Wooden Crates

Wooden Crates for Tabletop games

Following on from my last blog about making Wooden Barrels, I have added to my scatter terrain by making some wooden crates. These will also give minis something else to hide behind and climb over. These are definitely easy to create and mines are made from thin card and polystyrene. I used cereal packets for my thin card as it is cheap and ideal for this build. I used expanded polystyrene like the stuff you find as packing material, although you could easily use extruded polystyrene instead. If you don't have any polystyrene you could use foamcore or corrugated cardboard instead.

General scratch building tools. You will need something to measure and mark out your polystyrene and cardboard, and you will also need a metal edge and a sharp knife to cut things out. If you are working with polystyrene, you will need a suitable glue that will not dissolve the polystyrene. The basic box (polystyrene core and outer cardboard) can be glued together using any suitable glue, but I would definitely recommend PVA to glue the card on to create the wooden slat effect.

The polystyrene is used to fill out the void in the middle of the crate and give the crate some solidity to attach the card cladding to.

Cut out the polystyrene to the size and shape you want. I used my Proxxon hot wire cutter for this, but you can just use a straight edge and a knife. Don't forget to make the blocks slightly smaller than you want the finished item as you will be covering all this in cardboard. I find using a mini for scale helps to determine the various sizes which work best, but I cut 10mm cubes and 17mm cubes as my basic structures and then increased or decreased from there to make my different sized crates. If you are using cardboard or foamcore, layer these to get your desired shape.

Clad the polystyrene (or cardboard stack or whatever) with thin card to give a plain card box shape. Next cut thin strips of cardboard to make the wooden slats for the body of the crate and glue these on. I cut my slats approximately 3mm and 4mm to give a bit of variety. I didn't glue any slats to the bottom of the crate as my crates will just be sitting on the ground. Once you have all the slats for the body of the crate attached, cut more slats for the support staves, generally these are cut slightly thinner that the slats for the body.

It is up to you how you want to build your wooden crates, but I would suggest having a look at some photos to get some inspiration. I have used slats to build the body of the crate to give the old-style effect that I was after, however there is nothing to prevent you from adding slats to the outside edge of the plain card to provide a frame. This would give a more modern wooden crate style which is made from plywood or other material with a sturdy frame around it.

All the crates were primed black, then once this was dry given a coat of a light brown beige colour (I used a of approximately five parts toasted nut to one part burnt umber). All the crates were then highlighted with a cream, then light grey. All the paints used in this step are either cheap artists acrylics or trade paint tester pots. These colours used here are to build up the tones in the crate before the wash is added.

Once all the paint has dried, the crates were washed with a black brown ink wash (I used two parts black ink to one part brown ink, both mine are citadel range of washes). Once the wash has dried the boxes were dry-brushed to bring out the details. The final colours I used were to give a bleached wood effect.

I first gave the crates a heavy dry-brush with a lighter version of the base colour. This dry-brush was from all directions and was to bring back the light wood colour. Then a heavy dry-brush of beige was added (although not as heavy as before) again from all directions. This is to add that grey effect to the wood. A light dry-brush of the light grey was added to pick up some of the detail. This was again dry-brushed from all directions although I brushed more from the top down and less from the bottom up. White was finally added in a very light dry-brush and is only for an edge highlight to pick out the final detail to make these pop.

I enjoyed making these and reckon these will look great on the gaming table. I hope that this inspires you to make something yourself.

J