A lot of people, including GW staffers, already use the Hirst Arts Gothic line for 40k City Fight terrain and indeed I created a little test piece earlier this year. I guess this is one of the motivations behind Games Workshop’s recently released Cities of Death plastic building sets.
However the first time I saw a GW CoD plastic building sprue I wondered if it was possible to use them as ‘detail panels’ set in some kind of Hirst Arts framework. I thought the complex, overly detailed GW panels would work well with the cleaner, church like GA gothic bricks to create the sort of ‘tech worship’ feel that is part of the 40k canon. This was the main reason I recently purchased a $45nz Cities of Death ‘Manufactorum’ box.
These photos show you what I’ve come up with so far, combining maybe a third of the panels in the Manufactorum box with a number of Hirst Arts ‘B’ style arches. This is an experiment, and putting this piece together has raised a few issues which are worth sharing for anybody else interesting in trying it out:
- The GW panels are very detailed, and on both sides. This means there’s little in the way of a flat surface on any individual panel which makes it hard to position them against a wall or doorframe without major sanding or dremelling away of surface details. My original plan was to have the panels flat against the HA archways so there was no gap around them. Turns out I was reluctant to remove that much surface detailing from the expensive GW plastic panels I’d just purchased!
- The individual panels are actually quite thick. Combine that with a wealth of surface detail and you’ve got a piece of plastic that is quite difficult to cut through, particularly if you want a straight (or even worse curved) cut. So careful with those Xacto knives.
- The GW panels are inordinately annoying dimensions. Across they’re maybe 3/8″ short of 2″ wide. Just short enough to be a hassle when trying to work with whole inches. Height wise they’re not too bad, but I don’t think they’re whole inches in that dimension either. I’m convinced this is by design.
- The whole annoying dimension aspect is magnified by the surface designs which of course work with other GW panels but don’t tend to fall on pleasing lines when surrounded by blocks in a different scale. It’s not very obvious in the above photo but the GW panels aren’t centered in the archways.
Still the piece is shaping up nicely. So I think it was a worthwhile experiment. Regarding painting I’m thinking of a similar scheme to this earlier CD terrain.
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Is it possible to set them into the mould after you pour and then make them a part of the plaster piece?
Interesting idea but I can’t think of any way to make it work :(.
Creating a one sided mold of the archways is easy enough but you couldn’t embed anything that actually projects out of the archways at all while pouring – because of course then it’d be projecting into the space occupied by the actual mold material.
Err if that makes any sense!
could you make a donut shaped mold of the arch. cut the interior walls of the mold to be low enough to house the panel comfortably. Fill the centre hole of the mold with clay and have a little clay on the top of the interior walls.
Fit the GW wall into the clay pushing it slightly to embed ito the clay on the interior wall, if you cut the wall back you will get lots of left over bits of panels for basing and themed rubble and it will allow you to scult the clay to make the pannel look truely embeded. you could also push a piece of HA block into the clay to stamp propper detail on the clay.
then pour the plaster. and done
you could even keep the back side wall detail by cover the areas you want to keep with clay.
if you used the regular cast of the arch to do put the clay in it would match up sweet then you could glue regular casts of the arch to the back and you got a nice thick arch with a nice detailed panel.
My $3.fiddy
You could always make one sided molds of he GW panels. That way you haven’t got to worry about destroying those expensive bits. Simply set the panels in a bed of water based clay so the details on the opposite side of the panel won’t cause the mold material to seep under the piece.
Hirst Arts are made in the US where we use the inch, GW products are from the UK (though also manufactured in other countries) where the Centimeter is king. That is why the measurements don’t work right.