40K - Building Sector Imperialis

I've got a lot of terrain stored in tubs (with mats) for the tournaments I run. What I was keen to do was put together a set of terrain for my home table that would be set up and ready to go for games.

Over the past year I have been picking up Sector Imperialis buildings when they have been on sale and stockpiling them. I managed to acquire 11 buildings including the new Battle Sanctum and also the Shrine of the Aquila.

About 5 years ago I backed the Tablescapes Kickstarter run by Secret Weapons Miniatures and secured 32 12" x 12" tiles. Theses are molded plastic and come in both damaged and undamaged urban states. I've got a mix of both. My intention was to use these to base my buildings giving me a modular urban table with buildings and scatter terrain mounted on the tiles. I could then set them up in whatever configuration I wanted.

With the great 2020 Lockdown there was now an ample opportunity to pull it all together.

The first week was building the various buildings. The GW kits are really easy to put together and I would say very customisable. I didn't deviate from the instructions but you could if you wanted to build your own unique structure.

You can see the 12" tiles in the picture above. These were painted then airbrushed previously. Here I'm checking that the buildings fit on each tile. Some of the tiles are textured so there was the occasional need to remove material to get the building to sit flat on the tile.

The next bit was the probably the easiest. I primed them with rattlecan black primer and then fired up the airbrush. Decided to do them in blue-grey, green and limestone colour palettes. The floor panels were sprayed blue.

The first nine buildings are here. You can see the three different colours. Now the switch to the brush to paint windows, doors and decoration. This didn't take as long as I thought - probably about an hour per building. The gold was given a wash of sepia, the steel got Nuln Oil.

Once the base painting was done, I glued the buildings to their respective tiles. You can see they fit nicely onto them with pavement space around the outside.

Here's a top down view of one of the Sanctum buildings on a textured tile.

The next stage was to texture each tile up with scatter terrain. Here I've used various crates, drums and containers to provide the necessary Urban Rubble look. I added various grades of stone around everything to reflect a damaged city.

I also made some non-building tiles. The Shattered Aquila, the Astartes Statue and the tank traps are visible above .

The last thing to do was to weather/battle damage everything. Here I used acrylic inks through the airbrush. Browns, blacks, sepia etc .

And here's the finished product. The individual tiles can be moved into whatever configuration you want. They clip together to stop them moving about.

Really happy with how it came out and nice to have used the Lockdown to complete a large project.