Amera Ruined Temple for Saga part 1

Raw plastic ready to go

The online store The Combat Company opened a physical store just down the road from me recently.  At the grand opening I picked up a piece of the Amera plastic terrain, the Ruined temple (part no. F218).  These terrain pieces are plastic and seem to be vacuum formed.  At $7.50 it was reasonably detailed in the most part.  However if just painted it would have looked like a piece of plastic.  Too many smooth areas and too many flat surfaces which would break the scale illusion.  So I saw it more as a start of a terrain project that would need some detailing before painting.  I also wanted to try some of the larger Amera pieces but first wanted to see if I could make this piece look the way I wanted.  I had seen other pieces done and they always tend to look a bit too much like cheap painted plastic as drybrushing over flat plastic never looks good.  You always see paint streaks.

Since the floor area in the middle of the ruin was unsupported I glued a piece of polystyrene foam under it.  That way it won't bend when heavy metal figures are placed on top.  To add rigidity I then glued the ruins onto a piece of masonite cut to the size of the base with PVA glue and left it to dry overnight.

Lots of texture, but ugly for now

In an effort to add extra texture I used a model kit technique of covering the plastic in plastic cement and then pushing in an old brush into the soft plastic to stipple it.  This worked but the effect was minimal.  I then tried using the liquid green stuff (my pot was going hard so I needed to use it up) but again not much result.  In the end I used texture paste and stippled that over the entire piece.  Now I had real texture.

Reading some model kit magazines I had come across the black preshading technique.  This technique involves painting a thin black line in all the recessed areas as an under layer of paint.  Then the area is painted as normal but the black under layer of paint shades the cracks/etc without any obvious painting (unlike the normal way of painting a surface and then painting a shading layer over the top of the original layer of paint).

Preshading and base coat

Using my airbrush I spent 20 minutes tracing all the pavement and brick cracks on the temple ruins.  After that I applied a base colour of VGC Khaki.  The preshading worked really well.  In the flesh you notice that the pavement cracks are darker but you can't tell how really (except for the parts where I made the black line too thick).