You'd Have to be a Lunatic - part 2

My on-going plan to put on a Franco-Italian 1940 game at Crisis Point in March has me building terrain.  The Menton area is characterised by steep hills rolling down to the azure waters of the Mediterranean.  The "Pearl of France" was then and is now, an affluent area and I fancied building a large villa with a terraced garden and, yeah, let's have a swimming pool too.

I've got some dark blue PVC board acquired as an off-cut from work and it makes great base boards.  On to this I've started to build up the three dimensional shape of the hill using foam-core.  All of the foam-core was attached using a hot glue gun.

The idea is that this hill will stick out from one side of the table, hence the flat edge.  This first bit of two inch high foam-core is to form a retaining wall alongside which a road will run.  Exploring the area with Google Streetview I've found plenty of these.

I'm going to use the old Airfix, now Dapol, semi-detached houses as the basis of my villa.  I have built this kit in the past and that previous model can be seen below for scale.  The new villa will be in brighter, more Mediterranean, colours and will get some modifications to turn it into a single dwelling.

The next job was to build up the structure of the hill.  This is the lower terrace with the depression for the swimming pool in place.

After the picture above, I glued on a series of roughly shaped triangles of foam-core to allow the far side of the hill to slope down to the edge of the baseboard.

Then I covered the triangles with layers of plaster-impregnated bandage.  The small, dark blue area in the centre of the picture below is a staircase connecting the upper and lower terraces of the garden.  It's made from off-cuts of the PVC basing material.

After that I coated the ground surface with my usual "gloop" of tile grout coloured with cheap acrylic paint.

I've also used Milliput to add coping stones to the top of the retaining wall and added a vertical row of stones to disguise the ugly join where the main retaining wall meets the recurving wall that slopes down to ground-level.

After that photo was taken I used some plastic strip to add seams to delineate the concrete panels that form the retaining wall.

At this point I had to build the swimming pool.  I had a plan to paint the underwater sides and floor of the pool in a turquoise blue and then use a sheet of clear plastic as the water surface.  However, I could see it would be difficult to attach the clear plastic to the sides of the pool with sufficient strength and without spoiling the surface of the water.

In the end I cut a piece of clear CD box plastic to make the water surface.  Onto this I glued 1 cm deep strips of thick plastic card to represent the above-water parts of the sides and ends of the pool.  In this case I glued using Bostick clear adhesive as using cyanoacrylate or polystyrene cement risked making the clear plastic go opaque.

I then glued the plastic walls to the inside of the swimming pool depression.  And yes, I did remember to paint the underwater part of the poll first...

After that had all dried, I cut squares of artist's mounting board to make the tiles around the pool (they disguise join between plasticard walls and foam-core pool liner).  I then added a finer tiled apron around the pool using some Wills textured plasticard.

As you can see, I've also added a brown base-coat to the soil parts of the garden.

The next job is to start building the villa.  More when that's under way.