In the last week I spent a fair bit of time working with my Hirst Arts molds and projects. I made some major progress on this ruined Hirst Arts Church + Belltower combination, which has been sitting in my garage cupboards since March, 2004! That makes it one of the oldest terrain projects I haven’t completed, so it’s time I knocked it off. It’s built from Hirst Arts Gothic molds #40, #54, #55, and #235 for the gingerbread decoration and roof tiles.
This building was originally started for Mordheim and I had plans to embed a large chunk of wyrdstone into the floor. However since then I’ve decided to move it back towards a more vanilla build that I can use in Mordheim, Bolt Action WWII games, 40k in 40 minutes or Kill Team, and perhaps for Pulp .45 Adventure gaming in the English countryside. I’ve scattered some WHFB figures in there for scale.
This week I’ve finished the entrance, leaving it intact and covering it with a small roof of plaster tiles over an ‘A’ frame of foam board. The entrance lifts off the base currently so I can get inside to paint it.
The belltower was also largely finished, with a few additional casts and quite a bit of repair work and new gluing to get it into the state you see. It seems I’d built probably 50% of the tower years ago as I found two sides laying in the church when I dusted it off. As it’s a ruin the tower will stand as you see it in the photos. I may try to put some suggestion of stained glass windows in the intact rondel window once it’s painted up. Basically it’s been set up as a nice sniper’s nest from the top floor. The second floor is a bit more limited, but gives you nice sight lines into the main church and out over both the intact and ruined walls. The heavy tower makes this terrain piece rather lop sided in terms of weight, so I have to handle it bloody carefully. Last thing I want to do is drop it, 12 years later! The interior wall of the tower lifts out too, again to facilitate painting.
The second photo shows the ruined wall. This needs a little more detail work and I want to build it up a little more in the corners. Some ruined masonry will be scattered around as well, probably outside the wall. I’m not going to go overboard on it though because I want to leave a reasonably flat playing area in and around the church.
I want to do some more additional detailing in the form of ruined roof sections over the intact wall, possibly with some exposed beam work. Again I don’t want to go too far with it because you need to be able to get your hands inside to move figures around. However I would like some visual suggestion of a roof.
A couple more weeks of work and this building should be playable. Fortunately I’ve got some partially assembled bits and pieces left over from it that I’ll be using to test out paint schemes. I’ll probably end up going for your usual ‘light gray stone’ scheme though, give I want to use it in a bunch of settings. Now if I could just stop getting distracted by other projects…