Ishoo Wun-Ateen: Cardboard Cottage

Due to the shift to remote learning, my school has been setting up a whole swathe of new clubs to help our students socialise during lockdown times. One of the new clubs is my Scale Model Club. Since most of the kids have never built a model before, and since most of them don't have any exciting kits or materials, I put together a tutorial on how to build a simple model using only cardboard from packaging, and the sort of basic tools and paint which they are likely to have for art projects. Then I thought why sit on a perfectly good project? Why not get Grot to explain it for his many fans?
So here you are, you lucky people! Apart from the static grass added at the end (and you could skip that!) this whole cottage is made from two different cardboard boxes using nothing but a knife, a pair of scissors, a pen/pencil, a ruler, and some glue. I did use both PVA and Super Glue, but you can just pick one and use it for everything. I did also use two different knives, but either one would have been fine for the whole project. You'll also notice there are more photos than I'd usually use - since this was designed for novice modellers, I went into more detail than I usually would, taking two or three photos were I'd usually only take one.
Anyway, Grot time.

Well, there you have it besieged Hippo Fans! Working entirely in cardboard really took me back to the early days of my terrain career, when I was 13 and my nan gave me the original red How To Make Wargames Terrain book for my birthday. Look out for companion pieces to this coming in future!

Ishoo Wun-Oh-Six: Portheim Tile

Hello again and welcome to the first real instalment in the Portheim Project! This ishoo will tackle the main building block of the whole project - the basic Portheim Terrain Tile, which can be customised, adjusted and messed about with the build all sort of more exciting versions of itself! Yes - a modular terrain tile and it's only taken us seven years to get round to making one!

But how hard is the making of a modular terrain tile? Let us consult the mystical oracle of Grot...

A tablesaw is very handy for making sure all the lines are exact, and, by using the built in fence, you can make sure all pieces have the same dimensions. I started this over the holidays, so I had to use my Dad's old Triton Work Center, which is kinda small. During term I have access to a huge industrial saw table at school which makes these things much easier.  Sigh. 

Unlike the blade on a knife, the blade on a circular saw is actually very thick - about 3mm usually. This means that for every cut you make, you lose 3mm of material. Since the sheets are exaclty 600mm wide, you get one 300mm and one 297mm wide tile across. Since all the tiles must be the same size for a modular table, this obviously does not work. I cut the slightly narrower tiles down to 150mm wide half-tiles, and use the rest of the left overs for other things. As you shall see. Eventually.

And there you have it Hippo Fans! I've got quite a bit more of Portheim in various places - this is just what I had in the modelling room at the time, and painted. Come back next time - we'll either be making a launching ramp/boat slip or a boat. One of those.

Portheim: Prologue.

A glimpse of Portheim from way back in 2009.

I've decided to try to increase the posting rate on the blog by bringing back themed months during the summer holidays. This time round: Portheim.
Portheim was a project from before TFH even existed - 2008 I think. I'd had the good fortune to have a huge amount of medium density white polystyrene insulation board offcuts given to me by a friend in the building supply industry, and realised that it was the destiny of these boards to become modular terrain tiles. At the time, we were playing a lot of Mordheim at HGC, so I decided to make the boards for that sort of medieval fantasy skirmish game. There were not enough to cover a whole table, so I came up with the idea of doing them as a dockside table. The idea being that you put down a blue table surface (painted, or a sheet) for the water, and then build up the docks on this using the tiles. Portheim was fairly quickly built up, including a bunch of things like a ruined lighthouse island and some boats to go in the water. The porblem was that it worked fine for a 4' table, but I never got more polystyrene to expand it out to larger sizes. Then Bunnings started stocking the stuff. Then an idea we'd had at HGC about a modular town table came back to light, and things sort of happened. So Portheim is on the go again, and during January I'll be posting TFH ishoos on various aspects, like making the tiles, building ships and other stuff.
Of course, I have to post the People's Choice Necrotite Rig first. So I'll just go and finish that shall I?
There are also some comissions which will need to be worked on while Portheim stuff dries, so I'm not really expecting more than one ishoo a week. Especially since GeekFest is next week.