{"id":14076,"date":"2023-10-31T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brigademodels.co.uk\/Blog\/?p=14076"},"modified":"2023-10-25T13:19:21","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T12:19:21","slug":"living-in-the-pits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brigademodels.co.uk\/Blog\/2023\/10\/living-in-the-pits\/","title":{"rendered":"Living in the Pits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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At the Joy of Six show earlier this year, someone asked if we had any photos of our 6mm Sunken Dwellings<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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).<\/p>\n