"A Frostgrave Graveyard" Topic

I built this a couple of months ago to go with my ever increasing lot of buildings & scenery for my Frostgrave setup. The idea came from my wanting to have different levels of terrain for my Frostgrave games as my terrain board is split over different levels to add to the general mayhem of the four player games I usually play with my gaming buddies.

To that end I wanted a graveyard that was raised above the surrounding terrain with only one access point being the stairs. To start with I had a piece of cardboard packaging lying around which was 240mm long x 200mm wide x 45mm deep, which seemed about the right size for what I wanted. I then decided to fix a wall around it made from foamboard which was cut to a height of 60mm which allowed for a wall 15mm higher than the graveyard. Once glued in place I decided upon an entry point and cut an opening 30mm wide, which was so far so good and only a few short minutes of work. 

The next thing to do was build the stairs leading up to the graveyard level which needed some planning to get the stair treads to match the height and position of the opening, at this stage I realised that I should have built the stairs first and then cut the opening last. The stairs were made from 5mm foamboard with a width of 30mm and each one glued in place to match the position of the opening. Fortunately the stairs matched perfectly with the opening so I then built the walls to enclose them so that they looked in keeping with the rest of the graveyard.

The next thing to do was to wrap the entire set of walls with a home made stone effect wallpaper which I regularly use on projects like this. The stairs were done first and separately from  the main walls as they were not yet glued in place for this reason. The rest of the graveyard walls were then done and once everything was dry the stairs were glued in place, finally everything was sealed with a coat of clear acrylic matt varnish.

The grave stones were next to be tackled and as I already had some resin gravestones from an old abandoned project lying around I painted them up an decided to position them. I wanted 2 rows of gravestones and allowed 30mm all around them for figure placement and 30mm between the rows for the same reason. When happy with the positioning of the gravestones I glued them all in place and painted the ground dark brown and once dry I used brown scatter material to simulate dirt.

The final stage was to apply the snow and frost to the whole model, the snow banks were made from Woodland Scenics snow scatter material mixed to a paste with PVA glue and this was applied wherever I thought snow would gather. Once dry the whole model was scattered with the snow effect scatter material to simulate  frost and that was it all finished. 

More photo's on my Blog: link

A cool piece that fits the atmosphere of frostgrave.

Nice ! Great work.

I have never seen a graveyard on a raised platform before.

Double Decker Graveyard

Nice work! It looks suitably chilly.

Kind of unusual, but it is well done.

Hi Guys, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

A raised graveyard is unusual, but then it is for a fantasy setting and along with towers that deliberately lean to one side, vast dwarven mines with hundred foot high ceilings, it's a case of anything goes.

I wonder if you'd think about adding some corroded bronze plaques along the outside walls to give it extra character, and maybe represent people who might be entombed in the walls?

Can you tell me more about the stone effect wallpaper?

The plaque idea is really excellent, I will have to lookinto doing that.

The paper is simply a sample photo of real stone work which is used as a template to make a much larger A4 size panel which prints out to 28mm size.

I use a really good top range photo inkjet printer which is excellent on good quality inkjet paper and simply glued down using neat PVA glue pasted to the back of the sheet, the colours won't bleed even if you get glue on the inked side. Once dry simply varnish all over with a household acrylic matt varnish, one coat will protect it from all sorts of knocks, scratches or water damage.

Not unusual if the graveyard contains a dead nobleman buried sitting upright on his horse,which could give rise to an undead mounted wraith or similar.

As a paper modeler, I would like to suggest using full sheet labels for your stone wall prints. Here is what I plan to get when I run out of my Avery full sheet labels: Amazon link. It has 100, 8.5" x 11", sheets, of peel-n-stick label material, for under $10 USD; Avery is much more expensive, but I bought a box of Avery full sheet labels, years ago, and I have not finished it yet. I use a color laser printer, so water, and glue, will not smear my printouts.

Beautiful piece, really well done. My compliments, and my thanks, for sharing it with us. Cheers!

I have used full sheet self adhesive labels in the past and for buildings of which I do a lot of, in my experience I don't find it as good as using a good quality printer paper and PVA glue.

With self adhesive labels you get 'one shot' at getting the position of the sheet right, which with even the most experienced hands it's not always going to go perfect every time which usually means hat your sheet of paper is ruined.

With PVA glue it's more like wallpapering, you get a bit of slide and sometimes you really do need that. Plus with walls and roof sections that have to be covered both sides you can do this with one sheet of paper and apply more PVA glue if needed. Also with the same PVA glue you can brush over the face of any troublesome lap over pieces and really soak the paper so that it sticks down perfectly.

I have never ever had any smearing or colour bleed from the paper or inks that I use and although of really good quality neither is expensive and a really good quality inkjet paper gives visually much better colour results than self adhesive labels from my personal experience.

Water has no effect either as I never water down the glue, the inks are nigh on waterproof and I always varnish the finished piece with household acrylic matt varnish which once dry makes the whole piece rock solid and resistant to scratches, water and any normal wargames wear & tear.

The cost for me would soon stack up also as 100 sheets of cheap self adhesive paper cost ten times the price of the same amount of excellent quality inkjet paper and I could go through a hundred sheets in a few days with some of the things that I build.

Having said all of that, this is simply my opinion based upon my own experience, and different people do things in different ways and still get great results.

That does NOT look like printed paper. I thought it was some high end, textured paper. well done man. I guess I need to upgrade my printer!