Imperial Tower

Imperial Tower

My terrain building momentum has died off considerably, but I'm still happy with what I've been able to crank out near the end of last year and up 'til now. We were playing in a 40k campaign where you got additional points awarded for completed pieces, hence everything I cranked out lately. Well the campaign (in that form and function) has ceased, but I still had an unpainted building I had started, so I figured I'd paint it up.

I wanted something that was both tall, and had a small footprint on the tabletop at the same time. It's base, cut from MDF board is a six inch square, and the tower itself (four levels at 25mm scale) is about a half inch over a foot tall. The neat thing about this tower is that it was made entirely out of spare parts, pieces, and scraps that were all left over from a variety of the great building kits GW came out with a while back.


Front and right hand side

I primed it was the usual generic flat black spray paint and waited for it to dry. Then I tried something new, I "drybrushed" it with a spray paint can of antique gold. Basically I dusted it in areas with the gold to the same effect as if I had drybrushed it.

When I paint up large projects like this, I mostly use craft paints. You get a lot in a bottle, and you don't mind using a bunch of it squirted out on a paper plate to get grips with painting it all. I mentioned drybrushing earlier, well, when you're doing large pieces, buildings and such, it's your best friend to get the most area covered the fastest.


Left hand side and rear

Once the spray paint dried, I drybrushed it with a dark blue (midnight) followed up with another layer of an only slightly lighter blue (night sky). I then went in with a layer of craft paint also in an antique gold and laid in heavy on the smokestacks, front doors, vent pipes, chains, and the like. I used a GW Tin Bitz on some of the skull motifs, and the swords of the figures in the windows. I painted the remaining skulls with a GW Bleached Bone, followed up with a direct wash of GW Devlan Mud.

The rest of the skulls (did I mention how many there were?) were done in GW Chainmail with a direct spot of Badab Black on each. I used the Chainmail quite sparingly on other little detailed areas of the panels. That was it for the building, I kept it simple.

For the rubble, I used generic cat little, hardened with a watered down white glue option. I laid in a heavy drybrush of craft paint gray, followed up by a lighter drybrush of craft paint dove gray, then a final highlight of GW Fortress Gray.