Skips

I started making these skips quite a while ago as yet another project to fill in drying time gaps.
I guess I was inspired by Dave Van Dam's models which you can see here and also Vampifan's fine rendition of a WorldWorksGames' skip which appears in many of his bat-reps.
Skips are particularly useful as cover, observation posts and are probably a good location for scavenging and I'm sure for many other purposes too.
All my skips were built in exactly the same way, a simple net of four sides and a base all cut from one piece of card. The first one cut out was scored and loosely folded, the result of which was trimmed and adjusted for fit..
This first skip was then flattened and became the template for the others.
All the skips were then folded into their final shapes and trimmed to fit, so that even though they're all meant to look the same they are each in fact just a little different.
The card I used was fairly thin, probably too thin for use as walls in buildings, but easy enough to cut with scissors, score and fold.

In the photgraph above you can see how badly the fit is in some areas inside the skips.
The next stage was to make them look more like skips and less like fancy boxes.
Initially I had thought to use the tried and trusted coffee stirrers for the extra bits that would form the reinforcement struts (or whatever they are), but these were too wide (5mm+!) for the job so I cut some strips of card from a cereal packet to use instead.
The strips were applied in several sittings, they were allowed to overlap the edges and were then trimmed afterwards; the whole process was then repeated for other strips. The diagonal pieces were all cut to fit the particular gap they were intended for as were the two vertical strips in the top half of the skip, this was fairly time consuming.
After a quick, rough and ready paint job (as most of mine are) I had four skips which at least looked the part.

The photograph to the right and the one above show two views of the completed models. The models appear very brightly coloured but this is actually not the case, they all much darker in reality (I put it down to my legendary non-existent photographic skills)

Skips of course are never in this state for more than 5 seconds in real-life as the moment they're dropped off all and sundry will be sticking their own garbage into them without so much as a by-your-leave.
So the next task was to design some contents for them.
As I had four skips I obviously needed four loads and I had the idea of having them each with a different amount and type  of "fill".
I also had the barmy idea of having transferable loads, though I'm still unsure as to the usefulness of this and the loads may all end up stuck down.

I used some broken stirrers, my plastic sacks and  newspapers that I made a while ago. I also made some more bricks (from plastic this time rather than cork).
Each of the loads had a base upon which all the rubbish was piled, along with copious amounts of cork filings to provide texture.
 I've used scraps of foamboard, polystryrene and card to build up all the bases, nothing clever. The black sacks load has a two-piece card base on a card "box" for support whilst the load of bricks is a flat piece of card on  several scraps of foamboard.

The photograph on the left shows the brick load transferred to the red skip and the final load .
The final load seen in the skip on the right can be placed either at the back of the skip or at the front as shown here.
The final view below shows all four skips, completed sufficiently enough that I can say I'm satisfied that they can be used on the table.
I probably spent no more than four hours total on these at a cost of only pennies and time.

Next week I'll probably show you more rubbish that I've been working on in-between bouts of trying to get my four of my buildings finished (I'm guessing that in another three to four weeks time I'll have them to the stage where I can show them.)

That then, is it for this week it only remains for me to welcome my two latest followers "Doer-chele and Deathurgent", so "Welcome guys", I hope that there is something here to interest you.

All comments, as always, are both welcomed and appreciated.