Pictish Terrain

A hut and a Pictish stone

Having painted some Picts for Pillage, it only seemed proper to make some terrain to accompany them.

So I made five roundhouses and three Pictish stones. This will go very well with the rest of my Pillage terrain, but give it a more Pictish flavour.

The completed models

The Huts

I cut a section of card from a whisky bottle tube as a former for each hut and glued it to a base made from 3mm MDF. This seemed like a good diea at the time but turned out to cause some problems later as discussed below. 

A Pictish hut

The walls of the huts are made from DAS clay, which was wrapped around the card former, trimmed at the top, and indented with the point of a screwdriver to make the stonework pattern. This was then left to dry. My mistake was trying to remove the card former after it had dried. DAS sticks to card, so I ended up breaking some of the walls and having to repair them later, whicb I could have avoided.

I made a cone of paper for each roof and built DAS clay roofs on top of this. The thatch detail is marked in with the tip of a modelling knife. It's very easy, fairly quick, and in the end reasonably effective. I am not a fan of teddy bear fur thatch! Each roof has a central hole to let the smoke out from the fire that would typically be inside to keep those Picts warm on cold nights.

Finally, the bases were textured and the models painted. Stonework painted in Foundry Granite 31A-C, while (after a certain amount of trial and error) thatched roofs were painted Humbrol Acrylic 63 (Sand?), washed with Army Painter Strong Tone, and finally highlighted with a light dry brush of Citadel Terminatus Stone. This is more a result of what was available to me than a precise guide to painting thatch, but it worked perfectly well.

The Stones

Sacred stones

These are based on the many Pictish stones that occur in the North, though favouring style over accuracy in the detail. They are made from appropriately shaped and sized stones that I found (!) glued to 3mm MDF bases. I built around their bases with Milliput to make them look a bit more stable, and then rubbed a thin layer of milliput over one side to flatten some of the natural surface to make it easier to paint on the designs. 

After texturing and painting the bases I then found myself ironically painting stones to look like stone. Firstly, this was done with Foundry Granite 31A-B. I then painted Pictish style designs in white, and finally highlighted the surrounding stone with Foundry Granite 31C.

Huts and stones are all painted essentially for games of Pillage, but will work for plenty of other games and settings as well and are going to be very handy additional terrian items for the gaming table.