Terrain Showcase: The Danger Room, Part 7

In this final installment of the Danger Room terrain showcase, I'll show you how I made the taller buildings:

 

 

The NYC Apartment
 

Making taller apartments with the Marvel: Crisis Protocol kit is simple because the floors all stack together. The stock kit has three floors, but if you have multiple kits, you can combine them to build a few taller and shorter buildings. I went four stories high on this one, and it's probably as tall as you need to go to build an impressive city skyline.

 

 

Here's the completed apartment building with its roof details and extras like the Sentinel posters.

 

 

Making Posters and Signs
 

I used the famous Uncanny X-Men #141 cover as inspiration for the posters and warning signs that decorate the city:

 

 

I designed the different posters in Photoshop and printed them on card stock. While still on the page, they were all stained with thinned brown ink, coated with matte Mod Podge, and then cut out.

 

 

I even made the wanted poster depicting the "apprehended" and "slain" mutants. The head shots were taken from photos of the miniatures themselves, with a few alterations to create the characters that don't have physical miniatures. (I don't have a Wolverine miniature, so the Punisher had to stand in for the cover re-creation.) 

 

 

I also printed some street signs and the "walk/ don't walk" icons for the street lights. For these, I used photos of actual signage, and shrunk them down to size. This "do not enter" sign was mounted on styrene and attached to the top of the light post in lieu of the traffic light.

 

 

I tried to make this a functional intersection, with the small street being one-way, while the street with the concrete divider has two-way traffic.

 

 

Building the Ruined Skyscraper
 

Calling it a "skyscraper" is a bit of a stretch, since it's only four stories, but it's the tallest building in the set. It was made by combining a few Marvel: Crisis Protocol Sanctum Sanctorum kits. I think I used a total of three kits to get enough side walls to complete the third and forth floors. 

 

 

The destroyed top floor was made by cutting the concrete foundation from the bottom and adding it to the top. Sections of the wall and windows were cut away, and distressed with clippers, and cracks were etched into the concrete.

 

 

I covered the insides of the walls with foam core board. I tore off some of the paper and spread on food filler putty to give it some texture. I added large plastic I-Beams (which happened to fit perfectly into the recesses between each window). The corner windows were built up with styrene strips, and lots of sand and debris was glued around the wreckage. The windows on the insides of the walls were cut from the rooftop window boxes.

 

 

The top floor was filled with insulation foam, and I stacked more foam to fill up the back half of the room, and added a dividing wall made from foam core board with strips of basswood sticking out to represent the broken studs.

 

 

The outer wall fit around the foam interior, creating a caved-in backdrop to the room.

 

 

The foam was painted with black latex paint to seal it, and basswood strips were glued down to create a hardwood floor. Some broken I-beams were inserted into the foam, and then it was all covered with wood glue and sprinkled with sand and coarse ballast.

 

 

More rubble was created with the off cuts of the Sanctum's brick walls, styrene bits for loose bricks, and, strips of basswood.

 

 

Some wall fragments were added to the inside, positioned to fit around the rubble. 

 

 

To make the roof, I cut a piece of 1mm thick styrene to the shape of the building, and softened the center with a heat gun to bend it. The framing around the edge was built with styrene strips and rods, and fit snugly over the top of the building. The underside would be mostly unseen, but I added some spare pieces from the apartment billboard and I beams to create parts of the superstructure poking out.

 

 

Here's everything fit together. I kept it all separate for painting.

 

 

I didn't get any photos of the painting process, except for masking the windows. I had sprayed the building beige and then gave it a zenithal spray of off-white. Then, I masked the top and bottom to to spray and spatter the grey concrete. In this shot, I've masked off everything except the windows to spray them with dark blue and then with a lighter blue at the top of each window.

 

 

Here's the building with most of its painting finished– Some individual bricks have been picked out with a darker color, the doors and porch are finished, and the rubble and exposed beams are painted. The window frames still need to be painted, though.

 

 

To easily paint the window frames, I painted all of the framing with straight Formula P3 Bastion Grey, and then drybrushed some edge highlights with Army Painter Skeleton Bone.

 

 

The finished skyscraper:

 

 

The building number is an homage to the old Marvel Comics address in New York City: 387 Park Avenue South. To distinguish this building from the Doctor Strange's Sanctum, I altered the lamps and removed the face over the door. (The number sign actually hides the hole where the head plugs in.)

 

 

And that's it! This terrain project was a blast to work on. Thanks for following along with this series! 

 

 

'Til next time!