Scratch build: Quar House (Part 1)

1 house in 1 month.  A singular task for this distinctive blog.  

The one-month deadline comes with Pacificon at the end August where I am putting on several Quar games.  I have enough adequately painted figures, so any cool terrain items I can add in the meantime will only enhance the games.  Because everyone knows, it's the terrain that really makes the presentation pop.

Also falls nicely with Dave Stone's Terrain Challenge that ends at the same time. 

Evolution 

I've never scratch built a house before.  That makes me the PERFECT person to follow along in this process as I flail around and try out things I saw on the internet,  like a teenager on his first date.  

Some people want to get seriously good at miniature painting and are constantly working on pushing their skill set further.  I have no desire to get better at miniature painting.  But I get it, in their perverse little minds that's a fun aspect of the hobby.  I have a desire to improve my terrain making, because in my saintly mind that's a fun aspect of the hobby.  Moving up to Scratch Building seems like a natural step in my evolution.   And since it's my first time I'm gonna get all chatty about it, like virgins with wedding night jitters.

Quar Barn - House Scratch Build

This is for Quar games, and while there is opportunity here to go really crazy with the design I feel like I'm unprepared for that.  What I want is a house / barn looking building that would be recognizable as a building but still have some quirky elements.  

First step I drew out some plans on graph paper to get a sense of how things will shape up. and then ignored them. This will create issues later on.  I'm gonna build this out of foam because I have a lot of it because somewhere along the road I've become an EPS foam hoarder, and I have a hotwire cutter.  

And if I end up hating the whole thing I can just throw it away with minimum loss of materials.  

I know I want a little stone foundation, little stonework border to run along the bottom of the walls.  to wit, I purchased a little textured roller: 

Which failed utterly.

While it did make a nice brick pattern in the foam what it didn't do was make that pattern deep enough.  I noticed it and thought, "I bet you won't see that pattern with paint on it" and tried an experiment on some foam that you can see below the roller in the picture above.  You see the brick / stone pattern in that foam?  No you don't.  Even if I push REALLY hard on the roller into the foam with as much force as my girly arms could do, the pattern is just not deep enough.  

So I scraped the roller and just drew / gouged some stone work with a pencil.

The experience made me look askance as the other things I bought for the project.

These little windows should be alright..

But the etching on these doors probably isn't deep enough.
But still, the doors are door shaped which is the main reason I bought them.
So we'll see how they work out.

After the stonework, I cut out the basic shapes of the walls, and used balsa square dowels for the framing, and cut some holes for the windows.  This is the WIP result

looks like something!

The walls are 5" high.  The short ends are also 5" wide, and the long ends are 7".  

The Quar-ky / whimsical element of the build is gonna be a walkaway that leads up the upper floor. The walkway is gonna be 3" high and wraps around the building.   To make a 3" high ramp out of 1" foam sheets I made template...

and cut out 3 identical(ish) shapes 1" high. 

 

and then stacked them on top of each other and then shaped the walkway to roughly drop one inch for every 3" in length.

kinda like that.  still needs some smoothing out
but you get the basic idea.

Then cover the walkway with planks and dirt texture.

Kinda looks like ramp now.

Back the walls, I then added some watered down wall filler to the blank spaces to mimic the walls having plaster...

Which I am unsure about as I think I missed a step somewhere.  I think the idea is to add some texture to the bare foam to mimic plaster but I think the same thing could be of been achieved by just texturing the foam.  Plus, it kept getting on the wooden planks try as I might to not do that and clean it up.  I gave up in the end.  I told myself no one is gonna look that closely as it.  

But since I was adding a layer on top of the foam I took the opportunity to leave some areas exposed and scrap in a small brick pattern.  The idea being that in places the plaster has fallen away you would see the bare bricks beneath.  Though I don't think I sold the effect too well.  

Well, now that I have 4 reasonably detailed walls and a ramp, I decide its time to get this more house shaped.  I cut out a base from foam, and using a hot glue gun on the low setting glued the house together.  I then added stone pillars to each corner (carved out of foam naturally) to hit the ends.

Like so.  House shaped.

or course, it's not that simple.  I can tell with my critical eye where lines were not cut quite straight and measurements were just slightly off, and these little mistakes seem to compound the further along you go.

But it's a experiment.  It's a learning process.  It's gonna be a big beautiful building.  I do feel a little rushed though, with my self-imposed deadline to have this done by the end of the month.  Who am I, congress?  

Extra Credit

I've given myself extra work.  Because I was always a good student.  Clash of Rhyfles has an in-game resource called Pluck, usually represented by some tokens.  The problem is: a player will keep their unspent pluck in a little pile over here, and when they spend it they'll move a token to a little pile over there.  Then 20 mins will go by and the player will go "what's this pile of pluck doing over there? When I keep my pluck over here and then move it back.  It's a mess.  

So this is basically a fun way to organize Pluck, spent Pluck goes inside a cup, henceforth called a chalice. 

The dark ages Quar hero statue I got at a Quar event awhile ago and has just been sitting on my desk.  This seems like a fun use for it.