Building the "Royal" Kraal - Part 1

As I mentioned in my May Painting entry, we are running a very large Zulu game at our regional wargaming convention, Bayou Wars (http://www.bayouwars.org/), on June 21. As part of the game objectives, the Imperial expedition will try to burn the "Royal" Kraal. the pictures below show my initial steps in building the kraal. The outer wall will be made of slightly trimmed toothpicks (almost 500 of them!) all glued together. At first I was glueing them together in small batches of 12 and was planning on sticking them down to the masonite (mdf) base with Liquid Nails. But that didn't work too well. I finally constructed a simple jig using tape to hold the toothpicks in place and a ruler to keep the bases level before coating the surface with white glue. Two strips of 120 toothpicks each can be seen at the top of the picture, while a third is on the jig.

This picture shows two of the strips of 120 toothpicks set up around the masonite base.
They will be painted dark grey and then dry-brushed light gray to similate weathered wood. I'll use a mixture of dry-wall spackle, sand, and white glue for the earthen interior and exterior, suitably painted. The huts inside will be some paper-mache bird houses that I picked up from Michaels some years ago and painted to represent standard native huts.

More later as the project is completed.