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...