Building a ruined temple - Part 1

My latest completed project is a ruined temple, made out of bits and pieces I had around the house or that I got from the excellent shop Reverse Garbage, which sells random stuff reclaimed from businesses that would otherwise have sent it to the dump. I posted some pictures on the Oldhammer Community Facebook group and had a request for a tutorial. So here's my first stab at a how-to-make-this tutorial.

The ruined temple of doom

The main materials were a piece of polystyrene foam, cereal packet card, foamcard, the four plastic things for the pillars and some relatively dense foam. I'm not sure what the pillars were in real life - I found them at Reverse Garbage, and they're just hollow plastic tubes really. The foam isn't I think as dense as insulation foam, but is denser than polystyrene foam and isn't made of little balls. Any fairly dense foam would do I'm sure.

A piece of foam

The first step was to trim the polystyrene foam to size - about 15cm2 - and glue it to the base with PVA. For the base I used a scrap of - well, not sure what it is. It's not as thick as MDF - I cut it with a stanley knife - but sturdier than mounting card.

I then cut out two strips of foamcard the same length as the front edge of the polystyrene, with one piece twice the width of the other. The smaller piece was glued on top of the larger piece and the larger piece glued to the base butting up to the foam and there's your steps.

Next step was the blockwork. I wanted the effect of large blocks of marble - similar to Roman or Greek temples. For the floor of the temple I cut out a piece of cereal packet card that had a width equal to the width of the floor (about 15cm) plus the height of the piece of polystyrene times 2. This way, I can fold the card for the blocks at the ends of a row which makes for a neater edge. the length of the piece of card was the length of the floor plus the height plus the distance from the floor to the top of the first step. I ruled lines where I'd need to fold the card and scored along it with the back of my craft knife. Then using the knife I cut the card into strips about 1.5cm wide. each strip was cut into individual blocks, alternating between 5 blocks of 3cm and 4 blocks of 3cm and 2 blocks of 1.5 cm. This was I can offset each row of blocks so that the cracks don't line up. Here's what it looked like with the stairs and about half the floor done.

The blocks were glued in place with PVA. The stairs were done in the same way, with the width of each strip being the width of the stair plus its height, again so that I could fold the block.

I wanted a couple of patches on the floor where the block had cracked and filled with rubble, and I wanted the back right corner of the temple to have fallen off. Before I cut out the blocks, I drew the outline of the ruined parts on to the card, and when I cut the blocks out I cut around the outline as well so that I was cutting away the parts of the block I didn't need. That doesn't sound very clear. Hopefully this picture helps.

So the holes in the floor were cut out of the card before they were stuck to the polystyrene. Once all the blocks were on, I used my knife to cut into the foam to give it a crumbled look. 

Because block of polystyrene was actually 15.3cm wide, and my strips of blocks were 15 cm (because it was easier to cut 5 blocks of 3cm rather than whatever 15.3 divided 5 is), there were some large gaps between some blocks. I rubbed polyfilla into the cracks with my finger and then when it was dry I used the end of a wooden skewer to rub some of it away so that there was some definition between the blocks. I also put polyfilla on to the polystyrene where it showed through the crumbled bits, to hide the balls of polystyrene.

Right, that'll do for this part. In part two we get to the columns!