For a while now, I’ve had this itch. A nostalgia itch. I remember an issue of White Dwarf (roughly issue 180ish) where they showed in detail how to make a ruined building from foamcore and plasticard. I don’t have that issue anymore so to scratch my itch I had to use the old grey matter to remember as much as possible.
This ruined building corner is pretty small. I guess it’s more of a test piece. I’m pretty happy with it. I know it’s basic but it has a nice charm to it. That might just be my nostalgia talking though.
It’s really inexpensive to make. I used left off plasticard, foamcore, plywood, cork and sand. I used a hot glue gun to assemble the walls and superglue for the details like wall details and cork rubble. I used pva glue for the sand.
I’m really tempted to make another small corner and a much larger piece consisting of two corners and a first floor (2nd floor for our American readers). Increasing the size of the base footprint is a must to fit the new larger bases of modern models.
Let me know what you’d do to improve my test piece and let me know if you liked this post and would like to see a more in depth tutorial on making one of these?
28 Comments
Leave a Reply
Tale of Painters ist das inoffizielle Warhammer-Onlinemagazin VON Hobbyisten FÜR Hobbyisten. Unterstützt unsere Arbeit, damit wir euch auch weiterhin mit neuem Content versorgen können. Nutzt dazu gerne die Links von unseren 🇩🇪 / 🇦🇹 Partnerläden für euren nächsten Einkauf:
Oder unterstützt uns direkt:
Lot of nostalgic people here… : )
A great post, GARFY, that generated some interesting dialogue. Like HRLD, I still build the majority of my own terrain and add some manufactured kits such as Tamiya's 1/35 German Fuel Drum Set, Tamiya's (excellent) 1/35 Brick Wall Set et cetera. I am currently building several large craters and I use the method described on page 63 of HOW TO MAKE WARGAMES TERRAIN. As BADAAB mentioned, it is an excellent book and well worth owning.Hey, MCMATTILA, thank you for the link tothe WD PDF archive!
hi there,
we still use similar build terrain. so for me its not 100% nostalgia or even retro as some might call it.
for me its just a good looking, and much cheaper way to have good looking terrain.
my friends and me we have a whole ruined city built with that kind of buildings, scatterd with some new GW terrain.
building a whole city with GW kits woundn´t leave enough money to buy models to game with 🙂
we added leftover imperial bitz, rubble to the floors, propaganda banners and stuff like that.
for a overgrown ruin you can add aquarium plants.
the options are endless.
looks awesome and saves some coin.
and yes, its the grim darkness bla bla….
but is it necessary to cover everything with millions of skulls?
resources in war are not always that available. so why cover cheap workers-habitats in much ornaments??
i like my oldschoolretronostalgia buildings 🙂
hrld
Made one a few yeas ago. Central,piece of our scenery.
I still have the wargames terrain book that GW printed in the mid 1990s with the crashed space transport made of bits of toilet ball cocks etc, and the undead pyramid. My teen gaming years were defined by scenery based off that book with exactly the look and feel of what you have made. I especialy love the 2nd ed marines and orks in the pictures, makes me feel 12 again!
I've still got that one, too. So much great advice in there.
I Think I’m going to try and hunt that book down on eBay. Thanks for reminding me about it.
Another great book for terrain tips is the Evergreen Scale Models 'Basic and Advanced Tips and Techniques for Styrene Modeling' compiled by Bob Hayden. I bought this on a whim in about 2001, and its become a valuable resource, particularly when it comes to detailing things like bases and handmade terrain.
I have that book, such simple items like Pringle cans made great towers thanks to that book, of course with todays standards of modelling, conversion and painting, I wonder what every piece would look like if made today!
awwww yeah, foamcore board and cereal boxes, primed and drybrushed to perfection. I have cities of them! CITIES!
I'll tell you what would make it better, if it was based off one of my FREE terrain templates ? You can make them as complete buildings or rough them up into ruins just like your trip down memory lane.
