Cityscape

Building the Street Boards

	Although it's possible to just lay down black felt to cover your tabletop, I decided that I wanted to have some craters in my streets so from step one I knew I would have to build some boards. I bought a piece of 4x8 styrofoam insulation (2" thick) at the hardware store and had them cut it into 4 sections, 2x4. This way I could rearrange the pieces in several ways to mix up the locations of the craters somewhat.
	The next step was to make the craters. Since I wanted to get the craters into the center of the board, the foam cutter was out-- but there is an easier way. Since we all know that spray paint will EAT styrofoam, I just sprayed paint onto the boards in rougly the size crater that I wanted. I let the paint do its work for about 3 or 4 minutes then hit the center of the crater again with another, slightly smaller dot of paint-- this would start eating a new hole and give the crater a sloped interior. If you want a flat interior (like, for entrenching troops in) then make sure your paint coverage is even. Personally I wanted my craters to really look blown up and not really comfortable for standing around in. The spray paint should take about an hour to really finish its work and even then the interior will be soft and mushy. Don't use too much paint or it will eat all the way through your boards. (Learned this the hard way, myself. Sorry about that dining room table...) This second board has a couple of small craters in the middle and a big ordnance sized blast in the corner. Before you make any craters take some thought to where your buildings are going to stand... Obviously you don't want to make craters where they will be covered by buildings.
	The next step is to protect your board prior to painting it. I used textured paint, two coats, but you could just as easily use regular ol' white craft glue. After you paint it over you should add some sand to the top to texture it-- unless you want glossy smooth roads. Here you can see my third board with three small strafe holes followed by a big crater.
	Here's the fourth board. In this one you can see that I added two grey "city blocks" where my buildings will be based. So, all of the black area around those city blocks will be roads. This board has a lot of small, deep craters on it-- victim of siege shells no doubt. The street itself is just sprayed quickly with black primer.

Building the City Blocks

I now have four finished boards, each with two "city blocks" on it. Each board is 24" x 48" and each city block is 18" by 18". The streets themselves are 3" wide. When I push two boards together, the 3" on the sides will combine to form 6" wide "avenues" where the boards come together.

The next job is to build something on each of those city blocks. I briefly jotted down a few ideas and then set to building them one by one: sewage area; ruined building; loading platforms; etc. The buildings are all made out of foam card, styrofoam inserts, or trash. For some of the smaller details I just took a walk through the hardware store and grabbed anything cheap with an interesting shape (no, that does not include the girls at the checkout). Pretty much everything was given a coat of textured paint, sprayed black, then drybrushed heavily with space wolf grey.

Below you can see my preliminary attempts to beef up each city block with interesting terrain-- still in the early stages, of course. The thing to note here is that it is VERY EASY to glue four walls together and stand a building on each block. But the key to terrain is in the details, so even after the basic building is standing there's a lot of detail to be added before the terrain is done.

You'll notice throughout that we've gone from very general concepts and then gradually increased our focus onto the smaller details-- street boards to city blocks, city blocks to buildings, buildings to detailed models. It seems like a monumental task to build terrain, and while mine doesn't even aspire to match the quality of a GW piece, it's still pretty good for our basement games.