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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