A Year in Miniatures 6: Sector Imperialis Ruin and Sigmarite Mausoleum

Anyone who’s been following along with this little project of mine will have seen these terrain pieces already as I’ve been using them as the backdrop for quite a few glamour shots. Anyone whose been looking really closely will have noticed that they were missing more than a few finishing touches. This week I decided to fix that!

All of this terrain is put together from pieces I’ve had kicking around for several years. The sci-fi ruin is a mish-mash of parts from Games Workshop’s Sector Imperialis Basilica Administratum and Sanctum Imperialis kits, both of which are now discontinued in favour of structures with rather higher cielings (almost as if GW bumped up the average height of their primary faction and needed a bit more headroom…). While the Sigmarite Mausoleum is still in production, I bought this one back when it was called the Garden of Morr, so it’s all rather dated!

I’ve built and painted all of these in various different ways over the years, and they’d become rather neglected until I decided to repurpose them specifically as photograph backdrops. All of the decisions I took in painting the terrain followed from that intention: green was the ideal choice for the dominant colour as it’s the colour I use the least when actually painting models, so it contrasts nicely with pretty much everything I produce; colours needed to be fairly muted so that they wouldn’t distract from the foreground, so all of the metallic elements are shaded with matt washes to keep the reflections low; and I wanted to keep a consistent finish across all of the pieces so I could mix and match according to what I wanted for any given model. That also dictated the placement of highlights - I wanted to be able to put pieces assorted together and have gradients flow consistently, so I consciously kept a very consistent pattern across joins and edges while being much looser toward the middle of surfaces.

I knew I wanted a lot of smooth gradients in order to get some visual interest without creating eye-catching transitions. As luck has it, smooth gradients over largish areas are utterly trivial to achieve with an airbrush, so the initial stages where very fast to pull off. Next up was drybrushing, which when you’re covering this much surface area is a recipe for RSI and mangled brushes. Once I’d gone back to the airbrush to fill in the large metallic areas, I had something that, while unfinished, looked fine in the background of photographs. All that was left to do was the finishing touches.

Inevitably, those finishing touches took far longer than anything prior. Dozens of roses, skulls, and rivets needed painting, and, for some reason, I’d decided that I wanted to pick out a bunch of trim in gold. Then, of course, everything needed shade washes and little bit of subtle OSL. It’s amazing how quickly even the most interesting task can become incredibly tedious when you’re doing it on the 14th consecutive panel. Varnishing alone took half an hour even with a rattle can, and of course I picked a day when the outside temperature was around 4°C…

All of those frustrations aside, I’m genuinely very pleased with the finished pieces. I’ll probably go back in and magnetise the Sector Imperialis pieces, since they have an annoying tendency to separate into individual layers whenever we try to move them, but other than that I’m happy calling these finished. I might even use them as the battlefield for a killteam game at some point! There’s also a miscelaneous grab-bag of assorted additional terrain pieces that I’ve finished up in the same style to add some variation. And in case you’re wondering why the angel statues are on normal miniature bases rather than freestanding terrain, it may or may not be entirely to instil a sense of anxiety in any players who have seen doctor who…

Given their sheer size I’d be tempted to count these as many finished models, however gived the (deliberate) simplicity of the paintjob I’m going to ignore the misc pieces and count the big ones as one each. So this brings me up to 9 finished models in 6 weeks which is not bad going (although my release schedule has been slightly erratic). I’m beginning to run out of mostly painted models, and while I’ve still got plenty of models in the partially painted variety I’m planning to start doing a mix of those and the partially built ones. Either way, I’m expecting my rate of progress to slow from this point out. Hopefully I’ve got enough of a lead to hit my 52 models in 52 weeks target!

13/02/22
Weeks Elapsed: 6
Miniatures Finished: 9