Living in the Pits

At the Joy of Six show earlier this year, someone asked if we had any photos of our 6mm Sunken Dwellings in use on a table. The answer was, no, we hadn’t – we had never found the time to paint some and build them into a piece of scenery. So over the summer, Tony cast up a set (incidentally, they’ve all just been remoulded) and built a small mesa with them dug into the surface.

The original idea for the buildings came from a famous sci-fi film franchise (you all know that) but not so well known is that the film was itself inspired by the underground dwellings of the Berbers in Matmata, Tunisia where filming took place. Our range consists of four different designs, all of which are cast in square or rectangular resin blocks exactly 25mm deep. The idea is that you can make a piece of scenery from 25mm polystyrene or insulation foam by cutting holes in it and dropping the buildings in – we figured square holes would be easier to cut than circles or random shapes. The edges can be disguised with whatever you use for texturing the foam surface.

Tony started by painting the buildings – they were undercoated with Army Painter Skeleton Bone, washed with Citadel Agrax Earthshade and drybrushed Terminatus Stone. Doors and details were then picked out in various colours.

The hill was cut from normal white insulation polystyrene, and then a base was cut from 5mm foamex roughly 5mm bigger all round. Positions for the four buildings were marked with a sharpie and cut out, test fitting as we went – you want the fit to be as tight as possible with no gaps. The hill edge was bevelled and shaped with a knife and the base edge also bevelled before they were stuck together with glue gun adhesive (a non-solvent type so it doesn’t attack the foam).

A couple of buildings were added around the edge of the hill. One of our Loading Bay models was cut in half, the main door end was used as an entrance to what is obviously an underground cave network and the other end, which I was originally going to discard (which is why it’s not fully painted in the photo !), became a bunker/observation position. Positions were cut into the hill for these and they were glued in place.

Once all this was done, several conventional buildings were added to the surface and then then the whole thing was textured. This was done with a mixture of household emulsion paint, PVA glue and sand (clean bird cage sand from a pet shop). We had some emulsion mixed at a DiY store to match Army Painter’s Skeleton Bone, so that all of our base colours are the same. This was then washed with Citadel Seraphim Sepia shade and drybrushed bone. We added some awnings made from cheap (rough) paper towels soaked in PVA, with supports made from paper clip wire. After that it was just a matter of painting in a few details, varnishing and then adding various grass tufts in dry, arid desert colours.

So that’s it – welcome to life in The Pits. The mesa matches the rest of the terrain we built for a game at the Maidstone Wargames Society Open Day last year and should see action soon.