Rock Archway build.

I recently built a rock wall and decided I wanted to try and build a rock archway. I did want to take pics as I went, but the early pics I took were terribly blurred and so useless  . I have however, managed to take a few pics to sow the progress of the archway.

I started off with three pieces of hard board, and using a slot design, I soon had a 'H' shape which would become the basis of the arch.
Like most of you no doubt, I tend to collect styro foam, which is pretty useless for anything, but I hit upon the idea of breaking it up into odd shapes to create basis of the rock wall. When I built the rock wall, I used wet cardboard to create the rock face, here I have used both methods. here are a few pics.







I used pva wood glue to stick the foam and card board to the hard board. Once I was happy with the rock wall shapes, I mixed up some watered down PVA, 50/50 mix of glue and water and then paper mache'd over the shapes.




The next stage was to base coat the structure black, I hand painted mine, but spray would have been easier and faster! I have included Dax in one of the pics to give a sense of size.






Once the whole structure was painted black,using a 1" brush I dried brushed the archway in varying shades of grey paint, this will bring out the highlights of the rock work.




Once dry, using pva glue again, I added some flock to the archway.





So, there we have it, my rock archway  . All in all I'm really pleased with it and it should prove useful in my dioramas. I must admit, the whole process did take quite a while to complete, but it just goes to show, that junk can be useful  Hope you enjoyed my build, thanks for looking!

I think it's a pretty decent tutorial even though some images are missing. The majority of the build is shown.

The final result is quite impressive, particularly following the highlight painting and the application of moss.

It looks like a real rock one might find out in the forest.

Very cool and very impressive. Large enough for sixth-scale and realistic enough for your figures. The detail ended up being surprisingly rich and effective. Perhaps even more so than many common rock formations. I think it would work for mysterious and magical environments particularly well, or alien ones too. For Terran use, remember the moss has to face north! Thanks for sharing it.

Your rock archway looks great. Thank you so much for sharing. I'm trying to get into building diorama pieces, and this is extremely helpful to me.  

That is really cool. Excellent paint work, as well. Well done.

Nice, in some stage shots with black and white only it looks like some kind of transdimensional dadaistic cow.

The final product works as your regular rock arch, but also gives off some alien world vibes with those spider web like details, the skin like effect of the wet cardboard reminds me of some kind of dead, bezinskyesque organic superstructure.

Nicely done! The paper mache is an interesting idea!