Ruins

So there are some ruins. Nothing special here. I've painted a bunch of 3rd Ed. Ruins. They're decently detailed and interesting looking but, paradoxically, there's a simplicity to them that I'm quite fond of. And they're not too different than the good old Cities of Death buildings so one of those and a few of these can make a nice little building footprint. A few of COD buildings for the outsides and these for interior walls can make quite an interesting and complicated building setup. I usually just dry brush the crap out of them with some fortress gray and some white, but this time I decided, since I liked the red touches to the Mechanicum I did last week, I would make the exposed brick red and give it more of a splash of color. I also did a final drybrush with space Wolf gray. It's not a color I kept on hand until recently but I like it a lot. I like what it does with buildings so much that I'm thinking about going back over my old ones that are only done with fortress and white and giving them a once over. Of course, that requires going back to thengs I've already finished and with all I've got undone, I think that will wait for a while.

I have been thinking about color a lot more with the 40K ruins I have. A lot of stuff in 40K looks pretty drab and mundane: gray stone, white marble, black stone, gold details. The gothic look, of course, is the big thing. Funny thing is that Gothic architecture is based on Romanesque architecture which is an emulation of Roman and Byzantine achitectures and even though several centuries back they saw Roman buildings and sculpture and all that and only saw bare gray/white stone, in ancient times it was usually painted and, if not vibrant and breathtaking since dyes and coloring agents were expensive, colorful. So I've been trying to paint buildings with more color in them. My first attempt at this came after I read an article about St. Peter's Basilica restorations. Restorers, who had always seen this white building, began finding traces of paint on the structure. Later they found receipts (signed for by Michaelangelo) for paint for the outer facade of the building. Over hundreds of years, time and pollution had turned the building white and dark more slowly than people noticed over the course of their lifetimes but originally it was yellow, blue, green and red! So I painted up a Sanctum and on the far wall, I inked the panels to give them yellow, blue, green and red tint. That might not have been the best way to do it since I accidentally used too much red and it ran into a few places I didn't want it, but it still came out fine. My point here is that people decorate their buildings and the more the care about them the prettier they make them. And even if they don't, sometimes they use the materials on hand to build things and grey stone may not be it. You know why barns are traditionally red? Because white paint was too expensive for farmers so they would make their own, often with some kind of earth in the mixture so the final product came out reddish. Maybe some buildings get built with some kind of brownish sandstone or maybe local earth is mixed with the "plas-crete" mix or they use the local pink/red/bluish granite. There can be color and there should be color. Not every city should or has to look like some kind of bland ancient drabness.

So tonight I'm going to start the Razorback but it's going to be a two-fer! I found a new school Rhino that I had assembled and based in black but had not started on. Why not do both at the same time? They're functionally the same vehicle with a minor difference. And this Rhino will officially be my eleventh. Yeah, I'm a freak.