Terrain Talk Pt. 22 – THOSE Alien Cactii

It’s 2023, and nothing is just famous anymore. Anyone who’s anything is now ICONIC.

Of course, somethings are more iconic than others.. and anyone of a similar vintage to us reading this will undoubtedly have a warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to Ye Olde White Dwarf of the early 90s, and a certain terrain staple of battle reports and beauty shots…

Yes, we’re doing the foam ball / cocktail stick cactii. You knew this was coming, didn’t you?

For you whippersnappers, this is what 40k looked like back in those halcyon days:

There was even – IIRC – a White Dwarf article describing how to make them – basically, you took a ball of polystyrene, jabbed a few cocktail sticks in it, coated it with filler and then painted up. Simples, right?

Except – have you ever actually SEEN a polystyrene ball? I hadn’t – still haven’t. Plus this build started during January – Austerity Month, where we have an unwritten rule to spend NO MONEY WHATSOEVER (even if Jim has bent this on occasion). What we- well, Jim – had, were some ping pong balls left over from these. And he was sure he had loads.

He didn’t. He had three. However, what is necessity but the mother of invention? So into the Drawer Of Interestingly Shaped Crap we dove…

OK, I seem to have lost some of the initial build photos, but basically I chucked a few old CDs into a large plastic bowl, poured boiling water over them and cut out some woobly irregular shapes. Then I glued a variety of Interestingly Shaped Crap – ping pong balls, light bulbs, a nasal spray, some bottle tops – to the surface using a hot glue gun. The vine/tentacle stuff you see is all hot glue strands draped over everything. I always make a huge mess using hot glue, so figured why not turn it to my advantage?

The spikes were cocktail sticks (of course) pushed into the ping pong balls and secured with hot glue, or in the cases of the light bulbs and so forth, attached to the surface with greenstuff and superglue.

After that was done, everything got a coating of texture paste made from grit, PVA, filler powder and water. When this was dry, out to the shed for a dash of 2nd Ed approved white primer, and then a basecoat of yellow before being washed with thinned Army Painter Goblin Green.. two coats of this stuff, followed by a thinned wash of Green Tone ink made a nice vibrant green with lots of interesting colour modulation.

You’ve probably also notice the rocks on each piece – glued with hot glue, caught with white primer and also washed with yellow and then brown ink. Partially for aesthetic reasons, partially to keep them weighted down. Can’t abide terrain that goes off exploring every time someone nearby coughs.

After this I appear to have had a massive brain fart and forgot to take any more photos. So, as best I can, I’ll try and describe the process from hereon out – I washed the rocks with thin black ink, let that dry and then hit them with a bone drybrush (the leopard spotting technique we’ve used before since learning it from Lukes APS) – that was them done, a dark brown covering on the ground itself which I then drybrushed up with lighter browns.

Then I got out the trusty Crossing the Rubicon Nostalgius! A 1991 Blood Angels Tribute – Pt.1Vallejo Blood Angel Orange/ Red Ink combo and did the cocktail sticks, and following that the cactii got a yellow drybrush.. and from there it was into flocking.

I stuck with the same 3 tone flocking system we’ve used many times before, having learned it from Mel The Terrain Tutor, and drizzled a bit of dry soil to break it up a bit. Then I went in with clump foliage to break up outlines of anything recognisably a light bulb or bottle cap, and finally each piece got a bit of lichen.. and for this I dunked each bit of lichen in some black craft paint mixed with PVA and rolled it around in a jar of light green flock that I’d bought off eBay by mistake and had been looking for something to use it in! This didn’t quite go as planned, as genius that I am, it never occurred to me that black paint might darken the flock… Oh well.

Finally, I went in with an isopropyl alcohol spray and covered everything with it, before letting fly with about half a pint of watered down PVA, and FINALLY varnish!

So.. wanna see?

Course you do.

And with a few Blood Angels and members of Da Black Ork Cav for company:

So there we go, a nice thematic set of terrain for the next instalment of The Armageddon Diaries – stay tuned to see if the 3rd Company can bust Captain Tycho out of his captivity!

Stay thrifty, and as writing this post took me past an anniversary I don’t think any of us would have wanted to see – SLAVA UKRAINI