How to Make a Warhammer 40k Building

For all of you who have once said “One day I’ll make a cool piece of terrain”, well today’s the day you’re going to do just that! Making rocky formations and flocked hills for Warhammer is easy compared to making buildings, right? Wrong! Constructing buildings is not only more praiseworthy, it’s easier than you think. Also, the possibilities are endless. You can make towers, houses, churches, castles, bunkers, factories and pretty much anything else you can think of. Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now and show you the meat and potatoes of this article.

Materials list

• 20″x30″ foamboard
• pencil
• ruler
• utility knife
• paint brush (medium sized one will do)
• white glue
• black paint
• grey paint
• white paint
• popsicle sticks
• And one karma from Astronomican (it’s like food for the soul)

Step 1 Outline and cut your windows and entrance ways

I used a space marine to size the doors on this foam board. They’re actually able to fit through the windows too but that’s not entirely necessary if you choose to make the windows a different size. I’m not including measurements for the foamboard for the walls’ height and length because many of you will just make your own sized buildings anyway. But what I will say is that buying a sheet of foamboard 20″x30″(they run at about $4.oo dollars each at any office supply store) will suffice for a good sized miniature building.

So, we trace then cut out the doors and windows. You can cut out a template and trace the template to save some time.

Next, create the side walls to the building. I roughed the side walls up to simulate wreckage.

Step 2Installing popsicle sticks for added support

This step is crucial for adding extra support to your structure. It’s easy and only takes an extra couple minutes. First begin by slicing out popsicle length strips in each level of the front side. Next glue the popsicle sticks in the slots you’ve created. (Note:slicing too deep in the foamboard will cause you to deface the front side of your wall.)

Step 3 Cut and glue down your floors and walls together

This step is the trickiest of them all because it takes a little concentration and hands that are not shaky. Measure out your floors by lining up your 3 walls together. You’ll then see what will fit in as a floor for each level. I chose to chip off the edge of the floor the same as I did for the side walls to simulate wreckage again. You’ll also note in the pictures that I added some wooden sub-flooring to make from popsicle sticks to give some variety to the floors.

Step 4 Scuff and add rebar

This step is unique in that you destroy in order to create damaged parts of the building. It’s the best part actually. Go ahead and try, you’ll see. What I did was randomly create explosion holes and bullet hole marks throughout the front and sides.

And going in for a closeup to see some added rebar which is glued in place .

Step 5 prime building

Simply prime the whole building with an acrylic black paint. I texture my paint with added fine sand. This adds a rough concrete like texture to the structure and will look better when you dry brush later.

Step 6 paint building

Next paint the building grey. Make sure not to put a lot of paint on the brush. Creating a dry brushed look with the grey exposing about 5% of the black is best. Otherwise priming it black would be pointless. After painting it grey, dry brush it white but this time make sure it’s a very light dry brushing. And finally I added a light green to accent the building. Otherwise it would be grey only and boring. I also painted the floors yellow and brown to add variety.

There you have it! A simple multilevel building wrecked and blown up to give it character. We hope this inspires some nice terrain ideas. Feel free to tell us what you think of this project. Any ideas or suggestions are welcome and encouraged.

Cheers

Miniwargamer Dave