I wanted to create some wrecked buildings for the up coming Hammer's Slammers show game I was organising on behalf of the South London Warlords. In the news at the time I was thinking about building them (mid summer 2006) there had been numerous shots of the unfortunate business in Israel and the Lebanon and one of the features of that kind of urban conflict is, inevitably, heavily wrecked buildings.
Watching the TV I was struck by a couple of things. Firstly, almost all of the buildings seemed to have landed on a car or some other vehicle. I guess that, the world over, tightly packed urban structures are more and more likely to have parked cars right along side of them. Inevitably, as a building is hit by high explosives and slumps, it seems to land on - and crush - these, and so I wanted that to be a feature of the 'banged up' dwellings I was about to begin constructing.
Secondly, colour: in all of the current pictures and newsreel I saw - and this was backed up by colour shots of Caan after D Day that I had in reference material - the overall colour of buildings, rubble, crushed cars and indeed just about everything else seemed to be a universal tan/grey. The dust that settles in the surrounding area when a building is destroyed seems to ubiquitously coat the locale in a universal light brownish colour and that was also something I wanted to reproduce....
The picture below and the attached
pdf article follow on from this introduction and detail the process. This
article - but not all of the pictures - was originally published in Miniature
Wargames.
