Some Things I've Done With Foamcore

So, I've been talking about all this stuff you can build with foam core. Well, it's time to show you some of the things I've done. Maybe you'll get inspired!

Desert buildings. Note the one at the far right front. That's basically the basic building we built last time with the bottom of a plastic easter egg on top.




Similar buildings with an industrial look. The little factory in front is just foamcore with a couple of short PVC pipe fittings.




Desert ruins... Note that their bases are L-shaped. That way I can fit them together to make bigger building footprints...





Of course, wall rubble makes great barricades and can represent even more demolished buildings.





Talking about Planetstrike, does that look like it could be a Skyshield landing pad to you? It's a whole lot cheaper...





And maybe those could be defensive walls around a bunker. How many foamcore defensive lines do you think you can get out of $20 worth of foamcore?




These are bridges. Some are meant as river crossing bridges. The rear ones were meant to be between buildings but several strung together make a great elevated monorail track.




Watch out for the scraps you cut out while making something. These were left over from the monorails. I slapped them on a base and now they're Imperial message boards. Some people like the Imperium and some people don't...




Now these are city walls! Constantinople had nothing on these bad boys!






But if you need something for a small fort or a compound, these'll work nicely, too.




This is one of my biggest pieces. This factory has a 15x15" footprint. It's foamcore with some plasticard on the doors and PVC pipes for tubes and smokestacks.




And lastly, you've seen these before. Who says you're restricted to blocky Imperial architecture?




So, I hope you got some ideas from this. when it comes to foamcore, you're pretty much limited by the thickness of the foamcore and your imagination (and maybe the size of your graph paper but you can buy that bigger!) so get out your pencils. Get drawing, get gluing and get cutting!

Old Ruins

I mean that title in both senses... So last night I sprayed down Whirlwind #1 again and the various other stuff with it and then sat down and found myself in a bit of a quandary. What now? I don't feel like assembling another Rhino frame for Whirlwind #2. I don't feel like digging into one of the Predators. I don't feel like gluing and cutting foamcore. But I want to do something so what should I do? The answer was actually staring me in the face. Many, many moons ago, I acquired a bunch of 3rd Ed. ruins, drybrushed on some white and fortress gray and that was it. They were bland and boring but serviceable. Now I'm looking at them and thinking about how bland and flat they are. Well, enough was enough! I decided to pretty them up for a new millennium. And since it wasn't all that complicated, I managed to get a bunch done. Basically I painted either snakebite brown, golden yellow, bleached bone or a combination thereof onto all the brick areas, trying to give it a more desert stone look and then drybrushed them all with space wolf gray. I'm not jumping for joy over how they came out, but they're quite a bit better than they were before.

A funny thing is that to my eye, the brownish color seemed flat and blended into the stone but looking at this picture, they look decent without being garish or overwhelming. In fact, for the past weeks that I've been posting these pictures, I find that I may be kinda blah about how the thing itself came out, but once I look at a picture, I'm happy with the outcome. It looks like I've come up with a standard operating procedure for the future. Whenever I paint something, I take pictures of it. If I like the pictures, it's fine. If I don't, back to the drawing board or painting station until I do like it. Brilliant!

I took a look at the box for GW's Mines, Bombs and Booby Traps. A bazillion resin markers for fairly cheap? Not bad, guys. I think I'll pick one up when I have money again. I already want to get a Blastscape to add to my craters, a Battlescape and some Defense Lines. And yes, I do have a soft spot for the other buildings. Sure, I don't need a Bastion because I can make equivalents much more cheaply (and have) but for the most part, I've been very satisfied with GW's buildings. Their minis I'll find for as cheap as I can, but their buildings I'm actually willing to pay full price for because they're usually worth it.

The plan for tonight is to start gluing the templates for short walls and towers on foamcore so that I can start cutting in the next few days and then, with the time remaining paint up Whirlwind #1. Not that I'll have much time after that, but if I do, I think I'll start assembling Whirlwind #2. That's the plan, but then again, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Let's see what I actually manage to accomplish...

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.