Warhammer 40k Flying Base - How to Create Simple Urban Ruins

Creating the War Torn Battlefield Effect

My Crimson Minotaur Stormraven Gunship is all nice and shiny but I am actually most happy about the base right now. I have been trying out a number of simple techniques to get effective looking destroyed urban terrain feel. My goal has been to achieve the maximum visual effectiveness whilst not being too time consuming - there is a lot I want to do and time is always an issue!

I worked with the materials I already had, spare sprue, polystyrene from packaging and sand that I had already purchased for basing purposes. All held together with the old reliable PVA glue.

Painting begins with a chaos black spray followed by lots of dry-brushing.

I tend to start with a dark grey such as Mechanicus Standard Grey and be fairly liberal with it. Then working lighter and lighter, up through Russ Grey and apply them more and more sparsely the lighter it gets.

Once this basic groundwork had been done the fun details could be applied. It is still looking quite dark at this point with a fair bit of the black undercoat showing through.

The first task is to pick out any details with different metals. I picked out a few scrap pieces with Ironbreaker metal paint and several of the sprue 'girders' with a bronze colour. The bronze areas I intended to be quite rusty so I followed this up with a wash of Typus Corrosion. This wash is great as it contains sand particles that get distributed across the surface quite effectively which can then be picked out later through dry brushing. This is exactly what I did by completing the effect using Ryza Rust dry-brushed over the top.

This stage you can really go crazy picking out details of whatever you desire with metal or colour, it's all destroyed debris so it could have been anything. Tiny details really help to break up a uniform surface and give it some 'pop'. 

The final touch, which really helped to lighten the base was to apply some Forgeworld weathering powder fairly haphazardly over the base, working it in with a rough brush. I love these pigments, you can totally change the feel of a model or base and achieve a texture that you just can't replicate with normal paints.

Here is the final result!