City ruins scatter terrain

2024 and 2025 will see the 80th anniversary of many of the great city battles of the Second World War, such as Warsaw, Budapest, Königsberg and Berlin to name but a few.  With this is mind I've been looking at my terrain collection. 

My city terrain is centred around some marvellous 20mm MDF buildings I got from Commission Figurines at Salute back in 2014.  I built some rubble piles a few years ago, but when I got it all out of the loft it didn't look very impressive so I decided to make some more.

The first job was to sort the base materials.  I used four different materials: cork board; 5mm foam board; old plywood bases and old credit cards.  The cork board and foam board are great materials for this type of terrain proving height, being relatively strong, easy to cut and very lightweight. 

I started by pulling apart pieces of cork board to the rough sizes I wanted and then set about the pieces with a Stanley knife and an old screwdriver.  It's very easy to carve irregular shapes of different levels and gouge out craters.  For the foam board I used an old biro with a metal end and drew/scored the shapes I wanted which I then cut out with the Stanley knife.  The old ply wood bases were shaped with a pair of cutters and a Stanley knife.  For the credit cards I just free hand cut random shapes with a pair of old scissors.  All really quick and easy to do.

The fun bit was adding the texture and rubbish.  I assembled a whole host of materials: mixed sand; cat litter (clean of course); bits of MDF sprues from buildings kits: Javis urban scatter mix and a mix I'd previously made for the original batch consisting of bits of cut up plastic card and MDF and small rocks all dyed a dark grey.  For some of the credit card pieces I added a thin skim of tiling grout and for the rest I stuck them on pieces of cobblestone printed paper .  The key to urban scatter is to make sure there's some regular, straight line shapes like squares or rectangles mixed in.  These represent the man made detritus.  If you don't have these it'll just look like rocky terrain painted grey.

I smothered the shapes in PVA and stuck a right jumble of stuff over each base and into the holes I'd gouged.  I made sure I stuck some of the regular shapes sticking vertically so they looked buried in the rubble.  I also used some small pieces of plastic tubing which came from Covid swabs to represent pipes.  For the pieces that I'd stuck the cobblestone paper on I was much more sparing in my application and after a failure using PVA I used super glue to add cat litter and some of the brick dust,  After attaching all the junk I left them all for a couple of days.

After leaving a textured piece of terrain or base to dry and harden I always brush it with a soft brush.  Inevitably some material won’t have adhered properly and it's best to deal with it before painting.  

I used super glue to to reattach any larger bits that had come away.  I then primed/base coated the pieces with cheap white acrylic craft paint to which I added a touch of black to make a mid grey tone.  To try and save any more loss of material and I mixed a lot of PVA into my base colour mix.  I then glooped it all on.  I would have left this to dry at least overnight but real life dictated that I couldn’t do any more on them for a few days.

The paint/PVA mix worked well sealing everything in and providing a concrete base colour.  To start to add depth and interest I drybrushed each piece with a light grey and then a light buff colour.  When this was dry I added some tiny blobs of PVA and sprinkled some cat litter that I'd died a brick colour with acrylic paint and ground down to almost a powder.  This really added a ruined look.  

The wooden pieces were painted in various browns and then washed with Vallejo Umber.  Using a watered down version of the same colour I washed areas of each piece to give a suitable stained look to the ground.  The final part of painting was to pick out little pieces of scatter with the brick colour and then a final drybrush with a very pale almost white across the highest edges.  I had to call it a day then as you really could be doing this forever  and drive yourself quite mad.