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Hayden's New Playset!

Play Set 2014

After 4 or 5 days of work, I've finally completed Hayden's play set built to scale for his 3.75" figures (part of his Christmas present from Daddy [and papa, E-ma, mommy and uncle Corey]). It is 8ft wide and roughly 2.5ft tall. I made it using insulation foam from Lowes (1" thick), craft paint, airbrush, X-Acto knife and random parts and pieces to use for accessories, carving and textures. The foam is much stronger than you would think. After all was said and done, it scratches fairly easily (paint-wise) but does not break. I'm definitely satisfied with the outcome.


The far left building is actually a toy box. The roof top comes off and he can store his figures inside. Remove the top and gets his figures back out to play with. Across the top are mountain cliffs and ledges. The top right area is more like a rocky cave in the side of the mountain. The entire backdrop will be painted like a mountain side, rough and rocky.

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Here is a close-up of an example of the rocky cliffs and ledges in the mountain-side above the war city.

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This is the black base coat of spray paint I put on pretty much everything on this play set. The foam tries to absorb it but it's a good start. 

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The painting begins...

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A cave. Came out pretty cool.

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The scarred up roof tops.

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Notice the break-away bricks at the bottom? The bricks break out so his figures can crash through the brick wall. I have embedded magnets into the sides of the brick pieces and inner lining of the wall so they simply snap back together and snap back into the building in a matter of seconds, ready to throw the next poor loser through the wall.

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Painted!!

Notice some of the bricks carved out and some of the stucco that has broken off of the building revealing bricks. 

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Street view. The sewer (man-hole) lids were actually some old plastic pirate coins from the Dollar Tree that Hayden had. I painted them silver and then dirtied them up a bit. Then hot glued them down. Sweet!

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You can't hardly tell in the pic, but there is a man crashing through top right window. The windows are all crash-able. More later...

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This is actually a play set bought from Big Lots.

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A model car built only to destroy. I got my brother (uncle Corey) to quickly glue this car together so we could take an extreme heat gun to it, melting the front end and pushing it in with an edger blade. This buckled the front end of the car to look dented and wrecked. Then I misted some black spray paint across the hood and up over the car to give the look like it had been on fire at one time. I placed it in the nifty little hole in the building and pulled a tire off. The car is permanently mounted in place as part of the scene so it cannot be removed.

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The mountain caves. The top cave actually has a ladder that goes through a hole in the floor to the bottom cave-lookout.

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The bottom cave lookout has a rope ladder down to the building below (actually its a picket fence found in the wood area of Michaels craft store). It could have also made good use of a rope bridge which I've used it for in the past for a castle I built.

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Just a close up of a grungy street drain carved out. Why I chose this sloppy one to take a pic of, I don't know. There are better more detailed ones. Oh well, too late now.

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I used some medium thickness clear vinyl I picked up from the fabric section of Walmart for $2.50 for the windows. Then I cut slits in them to appear broken so he could "crash" his figures through without hurting his little fingers. A nice soft clear vinyl.

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I picked up some thin pieces of wood in the wood burning section of Michaels craft store and made the doors for the buildings. I used doll house hinges to attach them from the inside. The door knobs and hinges seen here could have been done better but I took the lazy/cheap way out and just painted them on using chrome/silver model car paint.

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The bench I picked up from the doll house section of Hobby Lobby. It was like $2 with a coupon taking more off that. For such a cheap price, I thought it'd make a nice addition to the street. Also, you'll notice a drain pipe from the building's roof top. It's simply a flex straw trimmed and painted silver. Gotta love the simple things.

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The next few pics are just some examples of some of my little boy's action figures on the play set to give size scale comparison. They fit in nicely to the scene.

Budeep. Budeep. Dats all folks!

If ever do this again, it will be a massive castle most likely with nice stone carvings, a possible dungeon, secret rooms, trap doors, etc... We'll see. But where on this earth would I put it? That's the question.

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