Pimping My 4Ground

My new Crescent Root Studio buildings with their lovely bases have made my 4Ground terrace houses jealous. I've quite often deployed my set of sidewalks and improvised some walled back gardens for them (for example here). But it's always been "not quite."

So this week I decided to set things right and make them bases. The first step was to decide on the size with some thin card that would be the bottom layer. This involved a lot of manipulating buildings and bits of sidewalk, and trying to measure very odd dimensions while things kept shifting.

The sidewalks I'm using are 15S-TAO-105 12mm wide pavements. The set comes with enough lengths and corner pieces to go around 2x two door terraces and 2x three door terraces. I used some of the spare pieces and cut them to make the depth of the gardens.

The next hurdle was to find a piece of card stock the same thickness as the walkways and cut pieces out to infill the garden areas. More measuring of odd, irregular dimensions while everything shifts.
Once everything was cut out it was time to glue it down and leave under a board with a heavy jug on top to make sure they dried flat.
I then used scrap MDF board from the left over frames and cut out garden walls, gluing them in place with the quick setting Aileen's Tacky Glue.

Then paint and flock.

Because these are back gardens, I used an unmixed light green flocking instead of my usual mix of shades and textures, tea leaves and bits of lichen.
While I was at it, I added a German propaganda poster to one end wall, tearing it and scrawling graffiti from an angry local.

For the ruined terrace I decided to make a rubble pile and have it fallen into the street. A pet peeve of mine is not enough rubble blocking the streets in our blasted urban battlefields. It was reading an article about using the leftover MDF frames to make rubble that got me to start saving them.
So I started building up some layers to give a shape, gradually using smaller pieces to give the basic form.

I then started chopping up MDF into bricks.

After gluing the substrate in place (first putting a MG team in the building to ensure the pile didn't intrude too much), I sprayed it with aerosol glue and then dumped the bricks on top. I then gave it another top coat of aerosol glue to stick everything down and added some beams on top. I also added some fine sand around the edges, using the sticky aerosol glue to grab much of it, but adding blobs of PVA and sand to hide the the straight edges of the sublayers.

Demonstrating blocking a street.

Now I'm just letting the aerosol glue fully dry and then it's dabs of PVA and fine sand to fill things in a bit, but not soo much that it looks like a cat turd.