What terrain can I make with my kids old toys?

After making the rectangles for my last build, I has a carrier bag full of off cuts. I decided to turn these into ‘bricks’ and attempt the building method of laboriously sticking them onto a shell one by one.

A few sessions with a scalpel and a metal ruler had the off cuts turned into hundreds of little blocks, about 1cm by 2cm although I didn’t stress about getting them a uniform size.

For the shell of the building I took a tube that I think was the packaging for a water bottle to make a tower. As I’ll be using this for my Mordheim games, I cut away at one side to make it look suitably ruined. I added a couple of stir stick floors, then pondered what to do with the top.

Happily the lid of the tube was an almost perfect fit to half a plastic ball that was the packaging for a bunch of toys (if you’ve got kids. you know the sort of thing : there’s usually half a dozen of them from different youtube influencers on the shelves on the toy shop). I attacked this with pliers to crack it.

A band of thin EVA hid the join, and I used old plastic pipe knocking around in the garage to make pillars to join this roof to the main body of the tower.

I decided that adding the same bricks I’d used for the body of the tower to the area below the dome would make the transition to the dome too harsh. So I used some of the thin sheet of EVA to make bricks that were just a facade rather than have any width. I think this sheet had arrived in the house as part of a Hobbycraft kit that my daugher had used once and discarded.

In a similar vein I raided a ‘diy diamond painting’ kit which was for making sparkly wind chimes. This provided rivets to attach make the dome look a little more interesting.

I primed this with spray primer, then dry brushed it grey.

The some was base coated with a dark blue, then I applied a sponged on layer of bronze paint, with a final wash of thinned dirty down verdigris.

For finishing touches I added some posters, bits of moss and a couple of skulls tiny head bones.