The Abandoned Generatum Sanctis

First pictures:

Next:

This isn't exactly an A to Z project, but I did want to comment a bit on this piece.

 

I made this buttress out of Hirst Arts pieces, both from the tech sets and also from the dungeon/castle molds.  I designed it to work with the Cities of Death pieces and also to have a flat top so that I could buttress up buttresses or put spikes on it instead.  The Skull actually comes from a skull ring (you can buy a bag of 50 of them for about a dollar around Halloween).  The spike on top is a piece that's used with wedding cakes.  I have other spikes that I sometimes use, but I like the long spikes as they have a real gothic look to them

One of the easiest ways to make rubble is to just take all the junk leftover from when you're making something (bits of wire, scraps of styrene, bad castings, etc.) and clutter the board with it.  The thing is, though, I recommend first taking chunks of 3/4" thick pink styrofoam and making a basic structure of the rubble.  Also, keep in mind that a miniature has to stand on this scenery at some point.  You'll want to leave paths through the rubble for people to move through.  I decided that, on this piece, there ought to be paths of rubble going to the ladders for the tower.

Once you've kind of made a skeletal structure for the rubble go ahead and glue down the big pieces with the detail.  Lastly, you're going to want to put ground over all of this so that it fills in the cracks.  Some people use glue for this, I prefer hydrocal.  Lastly paint.  Obviously, but here the paint adds to the detail.  As there is probably bits of styrofoam sticking out,  a couple coats of spray paint will melt texture into those bits making them look more like broken granite than broken styrofoam.  Don't forget afterwards to primer them with a water based spray paint like Design Masters or H2O by Krylon.  After all was said and done.  The last step to this model was to take brick dust and grey balast and put them on the base.  I put the grey balast down to mark the paths through the rubble and the brick dust I put up close to the buildings to give the outline something extra.

 

Well, obviously, the doorway and arch are from Hirst Arts.  I can't stress enough the power of those molds.  Most people seem to prefer the tech molds for 40k, but I think I use the gothic molds more than the tech.  I tend to find things that look sci fi, but rarely do I ever get a food container that looks like a gothic pillar.  In any case, I recommend the Hirst arts gothic molds very highly. I made the Imperial Eagle symobl out of balsa wood with the help of my dremel and then I made a mold of it.  Actually, the mold is for three of these things in a row so as to use them as a 6" section of molding.  Whenever I need just one eagle, I break one away from the set.

Precision Products makes a mold of corrugated texture for about $5.  I use that.  I apply that texture to...can't remember if I used pink stuff or balsa here.  In any case, where the edges were a bit choppy, I put in corrugated cardboard as a kind of undercarriage to the roof.  I made the spikes here out of conical plastic anchor (3/16. 5/16). I constructed the barbed wire by wrapping a thin piece of wire around a slightly larger gauge and then winding that around a pencil.

The real trick to the roof was in getting it to form the straight A frame.  I want to stress that if you can't get the roof straight, the rest of the building will look like something out of an old German silent movie.  In other words, not right.

The Tower.  Believe it or not, I built the tower first and then built everything else to go around it.  Okay, so.  Cities of Death pieces obviously.  The banners are available for download, here and here.  I did little more than glue two of these signs together back to back twice to make the banners.

Between the cities of Death facades and the turret, I made the walkway by glueing bits of model train track into the crack to give it support and then putting a plastic grating on top of that.  I used O scale train track for ladders around the other side and used the train ties as girders.

But where did I get the turret?  Keep your eyes open out there for unofficial molds people.  This one's from a bunt cake pan!  Seriously, cooking store...Crate and 50mm Barrels.  Funny stuff. The only problem is getting die stone out of a cast iron baking mold, but I'll leave that tip for another time.