Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Concrete Block terrain

At Salute 2018, I bought a set of Cinder Blocks and a set of Engineering Bricks from Zinge Industries. Now I used the engineering bricks on the bases of the Here's Negan! figures (including the Walkers) to tie them all together.

The cinder blocks however are rather large (20x11x10mm) which using my standard modern scale of 1/50 makes them a metre by half metre by half metre.

This is about twice the "standard" size according to Wikipedia. So they would get taken out of their bag, looked at and then returned to the bag.

When Full Metal Jacket was filmed, Stanley Kubrick used areas of London's Docklands for the urban fighting. So there were areas of concrete block work. Empress Miniatures' new Vietnam range prompted me to build some urban and industrial scenery.

At Campaign 2019, Products For Wargamers had MDF Scatter Terrain Bases, I played around with the blocks and bases to find something that worked.

I used a razor saw to cut some of the blocks diagonally, this allowed me to get a bit of height, and "increase" the number of blocks.

Having decided on how the blocks would be arranged, I feathered in the base with the curved side of a half inch half round file.

I drilled three holes in the board and superglued three lengths of 1mm plastic rod as anchor points. Using MIlliput, I then bedded in and mortared the blocks in place.

Ground texture was the traditional Woodland Scenics fine ballast with added larger granite ballast over PVA glue.

The top surfaces was then sprayed with Rustoleum Rust effect spray. The bottom of the base was sprayed with Halfords Grey Primer and the top sprayed with some ancient Citadel Ogre Flesh.

The blocks were then painted with Citadel Mechanicum Grey. This was then dry brushed with a mixture of Citadel Mechanicum Grey and Citadel Terminatus Stone, working up to pure Terminatus Stone. It was then washed with Citadel Nuln Oil.
Tufts were then added to break up the stark shapes and hide any problems.