Yesterday we looked at damaged houses, so today we will look at destroyed buildings.  As was seen in reality at Stalingrad, Monte Cassino and any number of city fights, sometimes destroying buildings can be counter productive, giving the enemy strong positions with which to fight from.   With a preliminary Stuka attack in the Blitzkrieg 1940 Handbook for Chain of Command, one of the results can be that a building is completely destroyed.  Of course this leaves a pile of rubble which is eminently defendable, with none of the restrictions a normal building has in terms of lines of sight and fire.
Once again, I was keen to be able to replace any building on the tabletop, so the model had to be able to expand or contract to fill the space necessary.  Like the model we did yesterday, this one also used the most likely building template of 7″ by 4″, but what I did was to cut that sized MDF into four sections, so we would have two ends and two walls which could be re-arranged for smaller buildings or even more unusually shaped buildings.

The build process was very simple, cutting foam board with a sharp knife and sticking this onto the base with a hot glue gun.  What you’ll also see below is that I placed some foam board on the ground to give a base for piles of rubble.

Next I added window sills and door frames, or what was left of them, with artists mounting board.

The next phase was to plaster the buildings, inside and out using Polyfilla Quick Dry.  See yesterday’s article for more details on this.

When the plaster was dry I added a scattering of bricks along the top of the walls to remove the rather too smooth edges.  I neglected to photograph that stage, but believe you me, it was not overly exciting and you can see the results in the next snaps.
With that done, I added my basing rubble mix of cork and sharp sand.  With that done I added s sprinkle of the more expensive brick cocktail.  That was all then sealed with a coat of 50:50 water and PVA glue once it was dry.

In the next snap you can see that I added some broken timber, again made from the MDF sheet that the models I built yesterday were punched out of.  I then spray painted the whole lot in black before paining it all brown with external house paint.  This was then dry brushed up with saddle brown and then leather brown to highlight the bricks.  The walls were then painted with house paint.

The final result looks like this.  In the lower picture you can see the added rubble scattered onto the model.

In the shot below you can see it with added rubble.

Finally, if I am replacing a very small building, the central sections can be removed and the model shrinks down to 4″ by 4″ which, conveniently, is the size of my smallest building.  Job done.