Why walls?
We played a fam-fire game of At Close Quarters the other day and the table was my MENA set up. Besides having the forces needed I've completed a lot of buildings from Knights of Dice and this gave me a good excuse to see how much I actually have. One thing that was missing though was small walls for gardens, yards, and general cover opportunities. Out came the proxon, tounge depressors, hot glue, and anti-skid paint.
 |
| The finished product |
The plan: I went with 20mm for the height of these low walls, not including the height of the wooden base. The length was whatever the final length of the tongue depressors, minus the rounded ends. In my next batch of walls I'll make some short corners. I thought about putting some areas of exposed mud brick but after a couple of small areas it didn't seem to add much for the work, maybe on the taller walls.
Execution: I cut strips of 1/4" pink foam on my proxxon table cutter, finally getting some use out of it! The wooden sticks were trimmed of their rounded ends and then foam was then hot glued to the sticks. The top of the walls were slightly rounded and the whole thing coated in anti-skid paint, my go-to for terrain and wall textures. This is available at hardware stores and is used in places like garages to keep you on your feet, it's paint with sand in it. After that dried the base was coated in sand, glue, and grout which gives a good subtle ground texture but it didn't stick as well as expected so a coating of wood glue came next. Finally the whole thing was primed black and heavily drybrushed up in shades, all ending with a matte sealer.
Lessons learned: I should measure the sticks to get some uniformity to the lengths, cutting full and half lengths. I rounded the tops with an exacto blade but maybe a rasp will work and go faster? There were some spots that looked a little "too clean". The sand-grout mixture worked but I have to remember to coat it with glue before priming; I don't want to make it too "gluey" to avoid the sticks warping.
Bigger walls you say! With my process workable I started work on taller walls, 40mm to be exact. I was going to do 60mm, the size of the walls on mdf compounds I have, but as standalone or yard walls they seemed to high based on youtube videos where they looked about 8-10 feet tall. The 40mm height seems right so that's what they are. The same processes were used for construction and the bases.
Making the 90 degree corners was done with a multi-angle mitre cutter. It's not laser precise but good enough to cut 45 degrees off the end of a trimmed tongue depressor. Butt them together on a piece of masking tape to hold it, run CA glue along the seam, and hit it with accelerator. When dried peel off the tape and proceed with the build.
