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I'm currently doing an imperial guard force defending the pulverized ruins of an ancient city. Think something like new york some 20k years after several nukes went off. The idea is to have it all be a very flat desert with an occasional short wall and metal rod sticking out (no buildings and such, the battlefields are a simple plain).

What are your suggestions for colours? I'm trying to keep it on bright side of the colour spectrum as my infantry and vehicles will be wearing chaos black and dheneb stone as it's main colours.

Feel free to leave ideas for more elaborate basing too!


Some backstory:
The Kriegan 21st is currently garrisoning a planet which used to harbour an enourmous planetary metropolis during the dark age of technology.
A devastating war left the planet ruinned except for a few isolated settlements. The small human population has long since stopped fighting for survival, but most of the planet is still covered by the dangerous ruins of the old metropolis.
Recently however, excavations have revealed an extensive underground bunker system containing an enourmous stockpile of Executioner pattern Leman Russ battle tanks, along with several other sorts of plasma weaponry.


PS: I've been considering the ash wastes, underhive and dooomed world schemes on this page but I doubt if they would match the "whites" of my uniforms.

I don't see an ancient city being 'bright' coloured at all - most colours will have faded or weathered away centuries ago. If you want visual contrast with your drab vehicles and uniforms, vegetation would be the obvious solution - lush greenery, interrupted here and there by grey ruins poking through (like the ruins in the Lord of the Rings movies), and the exposed soil of the recent excavations (a good excuse for earth-moving machinery and piles of dirt).

Hmm that's a good idea but a fair bit harder to model. I've never done vegetation. But wouldn't the greens make it even harder for the whites and khaki to blend into it?

My ulthwe are using a similar theme, desert bases with the odd bit of ruin poking out, mostly taken from cities of death leftovers and then finished with a range of dead foliage. It didn't quite have the punch I wanted though, so I'm in the process of migrating it to a frozen tundra.

Crushy wrote:Hmm that's a good idea but a fair bit harder to model. I've never done vegetation. But wouldn't the greens make it even harder for the whites and khaki to blend into it?

Sure, if you want your army to blend into the board, then paint the whole board as rubble and dirt and aged concrete and the occasional bit of rusting metal. But make sure you keep some contrast between the board and the army - camouflage is all very well, but can result in figures unintentionally 'disappearing'