Frostgrave is set in an ancient ruined city covered in ice and snow. Making ruined scenery in a fantasy setting is right up my sleeve but working with snow and ice is new for me. A good mix of ingredients so lets pick up this theme.

I start with a simple piece of scenery. A broken wall element so I can Practice on working with rubble, adding snow and making icicles. This first test worked out fine so lets start with the next Frostgrave project.

Second Frostgrave project:
The picture below is the finished project. Below you can see the development of this project.

 

Quite a large project, not sure what it will be but it looks like some kind of former temple. At first I start building up the structure. Fun part will follow later on once I start tearing this structure apart.

I’ll try to document the building process so I start cutting two large circles, each 8 cm high. One will be the base of the structure, the other one is divided in to small rings out of which I build up the round wall structure. Cutting out the archways is a bit difficult since you need to cut them out “freehand”.

Adding small buttress walls and making small archways into the big stairs gives the project more depth. Now its time to start adding structure to the project. While doing this I try to figure out how I will demolish the building later on. At this stage I am not sure how I will do this but we make it up as we go along.

Still working on the stone structure. The center opening is transformed in a round stairway. Thinking about what to add in the middle I tried one of the Plastic Citadel trees. It fits perfect! Bending the branches using a lighter and adding some extra branches makes it a nice old dead tree that will be covered in snow and icicles.

Adding the stone structure on the Styrodur is finished and now starts the hard part; Demolishing the project. I use a black marker to roughly point out where to make cuts and remove parts from the project. An then the difficult part where I start cutting the project into pieces while it looked quite nice when it was still in one piece.

Step by step I transform the project in a big jigsaw puzzle. For now I am not sure which cut off parts I will use so I keep them all sorted out and lay those aside. The large damaged areas are now treated with a Dremel to make the surface irregular and rough. With a sharp hobby knife I reworked the round wall section, making the cuts look a bit more realistic by adding more rectangular shapes. I do not worry too much about the final form since I will add snow later on. Where possible I will use a pencil to draw and structure the stones in these areas.

Breaking down a project like this means you will have to brake it down in layers. First you start with big chunks of wall and floor. Then you start to reshape those area’s using a Dremel, knife and pencils. After that you start to add larger cracks in the floor and wall slowly moving towards single stone details.

With larger damage done I decided to basecoat and brush the project fist.  Now I can see the structure more clearly and from here on I will continue to damage the project and start adding stones, rubble and sand.

I used parts of the cut away wall parts to create the larger stones that are scattered around the base. After that I added pieces of cork being smaller parts of rubble. Finally I used fine gravel as you can see on the last picture of the gallery below. I also added a irregular base for this project. A thin sheet of Styrodur with an irregular tile structure.

Painting all the rubble black and giving it a grey and white brush. The tree also got its final color brushing three different browns on it.

Since this will also be a project in a winter setting I started adding icicles on the tree, 42 in total. The icicles are made using acrylic strips heated with a lighter and pull apart by hand. The icicles are glued on using superglue

The snow is a white, lightweight, wallfiller. When you add a bit of water it gets the consistency of quark. I used a brush and toothpick to model the substance on to the tree. Once dry I used wood glue on the with areas and sprinkled them with Woodland Scenic Snow.

After adding all the snow areas on the stone structure the project is done.