Ancient Egyptian Tomb in 28mm

Sinister ruins from the age of the pharaohs - and Happy Six Hundredth Blog!

What lies in the darkness of the tomb? A king's ransom in precious metals and ancient artefacts or a vengeful mummy, wrested from his slumbers by odious graverobbers?

Construction

A nice simple little project here. Just a wee oblong bit of packaging, with foamcard glued to most of the sides, and a ruined entrance built up from offcuts. I peeled the paper off one side of the foamcard,  and scribed in details of stonework. I wanted it to look fairly imposing, so deliberately chose to make the stones look like large pieces. They aren't cyclopean, but they are pretty hefty. Once the piece was assembled, I gave it a coat of polyfilla over the stonework, and glued sand to the base.

Painting

A really simple bit of work again. I gave the piece a grey undercoat. You can see this in the recesses in the photographs, but in the flesh it's almost invisible. Then I applied a coat of some cream paint. Once that was dry I picked out the recesses in the stonework with diluted dark brown paint, and then gave the whole a drybrush of the dream mixed with the white. I'm very happy with how it came out.

Egyptian-style tomb

I have had several nondescript rectangles of foam sitting about glued to boards for a couple of years now.Recently it occurred to me to make them slightly less rectangular, and so was born the idea of making some (presumably ransacked) Egyptian-ish tombs. The first one is complete, so here you go. Construction is pretty self-explanatory.I cut a hole in the block, and added a sloped frontage, then clothed that frontage with black foam, and the rest of the tomb with foamcard. I scribed stonework on with a pencil, added a few offcuts to the roof, and then textured the foam with a light coat of filler. A little paint later (and some sand on the base), and here we are. I neglected to consider that thickening the inside of the entryway would make it a bit too narrow for a standard base, so our usual Scots officer has had to move outside for the after shots.

Egyptian-Style Tombs and a Permanent State of Distraction

I think the key to being me, in terms of my model-making personality, to be precise, is to always have* too many projects on the go. For instance, as well as several long-abandoned projects** I have been working on completing hedgerow for three different scales of gaming,*** renovating some long-forgotten jungle terrain I was never happy with, working on my Tudor-style houses, those castle walls, and, in the last two days, distracted myself by fiddling around with some blocks of packing foam. Years ago I glued these to bases, and just couldn't think of anything to do that wouldn't leave them looking like blocks. So I abandoned them. For some reason or another, inspiration finally struck, and I am now crafting some things that give the feel of ancient tombs. I make no pretense at scrupulous historical accuracy; these things owe more to Indiana Jones than Howard Carter. Apologies for the quality of these pictures. I cannot find the cable for my camera, so I'm resorting to my telephone.

* Remember to split your infinitives from time to time, kids: linguam Latinam non dicimus (We aren't speaking Latin).
** Whatever happened to that table I was going to turn into an apartment building?
*** 6mm, 15mm and 28mm.