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| A ruined building is such a classic image
that it will happily fit into anybody's collection of
wargame terrain. As well as creating atmosphere on the
gaming table, it has the advantage of being easy to build.
This particular ruin is a burnt out Empire farmhouse,
built by Mark Jones for the Warhammer Armies: Beasts of
Chaos book. We were lucky enough to be able to tear Mark
away from working on his latest project long enough to
produce this guide to building a set of ruins for yourself.
After the dimensions of the building were carefully calculated,
a set of templates for all of the sections were drawn
onto a piece of paper. |
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CONSTRUCTION
Print out the template
page and cut out the templates. Trace the outline
of the templates onto the sheet of foamboard. You
should end up with two end walls, one back wall and
one front wall with a door marked on it. Cut out the
walls using your modeling knife, always making sure
to cut away from yourself to avoid accidents. At this
stage, the walls will be easier to assemble if you
don't cut out the door.
Glue the walls together with white glue.
You can also use tape on the corners to help hold
them together. There's no need to worry about taking
the tape off, as it will be covered up when you texture
the walls later on.
Cut out a piece of thick card or foamboard
to act as a base for the ruins. The base should be
at least 20mm wider (all around) than the ruins. Glue
the walls to the finished base. Once the glue has
dried completely, carefully cut out the doorway with
your model knife.
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MATERIALS LIST:
• 5mm thick foamboard
• Thick card
• Sand/gravel/flock
• Ready-mixed Polyfilla
• Thin balsa wood/ Lollypop sticks
• Texture paint
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TOOL LIST:
• Modeling knife
• Steel ruler
• White glue
• Templates
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To give the house a more realistic appearance,
use small strips of wood to show the remains of window ledges
and the wooden framework of the walls. Cut out a set of balsa
wood strips, four of them 6mm wide and 25mm long and another
four, 6mm wide and 20mm long. The long strips will act as
the window ledges on the front and back walls, while the shorter
ones will do the same for the end walls. Glue the window ledges
in place using white glue.
Make another four strips, 6mm wide and 70mm
long for the remains of the timber frames of the house. Take
each strip and break it roughly in half, this will give the
tops of the frames a splintered and broken appearance. Glue
these pieces to the corners of the ruin.
Now that you've finished assembling the basic structure of
the house, it's time to start turning it into a proper ruin.
First, use your model knife to cut into the tops of the walls,
giving them an irregular, broken shape.
Then use the filler to build up an uneven floor inside the
ruins and around the outer walls. With the level built up
a little, gather up any scraps of foamboard from earlier,
along with some more strips of 6mm wide wood, broken into
varying lengths. Glue the strips of wood into the ruin to
represent fallen wall and roof timbers, along with bits of
foamboard as pieces of collapsed wall.
PAINTING THE RUINS
Paint the ruin with textured paint, being careful to avoid
the wooden parts. When the textured paint has dried, undercoat
the model with Chaos Black spray. Once the undercoat is dry,
paint the walls with Dark Flesh paint.
To keep the burnt-out appearance of the ruins strong, allow
the black undercoat to remain on the inside of the walls and
drybrush Chaos Black back onto the area near the tops of the
walls when you’ve finished painting them.
Drybrush the walls, first with Red Gore and then Blood Red
paint, to build up the remains of the original colour of the
farmhouse. Some of this colouring can also be used on the foamboard
pieces inside the ruin, to make it look more like collapsed
pieces of wall.
Drybrush a mixture of equal parts Chaos Black and Codex Grey,
with a small amount of Rotting Flesh, onto any of the wooden
parts of the ruin. The same mix can be used lightly on the
inside walls and on any debris inside the ruin which has not
been painted to look like wall fragments.
With the ruin itself finished, paint the base of the model
to suit your own gaming table.
SUMMARY
As you can see, building the ruin is pretty straightforward.
Once you've built your first model, it's easy to introduce
variations, like higher walls or the remains of a shattered
door. For our table, we decided to make a ruined barn to go
along with our farmhouse. We even added a trampled field later
on. The fun of building ruins is that you get to experiment
with building scenery in new ways without worrying too much
about the results. After all, it is ruins you're creating.
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