Monday, April 28, 2025

Middle Earth Terrain

 The first of my post-AHPC XV projects are some pieces of Middle Earth terrain that were prepared for the painting challenge, but put on hold when terrain was dropped from scoring status. These are two sets of hard plastic terrrain from Games Workshop - 'Ruins of Middle Earth' and 'Ruins of Osgiliath' that I acquired years ago. They have since been rolled into a single box with some deletions.

First up is the 'Ruins of Middle Earth. It consisted of two identical sprues of ruin corners, some fallen pillars, a fallen statue, a standing statue, and a campfire. The standing statue was glued to a 35mm wooden disc to make it less prone to falling over on the gaming table. The ruin corners were only a few millimeters in thickness, so I decided to beef them up a bit with a thicker layer of XPS foam cut using my Proxxon hot wire cutter. I glued the foam to the inner side of the the corners, clamped in place until the glue was dry. I then trimmed them with a handheld hot wire cutter, cut some stonework into the surface, and applied a coat of Mod Podge. Once that was dry, they were primed dark grey with a rattle can, and then dry brushed with light grey latex paint, followed by white latex paint. The wooden platform was painted using acrylics, as was the campfire and adjacent weapons and shields.

Original box art for the 'Ruins of Middle Earth' set

'Ruins of Middle Earth'
 

The second set was marketed as 'Ruins of Osgiliath' and had structures with much thicker walls, and stonework on both sides. The set I got was slightly warped. The large wall sections rocked back and forth a bit, so I evened out the bottoms using epoxy putty to prevent that from happening. I also added some walls to the section of stairs using some plastic card and epoxy putty as I didn't like the void underneath. Again the statues were glued to 35mm discs to make the base wider. Once all the glue was dry and the putty had hardened, the pieces were painted in the same manner as the first set.

Original box art for the 'Ruins of Osgiliath' set

 
'Ruins of Osgiliath' (A side)

'Ruins of Osgiliath' (B side)

Both of these sets are now out of production in this format. The thin walled sections from the first set have been dropped, and the remaining fallen pillars, statues, and campfire all rolled into one box with the Osgiliath ruins.

Thanks for stopping by.

2 comments:

Codsticker said...

Looking good. I started collecting a bunch of these second hand several years ago but have done nothing with them.

Jason Patrick Meyers said...

Nice job! Another reminder I need to paint mine up someday as well. ;-)