Temple of Mars – part two

This is the second part of my attempt to turn a Co-Op coleslaw box into a wargaming terrain piece. Here is part one.

My last post ended with an upside-down coleslaw box covered in sand and me waiting for the glue to dry. The following morning, I sealed the sand by spraying it with a mix of PVA glue and water. Then I waited for it to dry again...


Later that day, I undercoated it with Plastikote's black and brown paints. It finally started to look like what I had in mind:


Then I stopped work on it for a few days while I figured out what to do about an entrance. I wasn't sure what kind of doorway I wanted so I searched the internet for inspiration and eventually settled on a simple, square archway. At first I was going to cut some wood to size and just fix the pieces to a side of the coleslaw box, but then I thought it would look better if it was possible to see inside the pyramid. Then I took another day to work up the nerve to cut into the box and risk ruining the work I'd already done! Bullet bitten, I cut up five offcuts of thin wood...


...then glued them together to make a cuboid with an open side. The elastic bands were just to hold the whole thing together while the glue dried:


While I waited, I cut into a side of the pyramid. I didn't cut right down to the base so I added two batons inside the coleslaw box so that there was something to glue the tunnel section to:


If you make something similar, remember to shake out any slivers of plastic before gluing the tunnel section into position, otherwise they'll rattle around inside forever! Here is the tunnel, in position and with the gaps filled:


To give the tunnel more substance, I added three thicker batons of wood to the front to make a doorway. I also added a doorstep. I then sanded all the visible edges of the tunnel to round them, so they resembled the rounded edges at the top of the pyramid:


The last step was to paint glue over the doorway and doorstep then sprinkle sand over them:


I included one of Peter Pig's 15mm IDF miniatures in the above photograph for scale. Here's a view inside the pyramid:


I'm going to paint the inside black so hopefully it won't be obvious that the tunnel doesn't actually go anywhere. I hope that by having a deep recess behind the doorway rather than just a closed door across it, the pyramid will look like it is perhaps part of something much larger beneath the surface.

Comments