Microruins

These little buildings were my first attempt at terrain modelling in many, many years, and my first ever in micro-scale, and I'm pretty pleased with the way they've turned out.

They're just made out of painted cardboard, with rubble made from railway modellers' ballast. Being such small scale, ordinary 160gsm card designed for the inkjet printer is quite sturdy enough for the purpose.

The designs are some black-&-white line-drawn things I found on the internet somewhere; I'm afraid I don't remember where, but some guy was making available some old out-of-print stuff from the early 1980s that he had (with the original publisher's permission) scanned and uploaded for the world to enjoy. All I did really was decorate them with paint and crap. For mass-production, I'd probably get the original line drawings into Photoshop and pre-paint them; then all I'd need to worry about is the groundwork and tinting the cut edges so that they don't stand out like dog's bollocks.

NOTE: The bases are, like those of my infantry, made of 0.5mm mild steel, which both gives the cardboard model some weight and stability, and allows the models to be transported on magnetic trays.

These ruined versions were supposed to have non-ruined versions slipped over the top, to be taken away as if by magic when the buildings get the crap blown out of them, but my semi-elaborate basing makes that unfeasible. Since you have to make two models in any case, it's not a big deal to just replace a non-blown-up model with a blown-up model, and that's what I'll do. I guess the non-ruined slip-covers would be more useful if one were making large, elaborate terrain boards with the buildings permanently mounted in place.

The two larger ones are just the right size to slip a squad base of infantry or a tank into, while the 2-storey one will fit a small machine-gun or sniper base on its crumbling floorboards. Perfect.

Now to make about a hundred more.