MiniArt has released a huge number of diorama and scenic kits, designed with the scratchbuilder and kitbasher in mind. This kit is a simple unreinforced brick building ruin, suitable for almost any era or location in the world that has used this type of construction technique.

This kit consists of 35 parts, including a vacuformed base measuring 238x170mm, one sheet of vacuformed walls, one sprue of injection-molded styrene accessories (the accessory sprue seems to be the compulsory treat included in all MiniArt kits), and a one-page, double-sided instruction sheet.

The vacuformed walls are two parts each that need cut out of the sheet and joined together along the length of the brick walls. However, the fit of these wall parts is very bad. Large gaps are evident immediately, and brick and mortar lines do not match up. This required me to use almost an entire tube of Squadron green Putty to make it presentable and then, once the putty was dry, I had to file and sand the brick lines back into place. This is a lot of work for such a simple kit so, because of the required filling and filing/sanding, I would recommend this kit only to an experienced modeler.

With the exception of the walls, the detail in the vacuformed parts is very well done. I wanted my ruin to have more of a bombed-out industrial building look so, instead of using the parts on the injection-molded styrene sprue representing wooden residential windows and doors. I made my own door jambs and window frames from strip styrene and used some clipped ¼" square chicken wire for window frames.

I primed the entire ruin with flat black rattle-can primer and painted it with a mix of Vallejo, Polly-S, and Citadel acrylic paints and Secret Weapon washes, and Didi's Magic inks.

Many thanks go to MRC and IPMS/USA for the sample kit.