I started out designing them just for those folk who hankered after a by gone time of scratchbuilt buildings and terrain. There are some slightly more straightforward pre-textured LoS blocking boxes but some templates that you can paint yourself (and remix if you like).
They're all available here:
http://www.40kaddict.uk/2011/02/terrain-is-everything-standard-template.html
Very cool dude, that does remind me of the scenery in the old white dwarves I'm reading at the moment, I'll have to see if I have 180. I plan to do some of the death world cacti (with the red spines) over Christmas, mounted on a green flock board.
Ah I don't know if it is issue 180. I just think it's around that issue. Could be anywhere between 170 to 190 I guess. I'd love to find out what issue it is and make a proper replica of that piece.
Your were very close, it's 179, I've sent you a pm via Facebook 🙂
I found this archive where someone has uploaded almost all of the pre-weekly White Dwarfs as PDFs:
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/36808103/
GW would probably frown on this, but as they don't sell/give access to the legacy issues, I don't see the harm in downloading these.
As for your terrain piece, great job! For me, that's how WH40K terrain should look, and I reckon that piece would fit in perfectly with any model, be it from 2nd or 8th edition era. How about doing some ork houses next, as shown in WD 176? Now that would be retro! 😀
Rich and McMattila, you've made me very happy! I can't wait to build this ruin (maybe scale it up for primaris bases) I love the idea of doing some Ork buildings too!
I built a couple of simple pieces after seeing these videos from the terrain tutor: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLohbeH3fTP1ukLXKz_wOPD9-jK6RmMfqU
He had some great tips and tricks
My fave 90's WD terrain tutorial was the one where you made a ruined building from the old polystyrene inserts you got in the boxed lead mini's
In short hack out the back to make windows, chip edges, cover in pva and sand, paint it black, dry brush with space wolf grey awesome looking ruins, think it was around about the time of space marine bikes, scouts or the predator annihilator launching…
Nice blast from the past 🙂
Yeah, that was what I expected from 90's terrain, too. Built so many corner ruins from all that dreads, and unit boxes 🙂
Above is a modern take-on of the old days – Great inspiration as well for a low priced terrain.
Yep! I had a ton of those back in the day. All warped and pitted because 15 year-old me didn't know not to use spray paint straight on to styrofoam. Still made for some pretty awesome games.
Digging the nostalgic 2nd Edition vibe. How did you go about painting these ruins?
I second that question and add-on: specifically what colors did you uses? Yours seems really close, to my recollection, the colors GW used back in the early '90s on their ruins for their studio pics. Oh, well done BTW.
Nigel Stillman's 'How to Make Wargames Terrain' is your friend here. Most of the early GW terrain (built by Nigel for the book, or by Adrian Wild) was painted using craft paints since they're so much cheaper and you need to cover such a large area compared to a miniature.
If I were going to add anything to this, I'd say a texture spray would give a nice rough effect to the walls that you don't always get from using foamcore and plasticard. It's not too expensive for a decent sized can (cheaper than GW spray anyway) and once it's primed and painted gives a really nice effect.
This is liquid nostalga – back when we used to use cereal boxes for terrain and books under green mats for hills.
Fits perfectly with the retro ultramarines and orks, nice job
Would you add a few propaganda posters to the outer face of the walls? Scorched Imperial Guard recruitment posters, etc
I'd definitely do a few more standalone pieces, even for the sake of a display to go with your classic 40k boxset
Why is this 90s nostalgia? Because you didn't by a ready built piece from GW?
Please read the article. It's not many words audit's quite clear that I'm reminiscing about a specific White Dwarf article from the 1990s that I fondly remember.
I did read it and I didn't want to offend you (well, actually just a little bit 😉 ). But I thought you wanted to say, that self built terrain is 90s. I will take a look at my White Dwarf collection this afternoon. Perhaps I'll find the issue (but in german language). I'll let you know