Eight terrain pieces in one day

I don't have an Epic post for the day, as I was distracted by a new personal record. Today I assembled, primed, and painted eight pieces of terrain in one session. Obviously these were small and easy, but I think they were much-needed additions to my modular Cities of Death battlefield system.

Until today, I had been using a jigsaw to cut my MDF hardboard bases. Today I discovered a much simpler way using a mini-hobby saw and sanding sponge - it worked well enough that I may post it as a separate tutorial. Rather than using my own hardboard, all eight bases for today's projects were scrap and offcuts from the CNC Scenery Australia tiles. Some of the tiles, especially the straight roads, left pretty usable chunks of hardboard.

The project list for today:

• Straight wall section from Cities of Death buildings
• Stand of Games Workshop barrels
• Two piles of city rubble (my usual mix of ground sprues and aquarium gravel)
• Two Games Workshop tank traps
• Two Games Workshop personnel barricades
  

The straight wall section had the most detail, and even it only took me 45 minutes to paint. Black basecoat, heavy blue drybrush on the walls and rubble, rusty steel on the skulls and chains (tin bitz basecoat, tin bitz/boltgun mix drybrush, boltgun light drybrush) and a Bleached Bone drybrush on the skeleton.

The barrel stand was basic rusty-steel, and the rubble piles were drybrushes of the usual Wal-Mart craft paints that I use on most terrain.


I'm getting far more comfortable with my rusted-metal effect. I'll have to get a better picture of it later, along with a tutorial.

Cities of Death terrain - field test

This weekend I had the opportunity to play a quick Cities of Death game using some of the new terrain I've been working on. It was a 4x4 table made from the CNC Miniature Scenery Australia tiles, four of the classic GW corner ruins (which I really only finished as CoD test pieces, but they're good enough to stay in the mix), a standard Manufactorum, and a combination building built from all three CoD building types and the new Shrine of the Aquila. It's far from finished, but you can see how it's progressing in these pictures:

Belial and Squad Astrega assault the Orks,
while Tactical Squad Gesemon advances down the street

The corner ruins were a simple build. I cut the bases from 1/8" hardboard and white-glued the ruins to the base. Using a flea-market meat grinder and the GW website technique, I have a small box of sprue rubble. I added various bits to the rubble piles, such as old Skeleton Warriors, badly assembled and painted old Space Marines that received some fresh paint, and some old tank bits from, shall we say, eBay bargains.Made using a broken RTB01 marine painted as a Salamander with an exposed skull

A corner ruin with two skeletons


The left ruin has an ancient Crimson Fist
and a newer Howling Griffon, while the right ruin
features a skeleton and an unmarked yellow Rhino frame.

The next step will be to add rubble and wrecks to my larger buildings and get them painted. As side projects, I'm going to make three or four simple rubble piles, and a few city-painted bases of barricades, barrels, etc.

I also have an Imex Power Plant ready for assembly and painting. But I haven't decide whether I'm going to add it to the city, or give it a more generic paint scheme that can be used on multiple tables. Watch here for updates.