Maniple

Fantastic work on the board. Keep it up!

Lemax makes Halloween decorations that work for Malifaux. I use their fences and gravestones. They are prepainted, may need some touch up when you get them to fit the rest of your scenery. Also try Department 56 for crates and fences.

Ditto on the wire cutter. $15 even seems a little high, but I bought mine long ago. Considering I have made hundreds of things with it, it has been about my best hobby investment ever. You can also sometimes find chunks of foam at the DIY store that they will sell you for pennies. No need to buy a big sheet if you can find some broken pieces lying around. (I am also not too proud to go dumpster diving at construction sites).

I have found that the terrain is going to get beat up no matter what you do. You may have a problem with using the cork board as your main material rather than as a covering since it is not rigid and may deteriorate over time. Another method is to get a hold of some pink insulation foam in one and two inch thicknesses. Cut them out into large circles and use them as your base material, like this: The edges are dressed with some drywall mud and left to cure. Then I painted the sides gray, the top black, and flocked it with railroad flock and white glue. This method has several benefits. The materials are all rigid and easily patchable. Whenever the "stone" sides get chipped, I just hit them with some watered down paint. It looks like these are in need of a little touch up themselves. If the flock gets scraped off, I just reach for a bottle of glue and my flock shaker. This hill has seen a lot of use over the last eight years and is still table worthy. Also, there are no slopes to balance a model on and the rocks and trees are moveable. I have made some other pieces for the gaming group that are more complex and less flexible. They don't often make it to the table.

+1 on the cork tiles. Cheap and useful. Break off the ends and it looks like stone.

An easy way to keep everything uniform is to base a lot of the terrain features on an old CD. They are flat, durable, and they accept paint and glue fairly well. One of my buddies made several swamp and forest pieces in this manner. Two-part modelling clay, some sticks from the yard, and a little flock should make some nice stands of bare trees. Make pools out of the same clay and paint the interior with a mix of green or brown paint and white glue. The glue is "poor-man's" water effect and gives a shiny finish to the paint. Another buddy made uniform wall pieces by cutting out small blocks of insulation foam, drawing bricks on them with a pencil, and gluing them to large wooden tongue depressors. We painted them with the citadel spray gun and drybushed on a highlight. You can also download and print off brick-patterned designs from www.jennifersprintables.com. Just make sure you scale them down a bit. Print, glue to cardboard, base on a piece of heavy card. Done. For buildings, the hirst arts molds are easy to use and give a professional result. I primarily use foamcore and cardboard. Tutorials are on my blog under "slum" and "frontier" tags. Since buildings take more time, focus on getting one or two done first and fill in the rest with other kinds of features. We are also getting into Christmas season, so don't forget to look around the Christmas town displays for bridges, trees, and fences. Lemax, etc... make lots of cool stuff. Pet store bargain bins will also be a good place to look. Some of my favorite pieces (ruins, skulls) are actually 99 cent cast-offs from the aquarium section. Have fun!

Nice work. I am loving this project. Tough call. If you model the train with one car halfway through and cut in half, then your diorama will be stuck that way. Do you really want such a large piece of blocking, immovable terrain there? Even if it doesn't look as cool, you might prefer being able to move the train around more easily or remove it completely without tearing off the gate. I suppose you could also just pick up a second train- have one that is cut in half and another that is whole depending on the kind of set up you want.

I spent a few days working on window and door frames for the mansion. My goal is to be finished by Halloween, but these take a loooooong time. 2 Levels down, 3 to go! Unfortunately I keep finding things that I want to change/fix. lets hope I can stay on track...

Gorgeous! She looks great!

I like that changing her hair and losing the hat really gives her a totally different look. Nice job. Also, is she in a corridor on the Battlestar Galactica?

Nice work there, glad you found the game! Keep the pictures coming. I want to see what you do with Lady J.

