It’s ruined!
July 21, 2014I’m getting back to painting after one of my hobby-uninspired periods (see this blog post from four years ago). Sort of like exercise, you have to ease yourself into it after a break, so I figured I’d start easy and built a few ruins for my Pacific Rim project. After all, those cities are going to be hit and wrecked, so I’ll need plenty of replacement pieces for destroyed buildings.
After buying a bunch of Monsterpocalypse buildings and popping them off their bases, I was left with plenty of empty plastic bases which I didn’t feel like throwing away. These provided a great base for ruins. I then simply slapped on rubbish – mainly plasticard cut-offs, sprue pieces, sand and small rocks, undercoated with black and gave the whole thing a quick drybrush treatment. They turned out quite nice, and I wasn’t going for beautiful diorama pieces anyway as they’re rather just glorified tokens.
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The pieces work nicely on the battlefield. Here’s a shot of the kaiju Knifehead with one of the ruins. I like the way the base fits in!
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As and added bonus you can combine them and they work well with 28mm too, which is always a good thing:
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Setting up the mini diorama above prompted me to throw together some ruins, Knifehead and some of my city terrain and smoke pieces to show you what it’s meant to look like eventually:
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As always, all comments welcome!
Dawn of the Lead 
What fantastic ruins. Nice job re-using the old bases for such a handy project. 🙂
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Thanks! Like many other wargamers, I tend to never throw away anything that might eventually be useful. Usually this leads to an accumulation of rubbish, but every now and then I manage to recycle some of that rubbish into good use. Always makes me happy when it happens!
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I think the ruined bases fit well in the street layout. I was first wondering if an irregular base shape would eb better, but that way they look like structures that could have been part of the city scape.
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Thanks daggerandbrush, I went through the same thought process and arrived at that conclusion.
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Interesting to see your map progress. I see you have roads down now. I’m enjoying your rubble. Are you still planning on using the Ganesh Mighty Monsters rules? I’m struggling with what to do for my ruins/rubble counters for when buildings are destroyed. I’m not nearly talented enough painting-wise to pull something like that off.
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Thanks for the comment Batman! I did add some roads, although only a few. They make the city look more like a city, but I didn’t add too many so I could keep the layout flexible. I’m still going with the Ganesha rules, yes.
I definitely suggest you give my method a try, as it’s very, very easy and provides a nice result. Here’s a recipe:
1. Glue pieces of plasticard, sprue, small rocks and anything else you want on a piece of plasticard or an old base with. Leave some parts bare.
2. Slap PVA glue liberally on the bare spots and pour sand on. Partially covering some of the glued-on pieces helps create the illusion of rubble.
3. Paint everything black. I simply use a black spray paint.
4. Give everything a dark grey drybrush. I used GW’s old Codex Grey.
5. Give everything a lighter grey drybrush. I used GW’s old Fortress Grey.
6. Paint some parts of the sand khaki/light brown. I used Vallejo’s Khaki.
7. Give all the parts in the previous step a light drybrush with a pale skin tone or an off-white.
8. If you have any pieces on the base that look like they might be metal (such as pieces of sprue), give them a lick of metal colour. I used Vallejo’s Oily Steel.
9. You’re all done!
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Thanks for the recipe! I’ll be sure to give it a go when I have more free time. August is hectic here in Edinburgh with the Fringe Festival.
And here’s a picture of mine so far. Still needs some work, but it’s taking shape.
https://scontent-a-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10306724_10152291479234220_2959409402232814902_n.jpg?oh=023db47c33321cf1c855e009d15fc327&oe=547E0D1B
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Great use of the bases! I think this will work very well for the damaged buildings during the battles. If I were gaming in that scale, I would steal this idea and run!
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Thanks! Should get some gaming done myself 😀
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