Saturday 12 May 2012

Mark: Terrain-tastic

With the local Kill Team tournament coming up next weekend and the club moving ever closer to officialdom, I've decided to add a build of terrain and add a little variety to the club's terrain collection. I had set out to add a couple of pieces to the Jungle terrain set and repair the stuff I made for the Lustria campaign we played back in '05, but because of a little miscalculation on my part the lake I was making came out bright green instead of the dirty green I was after, so it became part of an arid alien landscape.

While the lake started out as an accident I do like the way it came out in the end. The only issue I'm having with it is the GW water effect I have been using, it's taking an incredibly long lime to dry. It's been 7 days since I applied the last layer and it's still no where near completely dry, I have been told by others that have used it in the past that they have had the same issue. The bottle was purchased back in late '05 or early '06 shortly after GW released the product so I don't know if the age may have something to do with it.




The alien flora is made from some plastic plants for a fish tank sprayed purple and attached to a balsa disk covered in textured paint. You wouldn't believe the looks I got from the girl behind the counter at the local $2 shop when I went in and asked for the purple spray paint.

The bases are made from 1/2" blue foam that I beat the stuffing out of with a hammer to achieve a cracked surface similar to sun baked mud, attached to 3mm MDF.


There isn't much to say about the "brick" hill, it's made by gluing down a stack of polystyrene rectangles painted with textured paint then dry brushed bleached bone.






I wanted something to represent the hand of man on the table, so in came Pringle Industrial. These were really simple to make, they're just pringles tubes glued upside down (washed out first) glued onto 3mm MDF bases, then sprayed with a couple of different  aerosol sprays. All told I think it took less than 15 minutes to build and paint them ready for basing. The pool of liquid in the base of the busted tower is two part epoxy resin that I poured down the side of the tower and let pool and the gaping hole on the other is a right angled PVC pipe joiner that I had lying around.








I made the fountain for the city fight table I'm working on as well, and painted it to match the other scatter terrain I made for the club tournament in January this year. It was made by cutting a couple of circles out of foam core that I then topped with 1.5mm balsa. The statue is an old metal GK Terminator (oddly I have more of them spare than plastic terminators). The liquid pool on the Pringle Industrial piece was left over from the "water" in the pond. I'm going to have to get hold of some more resin for any other water features I make in the future, It is a lot better to work with than the GW water effect and is almost completely solid after 24 hours.

I made this fountain for our Mordheim campaign at the club and while I'm happy with the way it came out, I'm frustrated by the fact that the water effect still isn't 100% dry after almost 4 weeks. There is a big gouge in an area hidden by the statue where the knight's shield broke off and fell into the pool.






Until next time .......

Mark

2 comments:

  1. Looks great - The water effect must be a pain though! Maybe try and put it in the sun/under a lamp. I remember one of my friends saying he even put it on a low heat in an oven for an hour! Obbviously not a good idea with plastic on the model!

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    1. Thanks Simonster, I've had them sitting near the window in a small room that gets direct sunlight for most of the day, it has helped a little maybe taking a day or two off the drying time. I'm not real keen on the idea of using the oven, polystyrene starts to melt at a relatively low temperature.

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