Time for Terrain

    At Fall In last year, I had the pleasure of sharing my space with Ken from Proxie Models. As payment I wanted some of his products for my personal use. I ended up purchasing several more sets to help fill in a Pavlov's house Stalingrad board I've been building. I'm not sure if I'll ever finish it, but it gave me a way to rationalize several purchases at the time.

   I picked up some corner ruins (Link: Corner Ruins) and another set that I don't see listed now. The come packaged as two sprues with each sprue building a corner piece.

    While cleaning them I examined them. I sat them on a shelf and looked at them once in a while for several months. Finally last week I wanted to fill out a ruin for a test game of Tomorrow's War. So I spent an hour cutting, trimming and gluing 14 sections together.

    The first thing I noticed was that the individual pieces were very sturdy. They were also easy to separate from the sprue and trim. The problem I found was in the design of the corners. Brickwork wrapped around both edges and one ends up gluing brick faces to the back edge of one side piece. This is a minor issue and if I weren't seeing how quickly I could get these done, I would have spent extra time sanding one edge, filling the gaps and carving new detail where it was needed. You can see what I mean in the picture below. A minor detail, but one of those things I'd prefer a designer think through and not pass on to the consumer.

 

    Now for the disclaimer. I did not do any priming or painting for the test game. The models just went on the table as black plastic pieces. They served the purpose, but I really was anxious to see how they painted. So about the middle of this week I primed them. They take primer very well and the job was about an hour all told including drying time.

    I selected one corner to paint with test colors and see how quickly they could be done. The interior was painted with pale drab colors. The floor piece is a little clunky looking, but the details in the interior are simple and effectively get the point across that this building has taken some damage.

    The exterior was painted red brick with a light grey mortar. I slopped paint on as quickly as I could for the base coat. Washed it all with brown drawing ink and highlighted some areas. The final touch was a little weathering with a dusty red pastel rubbed on with my fingers. The over all effect was quite good.

    One thing does bother me, though. The scaling of the windows is off. They're the size of doors for 15mm guys. It's another one of those minor details that could have been addressed in the design process. That said, I'm still very happy with these buildings and will definitely buy more products from Proxie Models. They're very reasonably priced at $4 for two corners. They are durable and easy to make look good with only a few hours of work.

    I like to have reminders of things to do or not to do around me. So I'll leave this first model as is, but I'm going to go back to the others and fill that crazy gap before I paint it. It shouldn't add much time to the process and the end result will be even nicer.