I have had lots of sprues from Cities of Death, Shrine of the Aquila and Bastion sets lying around for a while. With Partick Crucible coming up tomorrow (40k, 4 games, 1000 pts) I decided to make an effort and get this last one finished.

I didn’t have any clear plan in mind beyong my usual; make sure the ground floor blocks line of sight, make sure there are ample surfaces to place models on and try and make it look interesting. So, with those vague aims in mind I just built as I went.

I ended up with an open ground floor that has three wide entrances, but which blocks line of sight completely from all four compass points. You have to approach it at an angle to get sight through it and out the other side. The first floor has a lot of floor space – more than any other model I have made with these kits. That is largely because I had two Shrine of the Aquila sets and used none of the floor panels from them at all, so I had loads left over. Adding the much larger rear wall (also from the Shrine kit) creates a large open space on the first floor, while walkways to the front provide great firing positions with cover. This walkway has the only ladder up from the ground floor. There is another walkway on the second floor, reached by another ladder, again with lots of cover. The last floor is a tiny sniper’s perch on the third floor. It has a bare minimum of cover, but with the angle created by the height, anything up there will be in cover from most other models in the game anyway.

For details I added some pieces from the Battlefield Accessories set, putting some barrels at the rear, a tank trap at the side and a crate, fuel can and radio set on the first floor. I had some plasticard with a corrugated iron texture, so used that to seal up a hole in the wall and to stand around the barrels, as if someone was trying to protect them from stray fire (or even hide them).

The whole ruin was then glued onto an MDF baseboard (5mm or so thick) with a hot glue gun. Bits of tread-pattern plasticard and other flooring tiles from non-GW kits were also hot glued in place on the ground floor for some variety.

Rubble was added with sand and cat litter. I painted watered down PVA glue around the bottoms of the walls and added the cat litter. Then I painted the whole ground floor and sprinkled loads of sand over it. I then added more watered down PVA glue to selected places on the ruin levels and added sand there as well. This step is very messy, and by doing it all in my spray booth I managed to stop most of the excess from spilling all over my garage floor. After that was done I loaded up my GW spray gun with watered down PVA and gave the cat-litter and sand a good soaking.

Once this was dry (I waited 24 hours) I primed it black. This took a few passes, as the sand soaks up the primer like a sponge. After that, I went over the whole ruin with rust primer, getting the coating quite heavy in places. This is a key step, as it basically pre-weathers the entire terrain piece. If you look at the pics you can clearly see the rust coat in all sorts of recesses and crevices.

After that, I drybrushed the stonework in three stages. Paynes grey, a 50:50 mix of Paynes Grey and White, and then a 20:80 mix of Paynes Grey and White as the final highlight. I used cheap acrylic colours for this – almost every range you can find has a Paynes Grey if you are looking for one. It is a very common colour. A very dark bluish-grey.

The floors and metals were drybrushed Boltgun Metal, with a highlight of Shining Silver, while the ground floor was drybrushed brown and then a highlight of a light sandy colour.

Then I went around adding spot colours here and there, the barrels, the crate etc, as well as the bone for the skulls and the gold parts.

Lastly, I cut some translucent blue plasticard into slivers and glued the pieces into the large windows at the back. I used PVA glue, as superglue will frost the plasticard.

In my last post I mentioned Robert’s terrain. I reckon it is worth a post of its own (at the very least).

What Robert has done is take various materials (greyboard mainly), and make flat-pack Wild West buildings out of them. Early ones had Whitewash City PDF textures on the outside, while with the later ones Robert has been using scored balsa wood and painting it with his airbrush, before adding pigments for weathering.

His innovation (Rabtab™) is to make interlocking plasticard tabs in the inside. Once these buildings are assembled they are very sturdy indeed, but can be quickly packed away into a shoebox.

I will let the pics do the rest of the talking.

I will put up a post with my initial thoughts later, but here are some pics for now.

This used less than half of one box!  I still have (from 2 boxes) 21 of the large ground tiles and 40 of the smaller ones.  I have included a pic of the leftovers, all neatly packed away.  The doors and tokens are in those plastic boxes.

A weekend of playing with construction sets beckons

But sadly only the clips   Maelstrom split the order, so now I have to wait for the actual building sets…

With World Works Games releasing Streets of Titan, I thought it was about time for another terrain project (and I want to see if Mark will actually offer me the still-beating hearts of his family for making this!).  This time the game in question is Infinity.

My last set of terrain boards were made from cork tile, and I wanted to try a different material, and to make them double sided (roads on one side, plain on the other).

I picked up some 2.25mm thick grey board from the Art Store in town.  It is ideal in terms of thickness, rigidity and price, but this stuff is a bitch to cut.  This becomes very important because I want raised pavements on each tile, which means a lot of cutting out.

