The build-up to building buildings

I've talked a lot about my WH40K Imperial hive city project on here – and I've shown a handful of the robots, servitors, denizens, vehicles and scatter terrain that I'm going to use to populate the thing – but there's always been one vital ingredient missing. The city itself.

And that's because I've not actually started constructing it. The buildings have not been built.

So the other day I cleared some space and started putting some tin cans, foamboard, MDF and plastic parts together to see what would happen.

And what happened was, I ended up spending a lot of time working out which bits went with which, and a lot less time actually building any models.

So I'm afraid I still don't have any buildings ready to share.

But it became apparent during these preliminary fumblings that I was subconsciously drawing a lot of ideas from a single source. A source that was so brilliant, yet so rarely mentioned, that I felt I should probably dedicate a blog post to it.

It was a series of articles published in White Dwarf issues 260 to 263, back in late 2001, written by Paul Rudge.

He gave us a multi-part guide to making foreboding, semi-industrial scenery for the 54mm game Inquisitor. And, although the scale was different to the regular 28-32mm of WH40K, most of the techniques he discussed transferred very comfortably.

I suspect many long-term hobbyists will remember the articles fondly, and just might like to take another look at them.

So, entirely without any kind of permission whatsoever, I thought the best possible thing I could do would be to present the collected article here, scanned and collated directly from the original pages of White Dwarf.*

We had to wait for issue 264 and the Paraelix Configuration campaign scenario to witness the awesome power of the fully operational battlefield

My planned pieces probably won't look anything like Paul Rudge's incredible scenery from over a decade ago, but a great many of the finished elements will owe almost all their existence to it. With a little luck I'll have something in a fit state to expose itself to the world within the next couple of weeks.

*Games Workshop, I did it out of love. Please don't sue me.