Quarantine zone scenery

As featured in my last post, I’ve completed a set of modern ruins:

Cast your mind back to March of 2020. I had my copy of Zona Alfa, and dug out this set of Mars Attacks ruins that I’d previously bought from North Star’s Bargain Basement. I’d seen people jazz them up (on Borthwick Family site and especially this article on Tabletop Terrain) and so set about making a green stuff stamp to fill in the connector holes in the walls:

I cut a notch out of the stamp for ease of alignment:

And before long I’d churned out a bunch of wall pieces:

I’m sure you could make a perfectly serviceable set of terrain using the connectors as intended, but I preferred the look of this style, less ‘kit-like’.

Then it was just a case of making some ruins on rectangular bases that I’d cut out.

Not all of the wall pieces aligned perfectly, so I took this as an opportunity to add some more character by making the ruins extra ruined! Using the brickwork as a guide, I cut down corners here and there, and cut in some extra detail.

I also cut out all of the broken glass, as I figured I’d do something else for that rather than trying to create the effect with paint.

At this point, we went into the first lockdown. In the days before it was announced, my wife stocked up on vital supplies while I was at work, such as foam board (as I’d been watching a lot of YouTube videos on making Mordheim terrain, and planned on going back to that as a lockdown project alongside Zona Alfa).

So, finding myself with a sudden glut of free time (when we weren’t homeschooling, but that’s a whole other story), inset about continuing to make my ruins for Zona Alfa. I cut down plasticard strips to cover some of the joins:

Which wound up looking like this:

Then I added detailing, like carved cork to represent broken concrete floors, and using coffee stirrers to make broken floorboards:

I only did broken floorboards on one of the buildings, but I wish I’d done more in hindsight, as they came out looking pretty nice once I’d painted them!

I also decided that I wanted to add some rubble to make them look more ruined (although not so much that they weren’t playable wargame terrain). So, I spent an evening watching the Witcher and cutting tiny bricks out of cork sheet:

I wasn’t too particular about size, cutting by eye rather than making fully identical bricks. As a side note, I wildly overestimated how many I would need, and am still using up this supply of tiny bricks on modelling projects three years later!

Once I’d cut plenty of these, I then made up some rubble paste, using a mix of cork bricks, sand, crushed eggshell, filler, paint and glue:

Which I then globbed onto my bases in artfully arranged mounds like so:

I also added piles of bricks and other cork debris here and there, before finishing off the bases with a mix of sand like usual.

I have zero recollection what I was doing in this next picture, which is included purely as a historical record:

As my daughter paints a birdhouse in the background, I’m assuming that’s a dilute mixture of glue and paint, but to what end? 

Then it was a case of undercoating in the garden ready for painting:

Ahh, those sunny days in the garden during the start of lockdown. The only issue being, during one of these mornings while I was sat in the garden sketching some ideas for Mordheim terrain, a buddy (the same one that I challenged to paint a 500 point Warhammer army) introduced me to Rangers of Shadow Deep and threw off all my plans as that became my lockdown project as my focus swung to solo gaming…

Fast forward two and a half years. 

Deciding to play a year-long Last Days campaign, I thought I needed some city terrain for my band of survivors to battle zombies in. Figuring it would take a long time to make a whole city, I decided to finish off these pieces to tide me over until I made some other pieces, rationalising it as the ruined outskirts of the city where the government had bombed in the hopes of stemming the advance of the undead and creating a quarantine zone. 

So I set about painting them up with mostly Wilko tester pots and some heavy applications of homemade wash (a la Skankgame), a process that I apparently took zero pictures of.

Then came the least useful but also most vital bit of work on a piece of tabletop terrain: adding tiny broken glass from cut down blister packaging:

Entirely impractical (and to tell the truth the smaller piece on the above picture has already been lost) but they just look so cool!

I mean look at this:

Some grubby wash over the windows completed the effect, and then I had great fun seething up some poses shots to show them off:

To quote an old poorly translated advert that my wife and I still quote today “you can use it multipurpose”!

And as you’ve seen, they’ve already had their first outing in the Last Days campaign, so they’re definitely fit for purpose.

As well as finishing off long overdue terrain projects, the tally also took a hit as I won a twitter giveaway organised by @art_renewed, so am now the proud owner of the old school Commisar Yarrick sculpt:

Which brings the Tally to:

9 vs 10 = -1

But don’t worry, we’ll be back in the black soon enough…