Terrain Talk Pt. 23 – A Miscellany!

What are the two words most dreaded by wargamers? “Rounding out”? “Finishing off”? “New 40k?” (meow) – no, my friends, not even close. Brace yourselves for the full horror that is:

TIDYING UP.

Recently we’ve been getting our feng shui on in Jim’s gaming shed, informally christened “Apocalypse Junction”, and this has required some organising and rationalisation to make the best use of the space available – buying storage boxes, putting up shelves etc – and this has thrown up many a long-abandoned mini-project and piece of Interestingly Shaped Crap.

So while Jim was busy nailing himself to a wall, I got busy creating some more scenery from said Interestingly Shaped Crap with a view to big Apocalypse: Earth dust-up in the coming months.

Front and centre we have two soap dish holders, now surplus to requirements for several years. For the bases we have cut up CDs (soak in boiling water and then cut with kitchen scissors), and some offcuts of craft and insulation foam to create rocky outcrops. I used a mix of fast drying PVA and superglue to put these together – superglue gives the initial grip while the PVA provides are more durable and flexible bond when it’s dry. There was also a rogue piece of polystyrene Jim threw my way – or at me – which got added into the build.

It’s filler time! Cheap stuff from the local Poundland, this goes in all the gaps and over the smooth surfaces, and over the bobbly surfaces on the polystyrene.

Texture paste – PVA, filler, sand and black paint thinned with water. This gets applied liberally with a big and old brush – the idea being that black paint made it easier to see if I’d missed any bits. Then all likely nooks, crannies & crevices got painted with PVA and I drizzled cat litter on top. This is a ridiculously easy but effective way to add detail to pieces like this.

Primed white with £1 shop spray primer.

Leopard spotting! First we daub it with thinned yellow…. oh, no

And then the brown… oh no no no

And then a thin black wash… oh, okay, starting to see it now

..and then the drybrush does it’s thing… NOW, I see it.. actually, this was where I realised I’d gone a bit heavy with the black wash and the drybrush was a bit too high contrast – a thin grey wash sorted out the balance and smoothed everything out a bit.

See?

And here they flocked, sealed, varnished and are in situ, with the Blood Angels fending off nasty beasties from Hive Fleet Imprudens…

The rocky crag you can see in the background is a sister piece to his Golgothan Spire which Jim made and never got around to doing a blog entry for.

Now that’s a bad day at the office.

Defending the Star – no, best make that Space – Gate!

I also found a last bit of insulation foam, glued some thick mounting card underneath it (figuring the foam itself would keep from any warping), carved a couple of slopes and got busy with the bark chip and the filler, and the texture paste..

Close up of the stonework

Off we go leopard spotting again…

Black wash pulls everything together

Finished and in situ with the rest of the new terrain – fine companion to Bose Cliff

INCOMING!

“This would never happen if we were on a model railway”

Genestealers REALLY interested in how we did the stonework…

So now we have few more eye-catching terrain pieces providing some depth and interest to the next battlefield – stay tuned for the write up! Stay thrifty out there…