Well done terrain enhances the gaming experience for me. I love to see the models I have spent time building and painting wage war on a fully formed battlefield. Immersion is powerful and you want your toys to look cool right?

I have a collection of 40k terrain produced by Games Workshop or made of models they produce. These bits are cohesive and work well with each other helping to build a convincing scene. I am not against scratch built terrain, infect I wish I had more time and skill to make my own weird and wonderful creations. When I got my table I was wanting to get it filled as fast as possible so I could get playing. Tabletop quality is my style and that extends to the terrain I paint.

Buildings:

This is the STC Hab Bunker from the Battlezone: Fronteris set. I liked it as it added a huge slab of a building for line of sight blocking and came with a set of wall ish structures that I could use to extend its footprint. To paint it I wanted something quick and effective, so I attempted to do most of the work with spray cans and dry brushing.

Step 1: spray entire feature Chaos Black from a spray can inside and out.

Step 2: do a moderate 45 degree zenithal with Mechanicus Standard Grey.

Step 3: A dry brush of Tyrant Skull is applied in a circular motion to highlight the edges and give a little bit of texture to the surfaces.

Step 4: drybrush whatever you feel with brass, bronze or silver to add a little bit of variation.

Step 5: stipple / drybrush a complimentary colour to you battle mat / play surface along the points of contact at the bottom. This will help make it feel more like eh building ins in the environment.

I repeated these steps with a few other buildings from GW and based by building ruins on Plasticard so they had a footprint for gaming purposes. These had texture paint and other accessories placed on them to make them feel routed in the world. For scatter terrain that counts as hills I used two old destroyed rhinos and some munitorum armoured containers. These are played as hills so they block line of sight and are also scalable so you can stand on them.

‘hills’

The table is coming together for 40k and I do need to get on with painting something for AOS but at the moment it’s all systems go for Legions Imperialis. I’ve got myself some nice little terrain bits all build up and waiting for painting / re-painting from their days being used for games of Titanicus. As with all hobby projects I just need to do it now…