So, here are some pics of the process and the finished tile, but I won’t be using grey board for this.  2-3mm is about the ideal thickness.  FoamedPVC is pricey in comparison to grey board, but I will try that next.  If all else fails, I can always go back to foamcore

The process is very straightforward.  Print the WWG PDFs onto A4 label paper, cut out and stick onto the grey board.  The roads and pavements are cut out separately, with the roads being stuck down to the base 12″ square tile.  The raised pavements are stuck to other grey board and then cut out and glued down around the roads with some PVA glue.

Yup – two terrain pieces in one week.  Why, I am pretty fantastic, thank you!

Since I wasn’t going to complete my Deathwing for the tournament today (I took Tau instead), I decided I might as well finish off the last major terrain piece in my collection.  This one has been haunting my Man Cave like the Ghost of Xmas Past for ages.  I wanted a large, line-of-sight blocking, intact piece.  This one used up most of two Bastions, some Cities of Death and a Shrine of The Aquila.  Getting the last set to match up with the bastion pieces took some doing, but I think it worked well in the end.

The steps at the front are made from a single chunk of pink foam, carved to shape and sanded.  The windows are made out of translucent blue plastic sheets.

Part of the roof is just foamcore, for speed.

And here it is in play at Partick Crucible, along with the other piece I completed this week.  That’s my Tau, lining up for a very close game with Dave McMillan’s Tau:-

I will be taking this along to the Partick Crucible 40k tournament tomorrow.  It might be too big for ‘competitive’ play, but we’ll see what the organiser thinks.

It was made using a Shrine of the Aquila kit, an Administratum kit as well as a Bastion kit, all from GW.  The podium at the front is made from foamcore, with various bits of detailing added from the kits, as well as some plasticard rods.  The ruined floors were made from foamcore as well.

The tiles were cut individually out of a box of Cornflakes.  If you glue the tiles to the foamcore before you attach the foamcore to the ruin, you can flip the foamcore upside down once the glue has dried and cut all the tiles flush with the edges of the foamcore.  Saves cutting each tile to the exact shape!  I painted the floors brightly to help differentiate the various parts of the interior.

The shattered windows were made with some translucent plasticard I found in an artstore.

I am sorry to say that it looks like Wyrd and WWG have run into yet more problems with the production of Terraclips, and the design team have had to go back to the beginning. I know this sucks, as I have been looking forward to Terraclips for months, but it seems we will have wait again.

Turns out the cardstock material was considered too flimsy to bear the weight of multi-level structures. Various other materials have been tested, including Plasticard and Foamed PVC, but I understand Wyrd have opted for a high alumina silica compound with an excellent compressive strength of around 50MPa.

The clear plastic clips proved unsuitable for holding the material together, and have been replaced with a flexible bonding system utilising a workable, aggregate paste. Setting time is fast, although the adhesive offers a reasonable working window for manipulating the build.

The only remaining problem is unit weight, which means that Terraclips has now moved to a much more modular system.

Wyrd/ WWG will sell walls in single units at a time:-

although the adhesive paste is readily available in larger quantities:-

In order to celebrate me coming another year closer to my inevitable demise, Mrs Sholto agreed to fuel my addiction to all things hobby-related and bought me a Hirst Arts mould.

Hirst Arts make dozens of different moulds.  They are quite small, and one would fit comfortably in your hand.  They are made of silicone and enable you to make your own casts of whatever the mould happens to contain.  Hirst Arts started out doing castle moulds, with all different types of castle bricks and features, and now has ranges spanning castles, fieldstone, caverns, spaceships and dungeons.  The mould I went for was the Cavern Accessories mould, because I wanted to be able to make lots of bits of detailing or scatter terrain, and this mould has crates, barrels, sacks, urns, boxes and so on.

Hirst Arts is at the other end of the spectrum from the foamcore terrain I have been making recently.  Spectacular builds are possible with both, but the level of detail and the consequent investment of time are considerably higher with Hirst Arts.  Modular tables can and have been done with the cast pieces making up the majority of the build, but for now I am just looking to incorporate them into my foamcore terrain to add more visual interest and to make the city feel more believable and ‘lived-in’.

Click to embigulate

These are the results of my first two casting attempts.  I followed the instructions and it went fairly well the first time, and just about perfect the second time.  For the first attempt I spent too long mixing the water and plaster so that it started to set before I poured it.  As a result, the mixture did not flow properly into some of the moulds.  The second time around I mixed much faster, added a little extra water and it flowed just fine.  Hardly any bubbles, and no breakages.

I used 100g of plaster with 28ml of water (30ml the second time), and this was not enough to cast the whole mould.  If I wanted all the pieces every time (and I don’t) I would need about 125g of plaster.

The plaster I am using is this stuff; dental plaster from Ebay.  I bought a 2kg bag and have used 10% of it in two castings so far.

The kids were very excited when I explained what the mould did to them, and are keen to have a go.  They are also very keen on the idea of building a whole castle, so I might need to see about getting another of the moulds…

Yes, it is an addiction