OMG! SO MANY BRICKS! (Ruined Tower Terrain)

Greetings, humans!

Sorry I've been quiet for a bit.  I've been in a bit of a creative funk.  However, I did recently finish a nice terrain piece.  I should have been painting minis, I suppose, but the heart wants what it wants.  So my unsightly, gray warband will be having adventures at the feet of this lovely, ruined tower. :)

So, I decided that I wanted a ruined tower.  First, I daydreamed a bit about what it would look like, making a few sketches and trying to estimate the size.  I did a little Google "research", looking for images of ruined towers, and eventually chose a square tower (because circles are hard) with individual bricks (because detail!) and some vegetation sprouting from it (because it looks cool, and apparently that happens).

Just scribbled daydreams.

It can be hard to choose the right size, however.  How many "square feet" is a tower floor?  How much do I actually care?  I don't want to take up the whole table after all.  Eventually, I picked about eight centimeters square, and however tall it ended up being.

Thus, I started with a nice block of foam, and started gluing bricks onto it in a mostly vertical pattern, but with the occasional weirdly sized or placed brick.  Honestly, my consistency was all over the place, but it's a ruin, so you mostly don't notice.  The bricks should probably be smaller, too, but at 15mm scale you can go straight to heck if you expect me to try gluing what amounts to confetti to this tower.  As it is, the bricks are about 1cm across, 0.5cm tall, and about 0.5cm thick.

Makes for good climbin', though.

Apparently, for defensive purposes, the main floor is raised with just a ladder or narrow stairway for access.  Stairs can be tricky.  I originally wanted to do something like a set of plank stairs, like you might have leading down into your basement and/or superhero lair, with exposed undersides that would allow a mini standing on a penny to be placed on any given step.  However, the feat of engineering this would take quickly dissuaded me, and I just accepted the fact that my little dudes are just not allowed to stop halfway up the stairs.

Notice that there are no railings.  Management

is afraid that we're "going to lean".

I drew in the floor texture with a ball-point pen.  At this point,

I'm already sick of bricks.

Next, it's time for the tower proper!  Again, I'm not sure how tall the floors are supposed to be historically.  I just picked a height that felt right.  I had thoughts of gluing bricks on the inside as well, but between the excessive thickness of the walls, and hating bricks now, I chose to draw them on the inside.  I almost forgot the windows, but I did forget the door, which had to be cut out after the fact, and thus doesn't look quite as nice on the inside, but that's OK, because you'll almost never see that anyway.

Stealth robot from the future, for scale.

I really need to get one of those 15mm banana people.

Well, crap.  The walls don't fit right.  I blame Math.

Hooray, floors!  I was pretty proud of these, though I suppose they're flimsier than they could be.  Maybe I should have used actual wood of some sort.  As it is, I just cut out a thin layer of foam, drew seams into them, and then cut away the broken parts.  I finished by brushing them with the side of a steel brush, poking in little nail holes with a toothpick, and gluing supports underneath (more for the appearance of realism than for actual support.)

Luckily for Cyrano, the Beast Lord can't fit up those stairs.

Time to add bricks to the walls!  I intentionally left the bottom part a little uneven in order to "key" the top to the bottom and keep the top from being easily knocked off.

Yes, I'm very clever.

Pretty good for an evening's work.

And this took about 6 hours...

...from the previous photo. >.<

Jeebus!  Finally!  Freaking bricks!

Then I glued some rocks and sand along the edges of the broken wall, and in the corners where that sort of thing would collect, and on the stairs.  If I was making a base for this as well, I'd probably have put some more stones and broken bricks on the ground as well, but I'm going for maximum flexibility, so no base.

Everybody must get stoned!

Also, a few planks inside to break up the monotony.

Then, it's a coating of Mod-Podge and black paint, as one does.

The Dark Tower!  Or maybe just Emo Tower.

The first coat of paint.  Already, it's really coming to life.

Also, planks.

Now comes the "real" color, which in this case is a lighter gray that I applied as a sort of "heavy" dry-brush.  It almost covers the color beneath it, but obviously the dark gray still shows in the crevices and corners.

Pow!

The wooden floors get a similar treatment in light brown.  Really, they should have been the faded gray of old wood, I suppose, but the rest of the model was already gray and gray floors would seem boring.  Besides, I just want the impression of wood floors.  I like the contrast better, anyway.

I keep thinking, I could stop now, if I wanted to.

But maybe just a little bit more.

The whole thing gets a black wash, inside and out.  There are other color washes.  Browns and greens maybe, but I put black on everything.  Floors? Black.  Walls?  Black.  Red door?  Black!

Man, that just looks neat, even if the effect fades

somewhat as it dries.

Now I have glued thin lines of green flock in strategic spots to give the impression of moss and such, as well as a few bushes on the top edges.

Unfortunately, the bushes fell off.  Eventually I glued them back on, but for a while I eschewed them.

Shun the bushes. SHUNNNNNNN-A!

And here are a couple of photos "in context" to give you a feel for how it looks.  I'm pretty happy with it, but I swear, it's going to be a long time before I approach another one of these buildings that needs a lot of bricks.  Yuck!

"Exterior", although honestly, it's mostly exterior.

Interior.

"Say, do you feel a draft?"

And that will have to do for now.  I still need to do some more battle reports, of course, and I really want to make another gameplay video.  So, I guess look for those.

Ĝis la revido!

-Jason "Ludanto" Smith C;E