Imperial bastion

For a while now, I've been wanting to try the new fortification system, as well as to add some meaningful terrain to our weekly matches so one thing led to another and I got myself a bastion :)

Colorwise, it was a tough cookie to crack and I really put a lot of thought into it. Listed below were my main focus points:

- I did not want it to be a duplicate of the box green version
- I wanted to somehow tie it to other terrain that we use in our gaming club
- I had to take into account the paints that I actually have, without resorting to buying everything new
- I wanted it to not be SM exclusive looking
- It had to look AWESOME :D :D

With those in mind, I decided to go with a concrete-bluish look. I figured it would fit every army (and apart from chaos, I've started building a DA force) and when not used in an army list, it could always work nicely as a dilapidated structure.

The actual painting process was rather easy and quick and I finished the whole thing in one evening.
First off, was a black undercoat, followed by grey highlights applied with an airbrush to all the edges and the very top of the building. Then I did a basecoat of...mordian blue. At that point it looked quite terrible and I was really scared hehe. Once that dried, I airbrushed approx 5-6 coats of drakenhof nightshade into all the recesses.

At that point it was almost exclusively drybrush until the end. First layer was pure fenrisian grey, next was a 50/50 mix with bleached bone, then pure bleached bone and finally a light coat of skull white to the sharpest edges and very, very slightly to the surfaces. I must say, the citadel tank brush was invaluable here. If you want to save A LOT of time, you really want a big drybrush for a project like this.

Second step were the battlements. For the metal parts I did my usual rust treatment going from brown, through reds into metal but the floor was done with pigments. I used 2 different rust pigments, made a thin wash out of them through white spirit and just painted them on so that it would flow to the very bottom. It covered the area very nicely but you really have to watch out for splashes. I managed to get a few splashes on the walls and now I have no clue how to fix it since the walls are so nicely shaded :( Step 2 was to wash the floor with devlan mud and finally a very light drybrush of chainmail to make the metal texture pop. Finally, some black pigment was applied to the battle damaged areas.

I won't cover the details of the details like lenses, skulls and such, since it's all very basic stuff. All in all, a very fun project that came out just the way I wanted. You really can't go wrong if you spend the time to plan stuff ahead and think about the colors.

As far as gameplay performance goes, it's quite a bargain for 75 points and the quad gun for extra 50 is also quite ok. Just remember to place it far away from any ap1, ap2 weaponry unless you want it to go down in turn 2 by means of explosion, where 3/5 devastators from the battlements die from the impact, while 5/5 marines from level 1 die from the 22 str6 hits that occured when shit hit the fan :)