The Coastline

As you can see in the previous post the whole building process of the coastline happened at the same time as the water surface. The base for the landmass was cut out of 5mm MDF with a jigsaw. On the base I glued some scrap polystyrene I had left over from other projects. That’s the reason why some of it is yellow, some pink. Where the sandy beaches should be I cut a gentle slope in the mdf board. The rocky parts of the coastline where constructed of cork bark, glued into place with a hot glue gun. The gaps between the cork and the polystyrene was covered with a sort of papier maché mass (something like a woodfiller, hard to describe) I bought a few months ago in a hobby store.

On the main island the shape of the harbour was cut straight into the mdf.

A quick test with one of my ships of the line showed that the scale is quite okay.

The coastline grew longer and longer as I used bag after bag of the papier maché.


Meanwhile I had to focus on constructing the buildings. I had bought some models from JMiniatures, who is great supplier of buildings in 1:1200. But the buildings he offered didn’t fit all into the Caribbean setting, in the end I just used the cathedral, the tower and a harbour tower building from him.

For the rest I used a different approach. I started used google sketchup to construct some basic buildings which could be printed several times. My digital design skills are very basic, but in this small scale it’s just about geometrical shapes and not about having a detailed texture on a surface (which I’m not capable to design). This was one of my first prints.

As soon I’m through with the whole presentation I will post these designs on thingiverse to make them available to everybody. One word to scale: I tried to scale all my models 1:1000. They tend to be slightly bigger than they would normally perhaps be, but I’m totally okay with that. From a gamers perspective it’s all about the overall picture and that looks good enough. So I designed several different houses and warehouses and printed them a few times. The town grew bigger and bigger



To give the town a little extra, I constructed a hillock to put the cathedral on it. This should be the centrepiece of the town.

A small stream was carved at one side of the town and the waterfront was built with thin balsawood.

Then the same papier maché mass was applied to all the different hillsides and the basic shape of the landscape was finished.

With my airbrush I finally sprayed all natural areas green, the town itself more brownish (sorry, no pic of this step).

In my next post you will see how I constructed the jungle and some final overall pictures of the island. To be continued….