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Friday Quick Tip: Doll House Accessories
By: grey_death
A long while back now, I started a Cityfight mini board that I used as a test bed for a lot of different terrain building techniques and materials I had never used before. From that 2x2 mini table I still garner a lot of inspiration for different terrain projects and today, it's the source of a very simple, but very helpful details that adds a lot of character to otherwise bland terrain.
The idea came to me when I was perusing the doll house section of my local hobby shop. I found a great street sign right away that would end up being a central detail of the entire table! I had a perfect intersection on the table to use the sign on right near a huge blast crater. To make the sign fit more with the scene, I bent it back on itself some as if bent out from the bombing. I then painted it up, adding some roman numeral street names to the signs and viola!
Some additional paint lines to help denote the area as an intersection and we were golden! Note the dust and dirt up on the sign. It's weathered slightly, but not quite to my current weathering standard, so someday, I might end up going back to it with the
sponge method for damage. There are some damage scrapes on the other side using the old black and metal method though.
But that wasn't the only piece I picked up while I was at the hobby shop! I also found a sheet of fantastic scaled tile! The second I saw it, I knew it would be a prominent feature in my floors for the table. The beauty of the flooring that many hobby stores offer is that there are
multiple kinds of flooring. They even offer carpeting for those of you looking to REALLY add some spice to your terrain!
The tile I picked up was nice and thin and was quite easy to cut to fit! For most of the floors I simply did a basic color with a wash or drybrush. In this example you can see I went a bit off my rocker and hand painted a bunch of
Fleur De Lis! In fact you could do any tile variations you see in real life with just a bit of practice and a steady hand!
My dig through the doll house section ended after I stumbled across a set of two
scale paintings. The paintings themselves were of horses, which were of no interest to me, but the frames! They were perfect! And with that I ran home and got to work. I stripped the card painting from the back and cleaned it up a bit. For my paintings I had an extra 3rd Edition
40k box laying about taking up space, so I cut out some of the old John Blanche art from the rim and trimmed them to size. Glued them in and put them into place inside my buildings! When it was time to paint the terrain, I just masked over the painting with some masking tape and once painting was complete, I removed the mask! The end result is a really great detail that makes your building feel and look like it's been occupied! Not the cold dead uninhabited mess that many terrain tables seem like.
There are
so many things that can be conscripted from the world of doll house building into our more brutal vision of the future (or past!)! You just have to be willing to look for the things that will fit nicely with the scale and feel you are going for. With all of the small details I picked up from a single trip to the hobby shop, I will be digging through these sections for many many years to come as they will forever be a fantastic source for many of the things that make the battlefield feel more real, and worth fighting over.
Have you found a great alternate source of terrain features? We would love to hear about them!
