Sunday, June 15, 2014

Scenery: Ruined City Block

 I had an inspiration from a picture something like this:
Ruins in Detroit
Its a shame, but Detroit provides some great modern ruins examples.  I had found this at a second hand store, and figured it might be worth a shot at converting.  It is half of an old Fisher Price Little People Main Street play set.  I picked it up for the princely sum of $1.25. 

Little People Main Street, circa 1975

No way is this in scale with anything, but with the bigger openings, it does make it easier to move figs around inside.

I started by ripping off all the doors, the carry handle and I considered the stickers.  However, nothing really wanted to peel those things up, so I went over with a heavy black paint/water wash.  If they stick through that, they will be fine in the long run.  I printed off some new signs to cover the old.  I decided this would have been a payday loan and a quick lube shop.  Thank you internet for handy signs!
A few washes later
In addition, I added some gravel to various random areas to add texture.  This will hopefully make it look a bit less like a giant plastic building.
Sand/gravel added
Cheeky sign on the side
After the gravel, I did a few heavy washes in black and some dry brushing in various areas.  As you can see, I added some random bullet holes on a few walls as well.  I grabbed some various dollhouse toys and furniture and added those to the base as well, just to add some 'debris' of a vaguely recognizable origin.

Unfortunately, I didn't remember to get any in progress pics at this point.  Oops. 

Here is the more or less finished ruins, being explored by Rex and Eden (both from Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope line):
Run down and blasted
Still ruined
View from back
Ruined apartment
Overall, I am pleased with the result.  It does look like a fire/disaster destroyed a portion of the building.  I may go back and add some graffiti to some of the walls, and maybe some junk to the ground floor interiors.  I wanted to keep them pretty open to make figure placement easy, which it is.  Again, the building is oversize for scale, but doesn't look too bad with figs on it.

I recommend playing around with any junk toy play sets you can find.  This didn't take much time, and was rather inexpensive.  I think I spent more on paint than on the toy, and these are pretty common.  I like taking old toys and turning them into useful terrain.  It's kind of a recycling effort...

20 comments:

  1. That's an amazing transformation! I'm impressed; when I saw your first picture of the yellow plastic play set I didn't think you'd be able to achieve much with it at all.

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    1. Thanks, it turned out okay, and hopefully useful.

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  2. It came out fantastic! Can't say it's too large, either, except for maybe some doors. But...where are the "Beware of the zombies" posters? :D

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    1. I do need to add some more touches of habitation. I want to put some graffiti and touches like the biohazard/warning signs.

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  3. Dude, that's an amazing job of recyclign you've done. Very nice indeed! Love the cheesecake on the side of the building too! :)

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    1. I wanted an "interesting" sign. Its a reason to use the corner for cover...

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  4. Fantastic work mate, I think I had this toy when I was very young. was it play mobile

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    1. Its a Fisher Price Little People (old style) playset. It is from the mid to late '70's.

      Glad you liked it!

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  5. That's a hell of a transformation dude.
    Great work, nice to see old stuff being repurposed.

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    1. Thanks! I love reusing toys (as I am sure everyone has noticed) and I think they make for great scenery options.

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  6. Very good job.
    Old toys are treasures for scenery.

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    1. Thanks! I totally agree, toys can be great for scenery.

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  7. Excellently converted! That will be a treat to game with.

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  8. Wow, what a great re purpose / conversion :D
    I think the rubble really does help to stop it looking anything like an old plastic set. And the sign and pictures are really great too. Did they print off clean and you washed over / weathered them or were they printed old and dirty?

    I would be exceptionally proud of this as it is. But as I always find it is easier to critique someone else's hard work than it ever is to come up with improvements to my own work, or find my own mistakes, I have a couple of "polishing" suggestions too, if you don't mind :)

    If you wanted to, you could fill the top quarter of the doors with those metal "pull down security doors" to make it look like they've been rolled up high enough for people to enter and investigate. This would be a good way of stopping the doorways from looking a little out of scale as those types of roll down security shutters are normally used for doorways that are bigger than a standard sized door..

    Also, I think the upper windows would look better if the planks were on the inside? People would naturally board the upper levels from the inside as it's easier to get to them that way, unless of course it wasn't boarded up for security but to prevent infected from getting out...? :D (maybe this building was chosen to house the infected as the lower levels had security shutters that could be sealed?) :D

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    1. First, glad you enjoyed the build. Any suggestions are quite welcome!

      The signs were printed "clean" and I washed/weathered them. They were just found on the internet or created in word/excel. Nothing special.

      I like the idea of the roll-down security doors. I hadn't thought of those, they would make a nice addition. I will play around with those and see what I can come up with.

      The boards over the windows, I know what you mean. Originally I had them on the inside, as if people had boarded up from the inside. However, this didn't look very good (IMO) and so i moved them to the outside. Think of it as an ascetic choice, rather than making the building look realistic.

      Thanks again for the suggestions!

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