I recently finished building and painting up some Imperial sector buildings (which had been under the bed for too long) so lets dip into the box and see how they turned out.
I bought the following kits totaling €125 which was fairly pricey so I was interested in seeing what I could build for that. According to the set designs in the instructions it would allow me to build 6 buildings.
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440312a&prodId=prod1095509
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440312a&prodId=prod1095506
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat440312a&prodId=prod1095507
I bought an extra Manifactorium since I wanted to have a sort of industrial sector (I already had the battlefield accessories kit with barrels, ammo crates etc and a large oil storage tank from
FW).
The second Basilicum I bought because I think its definetly the best kit per £$€, (€22.50 for an 18 piece kit). The others vary from 12-15 pieces
afaik.
To complete the kits (assuming you want to follow this guide) you will need:
Superglue
Blutack (is there anything this stuff cant do?)
Large drybrush
Tank brush
Small brush
Paint: shadow grey, boltgun metal, tin bitz, sunburst yellow, shining gold, red gore, bleached bone.
Spray can of black paint
Stanley knife
So heres the basic components once opened, the walls etc come off the sprues fairly well but some cleaing is definetly required.
Tip: Akin to not laying railway tracks perfectly parrallel, if there are minor deviations at the beginning these tend to amplfy the further you build into the kit so be careful!
A sample of the insturctions
GW give you for the kits, I modelled my Governors Palace on this one.
Warning: Some walls in the kits do not fit well with others. As far as I can tell most of them are designed to fit at right angles to one another so trying to get 45 degree walls or diagonals or such can lead to problems. I would recommend if you are doing a complex build to use bluetac to fit the walls together first to see if they are viable. Go easy on the glue too, like mst GW products they are strong kits but brittle so if you do make a mess you can simply snap/hack(!) them apart again. Some sections also wont fit well with others.
Tip: I recommend laying out the pieces before you begin so you can visualise how they might look and the design you want.
Here you can see the first and second levels of the Governors palace.
As you can see from the top down view the walls dont match up as they should but dont worry, as long as they arent wildly off I found things tended to work out. Dont be afraid to chop bits off here or there or shave sections down for a better fit.
Heres is the palace with roof sections and second level complete.
And the final kit.
As you can see the difference between the first pic and this one is quite vast, once you add on all the extra bits and bobs included, it really starts to look like a proper building. (There are tonnes of accessories in the kits, arguably their strongest feature, I didnt come close to using all of mine and they can of course be kit bashed as per below. Some of them include, street lamps, building lamps, parapets, arches, struts etc).
Below is a finished Manifactorium kit.
This building I had orginally finished but wasnt quite happy with it, it seemed a bit lob-sided so I decided to add some more symmetry to it and added the unpainted section. The kits are great for this kind of thing, they really are ultra modular allowing some great kitbashes and modifcation options.
I took my time assembling each building but found I could usually do about 1 per night.
YMMV of course.
So next up is the painting stage. A basic black undercoat is how I began. Im sure other options are viable but I wanted a sort of “fire gutted” look to mine and the black would pick this out nicely as I'll show later on.
I spent distinctly less time on the inside of the buildings, a very rough coat of shadow grey and some light dry brushing with either bolt gun metal or tin bits is really all I did. I think it depends on how you want your overall kit to look, however Im pretty happy with how they turned out.
I then applied a heavy drybrushed coat of shadow grey. By “heavy drybrushed” I mean there was a fair amount of paint on the brush but not enough to get a perfectly even coat. I found doing continuous down strokes, starting at the top of the building and moving downwards worked best. It meant that underhangs (such as under ledges or doorways) didnt get any shadow grey, leaving them black as if they had been smoke damaged. This is probably demonsstrated better in pics further on then here (probably best to zoom right in to see what I mean).
The overall colors I used for the kits was shadow grey and shining gold, I wanted them to all have a similar appearance. However for the Manifactoriums I decided a more industrial look was in order so swapped out most of the shining gold details with boltgun and tin bitz. There is actually a lot of detail on each individual wall, how much of it one wants to paint is an individual choice, I chose certain features that I liked and picked them out with different colors, I deliberatly kept things simple as I didnt want to overload the building with color, they are in the end supposed to be battle/fire damaged.
After the shadow grey was applied it was a case of picking out the details.
Tip: I forgot to upload any pics on the floor sections (doh!), however these were fairly simple. I applied a light drybrushing of shadow grey, then a heavier coat of boltgun and then drybrushed on tin bitz on top of that. You can see some examples later on.
The other details that I picked out included the infamous skulls (bleached bone), the building lights (boltgun and sunburst yellow) and the parapets.
As I mentioned earlier dont be afraid to kit bash. I literally made up these simple pieces in 20 minutes out of leftover floor tiles/bits.
You can make bridges too to join up buildings one to another. I didnt glue mine in place as shown as I wanted things to be as modular as possible.
So out of the 3 kits I bought I was able to make 8 individual buildings ranging from what I consider to be mid size to large. This included 5 two storey buildings, 2 three storeys and 1 four story.
In addition there was the kit bashed extra ruins, lamp posts and other bits and pieces left over.
All in all a good investment and as you can see they cover a sizeable footprint on an 6x4 board.
From their vantage point, Eldar Dark Reapers prepare to engage a Cadian patrol group.
A group of Space Wolf scouts recon some Ork Killer Kans accompanied by a Big Mek, who are busy looting the industrial sector for gubbins.
An Avatar assaults the Holy Basilicums doors whilst a psychic choir attempt to stop his sacrilage.
The Wolf Guard supported by a Dreadnought, await extraction from a Governors palace as an Ork horde rushes forward.
Hope you enjoyed the tutorial/showcase and that it gave you some ideas!