We've seen quite a number of pieces of terrain on TerraGenesis that were inpired by the proud owner of a new piece of electrical equipment looking at the packing materials and asking themselves "Now what can I do with that?". In this case the electical goods were a new set of speakers, the proud new owner was Ariss, and the resulting terrain piece is one of the most amazing ruined constructions we've ever seen.
Ariss tells us that there was no forward planning to speak of. The TerraGenesis Forum had a competition in progress to build a ruin, the speakers arrived, and after looking at the various pieces of packing material Ariss decided to build a concrete structure that had suffered the misfortune of being ruined even before it was finished and would still have some of the wooden moulds still in place, and lots of rusty iron reinforcing poking out.
After selecting appropriate pieces of polystrene from the pile, the next job was to hide the texture. While it is reasonable to argue that the beaded texture of the polystyrene is a scale representation of some futuristic building material, in practice it ends up looking rather too much like what it is: polystyrene foam. Thus the preferred option is to hide it with something less obvious.
In the picture above we see the polystyrene having received its first coat of Ariss' special mix of filler + PVA + dirt + cheap black paint. The polystyrene beads are still quite obvious however the three additional coats that followed made a superb job of hiding it as we can see from the final photographs.
It is also worth observing the crack which Ariss chose to make a feature of rather than repairing.
The photograph to the right shows the ruin after the application of four coats of the texturing mix and standing on a hill made of simple chunks of polystyrene. The cliff faces were sprayed with aerosol paint in order to melt them (that gives a great cliff-like texture), and then painted with spackle.
Work has also begun to create the wooden shuttering into which the concrete was being poured when the construction was halted.
Following this, some 'random' chunks of polystyrene and scatter materials were added to increase the amount of clutter and debris. A broken paved floor, made from foamcore, was installed (see our article on paved floors for further details), and lengths of wire with thinner wire wrapped around them to represent reinforcing bars (rebar) were inserted at appropriate points.
A base coat of paint was then applied to those areas that hand not already recieved the coloured texturing mixed described earlier before drybrushing began with progressively lighter shades of grey being used for the concrete and brown for the cliffs and woodwork. The rebar was then picked out in rusty metal colours with rust stains being added to the concrete around them.
A few small clumps of lichen added a finishing touch.
It will probably not come as any great surprise to hear that this magnificent piece won the aforementioned competition. Kinda makes you want to rush out and buy new speakers don't you think?