My condolences. I hope she can be saved. I resolved one day to finally undercoat my collection of 54mm Inquisitor figs that I had been collecting for a few years. I had about 20 of them, lovingly converted. The hardware store primer had been sitting in the garage all summer, but I thought it would be fine. I didn't notice it at first (sunglasses were on), but the primer all came out like gritty "texture" paint. When I got back inside it looked like they were made out of black sandstone, with all the detail completely obscured. $500 dollars worth of models ruined by a $5 can of black spray. Words were said that shall not be repeated.

Along with my mansion project I have been working on a slightly more useable creepy structure. I want it to look like a witch's house from a fairy tale- think Hansel and Gretel.The building is just foamcore and card strips. The paint scheme is kind of a test for the Mansion. I wanted to see how best to paint the siding. The color is a no go, but I think I have a technique that will work. I think that looks fairly creepy, don't you? My next step will be to build a custom base with a flower garden some trees, and a few graves out back. I am also going to try and make some smoke for the chimney Yes, this is a bit disturbing. But as the book says, "bad things happen."

That train is sweet! Nicely done :congrats:. I am adding one to my project list.

@ Tumling: why not see if Romeo at Battlefoam will put a Malifaux badge on a Warmachine bag? @dsmiles: I used to go the cheap route too, but i got real tired of the GW foam breaking my minis. Also, other brands of foam hold twice as much in a similar sized bag, which beats out buying two GW cases.

Any pics Dwug?

Great work. I love the detail on the mannequin and the blonde hair on Cassandra.

Define "reasonable." especially when you see what furniture might cost for this sucker: http://www.virtualdollhouse.net/VDSTORE/QS_Bespaq.htm I think I can find a cheaper option... And its not a dollhouse. Because we don't call it that.

Could you post a few pictures of Malifaux models next to the Fast Lane train set? If possible, include some of models different heights. I am thinking about ordering this set from toys-r-us but without a model next to it I am not sure this is the one i want. Thanks!

I am still working on the old mansion. I am still cleaning up the exterior to try and give it a nice clean (relatively speaking) look. I opted for some plain vertical siding on the tower. If I had thought to situate the tower on the exterior of the house, I would have gone with stone. This looks a little more realistic as the tower itself does not extend into the floor below. The roof piece got a couple more ranks of shingles to make it overlap properly. I finally got around to putting shingles on the back of the house as well. This was simply procrastination on my part. I am really wishing I had done all the roofing at once, since I can't remember what colors I used to paint the others. Here you can see all the siding finished up. Now that this step is done I can go back and install window and door frames. I also need to make up a few railings. I am hoping that the stores will have some Halloween decorations that will help. That should be the last step before paint, then I can finish up the interior. The end is in sight!

I have done the paper clip trick with other models, but not many as fine as the Malifaux ones. Be careful if you try it. I don't have any advice on the other ones- a necessary evil of the hobby, unfortunately.

Silurid bases look pretty cool. Keep it up!

Looks like the board turned out great! I can't wait to see the train station.

For effigies- How about a cave entrance surrounded by cave paintings? Or maybe an animal hide stretched between two trees? I suppose you could also have a post with wanted posters on it if it is in the middle of town.

I have to admit that the exterior of the Mansion was really bothering me. I realized that the problem was the basic exterior design. I had gone with an old Mordheim technique of just covering the edges with card, but it did not look right. Were they columns? Was it a half-timbered structure? Was it at all victorian? Frankly it looked lame. It bothered me so much that I took a knife to the whole thing today. I cut off all the old card strips and decided to try something new. This would take a long time, but I determined to put siding over the whole thing. That meant I would need lots of these, 3/8" thick. Hopefully this would make the mansion look both more realistic and scarier, too. After 8 solid hours I am 1/3 done. Whew! I am liking it better already. The extra work is worth it and will paint up nicely with a black basecoat and a blue-gray highlight, kinda like the shingles but a different shade. Cheers