Ruining your painting – Breakthrough Assault

Today I follow on from my recent article on the Battlefront plastic ruins. These are the new product designed to make games of city fight easy to achieve. As promised I have been busy with the paint brushes and now have 4 boxes worth of ruins painted up. This article will take you through how I quickly got them up to a high tabletop standard and once I finish some experiments with cat litter (all will be revealed), the next article will cover basing them.

Paints you need

Vallejo Black
Vallejo English Uniform
Vallejo Dark Sand
Vallejo White
Army Painter Grey
Vallejo Dark Green Camo
Mig Wash Dark Wash for Green Vehicles
Army Painter strong tone.
Grey spray paint
British Uniform spray paint

1 – I started off spray painting the whole ruin grey. I prefer a grey matt primer from Wilkinson’s. It is super cheap and gives great coverage. With that dry I then sprayed the outside of the building with a English Uniform Spray (I had an army painter one). Don’t worry if some get on the inside, its a blown out building and will have lots of damage added later anyway.
I then painted all the grey areas with Army Painter Grey and the roof with Camo Dark Green.

Spray paint applied, then grey is brush on, along with the roof ‘s green.

2 – The whole outside of the building get a watered down coat of Strong Tone.

3 – Next its dry brush time. 50/50 grey and white for the stone work and 2:1 English Uniform / Dark Sand for the brick work. Also 2:1 Camo Dark Green / Dark Sand for the roof.

Drybursh to the stone work, brickwork and roof applied. You could easily stop here if you want. Its table ready.

4 – I take the Mig wash and dilute it with white spirit. It really is personnel taste how much but I didn’t want it too dark so went quite thin, think 5:1 White Spirit to Wash. I then liberally coat the whole model. This includes the inside walls and the floors.

Mig Dark Wash for Green Vehicles over the whole model

The combination of the wash, some black drybrush, and a little over spray from the original brown spray paint combine to give some interest to the interior.

5 – I gave the outside of the building a very light drybrush with Dark Sand just to bring out some of the masonry detail.

6 – The final stage is a patchy dry brush with black. I dont want these building to look uniform. I want them to look damaged as if they have collapsed from shelling and fire. You could scale this back or skip it (at a minimum I would recommend the edges of the walls), depending on the look you are going for.

There you go, its pretty simple really. Just make sure you have a big dry brush and also an old brush you don’t mind using for the enamel wash (I wouldn’t use one of my nice brushes for this).

I think this is a great balance between time investment and outcome. It looks great on the table and survives a close inspection as well. As always you can miss bits in this guide, to be honest you could end at the first strong tone wash and still have a nice table top building. Alternatively you could pick out lots more interior detail.

While I wait for the time to sort the bases, I could not resist getting all 4 buildings on the table to see how they look.