Z230 Redoubt - modifying and painting

Right ... this is an attempt at a [quick] guide to how I modified and painted the Z230 Redoubt from Amera Plastic Mouldings that I used in my Lava Terrain . In this post most of  the pictures are in galleries, and you can hover over some pictures for a bit more information.

Here's the Redoubt after it has been trimmed  - this is best done with a large, sharp pair of scissors as the plastic is quite strong. As you can see in the images (right) the redoubt looks great "as is" with some battle damage but I wanted the damage to be a bit more severe and I wanted there to be more of it. I also wanted to remove the doors.

The next step was to attack the model, I used a combination of scissors, an exacto knife and a small drill to remove all the damaged areas and enlarge them. I also added many more shell and bullet holes, the latter in a strafing pattern across the model. Finally I cut cracks and removed corners from anywhere where the model was going to sit on cracks in the terrain.

 This was so that the model would look more a part of the landscape. I then plugged all the holes with a mixture of polystyrene, poly filler and plasticard so that all the new holes had something behind them. Finally I cut back into the polysytrene plugs I'd just put in to make the holes deeper and more angular and covered and filled the gaps at the sides where the doors had been. Hopefully the pictures (above left) will help that to make sense.

Next I added rubble by blobbing and painting pva over the model before adding scatter of various sizes from 3 - 5mm bits of plaster to coarse and medium ballast to fine sand, in that order.

A last, and important stage was to the seal it all under a good couple of coats of vallejo polyurethane primer. This protects the polystrene bits I'd added.

Once that was dry I then primed it again with halfords black primer, I just prefer the finish this gives but without the vallejo layer the halfords primer would melt the polysytrene bits.

Time for a pause and a breath ... at this stage it looked OK and fitted nicely into the terrain. Well, I thought so ... you can make up your own mind, here it is on the left.
I did consider leaving it black, mostly because I'm lazy, but it was a present so I  wanted to make it pop out a little and I just can't help "doing a bit more" with these things (often with disastrous results).

On the right I've airbrushed some old GW boltgun metal that I'd thinned with water and added a few drops of vallejo's flow improver. I tried (with little success) to avoid the bastions and damaged areas.

On the left I'd gone back over, using a brush, the damaged areas, the interior and the bastions with Abaddon Black.

Next (and on the right) I masked off the bastions and brush painted them with retributor armour. Then (far right) masking off and a first dry drush of a dark grey over the rubble and damaged areas.

To finish the model added a wash of agrax earthshade into the damaged areas and rubble (not sure it made much difference) before I dry drushed these areas with three more (increasingly light) shades of grey -  achieved by adding in a little light grey to the previous mix each time. I also dry brushed mithril silver onto the corners and edges of some of the damaged areas.

The last stage was to dry brush some blast marks from the shell holes by lightly drag the brush from in-to-out very slowly building up some sooty - looking marks.
And here it is done (below). I hope you like it, I'm a big fan of Amera's stuff so I hope I've done it justice...