Category: Terrain

Building terrain, guides or showcases

Making drystone walls for my 10mm wargaming miniatures

I have recently gotten into 10mm wargaming and invested in two forces (from pendraken’s warband range). I chose this scale for the following reasons:

  1. The figures are cheap. For a relatively low price (compared to larger scales) you can get a respectable force. Many of my friends are interested in wargaming, they are intimidated by the cost of, say, a Warhammer army. This way I can own several armies my friends can play with.
  2. Because of the smaller scale and less detail, I have an easier time speed painting them. I can crank out large forces of 10mm figures quickly (for me).
  3. I require far less table space for gaming, and this means I can easily carry anything I need with me.

My first terrain project has been drystone field walls, mainly inspired by my travels in northern Portugal.

Step one:

I started by cutting out a series of bases for the walls out of an old egg carton. I painted the underside black and the top side brown – cheap craft paints are best for this, no point wasting expensive paints. I varied the length of these walls, with the smallest being 5cm long and the longest 12cm. The edges are cut into points, so that I can but them up against each other in any angle I like, eliminating the need for corner pieces.

Painted bases

Step two:

Next I started making the actual walls. To do this I used thin brush on superglue. Little by little I glued small rocks (more like gravel) onto the base, using tweezers. This is time consuming and fiddly, but I find it oddly relaxing, and I find the result looks good. I like to vary the size of the gravel used, and adding small pebbles.

One way of saving time and adding some colour is to have part of the wall be hedges. To do this I simply glued on some clump foliage here and there to break up the stonework.

In order to make the rather flimsy egg carton card straight and not bowed, keep the areas not yet worked on weighed down.

I’m using the flock box to keep the card flat

Step three:

So, my next step was adding ground cover. First I gave the exposed card a thick layer of PVA glue, and then a layer of my ground covering – dirt from the garden that had been sterilised in the oven and sieved.

When this is dry, I added my homemade flock and I cut pieces off gamer grass tufts. To seal it I sprayed on a mixture of pva glue, a drop of dish soap and water.

A completed wall with a 10mm Pendraken goblin for scale

In my next post I’ll write about adding fun details to vary the walls.