A Dock for Mordheim

 For a long while, I've thought it would be cool to add a dock to my Mordheim/Frostgrave terrain. This would involve making some raised levels to represent the harbour wall and the dockside, and would be quite a big job. This week, I finally got around to it.

First, I ordered some foam from ebay. I thought that I was getting foam blocks that I could sculpt into shape, but unfortunately I ordered the wrong thing and got a lot of sheets of foamboard instead. This is basically two sheets of card with foam in between. Oh well. I thought that I'd make the most of it and use that instead.

I bought some textured plasticard from a model shop and got to work.

The first thing to do was to cut the shape of each dock piece (three in total) out of foamboard. They're basically upturned boxes. I stuck pieces of plasticard onto the boxes to represent the upper surface and to hide the joins down the sides. (By the way, use superglue. Plastic cement melts the foam.)

The plasticard was already textured, but for the walls, I scored a brick pattern into the board with a knife (be careful not to cut too deep). Then, to make the bricks look more rounded, I went over the scored marks with a ballpoint pen. This widens the cut and pushes the "bricks" apart. With a base coat of (unsurprisingly) grey, the dock pieces all looked like this:

I then painted it grey and put a lot of washes on. Because of the sea, I used quite a bit of green further down the wall, to suggest algae. 

I added some details with bits and pieces. First, I made a load of little rings that boats could be tied off to (or tied up to or some other preposition). This was done by cutting a square of plasticard for the back piece, then gluing on a ring of thin wire that I bent around a paintbrush handle. The gap was covered in green stuff. 

I also made some mooring posts. These were very simply map pins pushed through plasticard squares and then pinned onto the dock pieces. Little blobs of superglue were added to the rings and posts to suggest bolts. They were painted in a rusted metal colour.

I added a bit of detail to the first dock piece with two baskets of fish left over from the Lord of the Rings River Town houses.

This piece got a bit of string wound around one of the mooring posts, partially to make it more visually interesting and partly to make it clear what these things are for.

Bits of grass (made from sliced-up basing tufts) were pushed into the bigger gaps between the stones, to give the impression that I'd honestly intended them to look like that.

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I've been plotting this piece of terrain for a while, and I bought an Age of Sigmar terrain set ages ago to go with it. Two statues were included in the terrain set, which I separated from the kit and put onto Warmachine bases. I painted them to look like tarnished bronze. They will be looking over the harbour.

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And this is the finished dock!

It been quite an epic project but I'm really pleased with the end result!

And on that note, it's almost Christmas. So, a very happy Christmas to you all!