I spent the last week working on a two storey ruined building for my Normandy village. After struggling with various different materials and techniques it all finally came together after more research and trial and error. I roughly copied a design from a terrain manufacturer as some inspiration. My usual dimensions for a 1/72 scale building are 40mm per floor, or twice the height of a regular man at this scale. Then the roof section i make the same height. So a two storey house will be 120mm high. Doors i tend to go 30mm high and windows 20mm square. These measurements all seem to work out well. I use 3mm MDF for the base and 5mm foam core for the walls. Both products are so cheap it makes building houses a really good option compared to buying, if you have the time…..

Once i had the structure cut out i removed sections roughly to create the ruined look before i PVA glued the thing together. Foam core is great as you can remove the card carefully and carve brickwork into the exposed foam with a ball point pen. The render effect on the undamaged walls was made using regular sand from the playground across the street mixed with a paint thickener i found in my art cupboard. PVA glue and sand would do the same thing. Window and door lintels, shutters and doors were all made with balsa wood glued on. The roof was constructed from balsa strips, as were the removable floors. I used modelling clay to make a bunch of roof tiles and also little bricks to create piles of rubble around the edge of the house.

Oh yeah and i forgot the wall paper you can see on the second floor was wrapping paper i found in our house that had a real retro feel and made the whole thing a little more interesting. Check out the photos. There is even a lonely private from the Durham Light Infantry (AB Figures) hanging around in the smokey ruins…….