Evolution of Huts & the Wench

Here's a little story about how I came into the world of gaming terrain. It all started when the hubby's buddy (Tony) who happens to run the gaming club, was having a 'terrain day' to build & fix the club's terrain. Hubby asked if I wanted to come along (because I think he felt guilty that he was leaving me on a Saturday), so I said sure. I spent the day doing a terrible job of putting texture on the banks of a lava river. Then as the day was winding down, there were still a lot of pieces that needed work so people were taking them to work on at home. There was a half of a foam ball with paper mache on it intended to be an Ork hut that caught my eye, so it came home with me. I added a base, some support beams from bamboo skewers, a fence, skulls & head piled about, painted it up & added some flock/sand. Here's how it turned out:

Not too bad -- I had helped the club out and it was fun to do. Shortly after I finished, Tony was hosting a 2 day Warhammer Fantasy tournament & had used this hut on one of the tables. After the first day, the hubby came home & told me that my hut was getting a lot of attention by the participants and we got a phone call seconds later from Tony that someone asked if he would put it in the charity raffle, and he wanted to know if I was OK with that. Which I was; I figured it was the club's and they could do as they pleased with it.

Sure enough, at the end of the second day, the hut was put in the raffle and went home with one happy tourny player. The gaming club was down one hut now, though, so I volunteered to make a replacement so they had one to play with on their normal gaming nights. Before I could even get started, there's another call from Tony explaining how there was more interest in that hut than the other prizes he gathered for the raffle. He purposed that I make a bunch of pieces of terrain for the next year's raffle prizes and I agreed because it sounded like fun.

But first thing's first, I had to make that replacement hut. So I got a foam craft ball, cut it in half & paper mached it much like the original one I ran off with. Knowing now that people would be taking a good look at it, I took more time & added more details to it.

Air dry clay was used to make tusks on either side of the enterance, broken craft sticks for the fence, paint & a craft product called Diamond Glaze were used to make the mud & blood look wet.

All in all a good little hut. And not that it was done, I could move on to the pieces for the new tournament raffle. Since I had half a foam ball lying around from this hut, you can probably guess... I made another hut. An Ogre hut this time, but that's not much different. So I tried a couple different things on it, like putting the main support beams under a tissue paper mache & a different color style.

I also added a little scene of noblars adding to a loot pile

I built up the loot pile by putting down gobs of hot glue, then after that was cooled, brushed it with PVA glue & dumped on small, round gold glitter

You can see a better step-by-step tutorial of this technique over at TerraGenesis.

Here are some other shots of the final piece.

So after being sufficiently sick of doing huts, I moved on to the rest of the pieces for the tournament raffle. These 3 huts spring boarded me into the crazy, addictive world of terrain making.