Customs Post

Customs (related to trading, as opposed to Yuletide) seems to be in the news of late, so what better way to celebrate this than to make a customs post?

This is for my AK47 collection and is actually an almost complete copy of a building from IrishSerb's blog, made in connection with his [checks website] on-going Mugabia-Uwanda War [OK, so not Ramsgate].  My approach to construction was similiar to his, i.e. practically the same.

For the customs building itself this was made using poor-man's foam board (pizza base polystyrene), which was pinned and glued together (I use Evo-Stik wood-glue for everything).  The bit of roofing over the 'serving hatch' and shutters made from corrugated cardboard were added, and a door was made at the rear from a piece of cardboard fixed inside the walls with some thin card panels attached to the outside.  Once the glue was dry everything inside and out was undercoated in black.

The walls were then covered in wood-glue and the building was dipped into a tub of fine sand to get most of the walls covered.  The sides of the building were painted using an earthy colour I use for mud-brick buildings. 

The areas of sand were then painted off-white (blue at the bottom), with smooth areas of wall (where there was no sand) left as bare 'mud', as though the plaster had fallen off.  The removable roof was made of corrugated cardboard, painted black and then rust colour.  Basing was my usual approach of coarse shelly sand painted dark earth and then dry brushed.

In addition to the customs post I made a small shelter for the sentries (I'd also started to make a swing barrier from a cocktail stick but then thought better of it).

The shelter was made from wooden coffee stirrers cut up with a pair of pliers, with sheets of fine corrugated cardboard laid over the top to form the roof.  Everything was undercoated in black and the wooden walls were then heavily dry-brushed with dark earth and the roof treated with a rust colour.

Further washed-out colours were added to the roof panels before the whole thing was lightly dry-brushed in a sand colour.  Basing for both models was completed with Javis static grass and some stick-on clumps of long grass.