New table, new terrain! [Part 6]

Well, just go an email on Monday that my 6 ed rulebook is shipping.  A week after I got an email saying it was "dispatched."  Oh well.

Over the last few days I have been very productive on the terrain front!  A couple nights ago I built the base for this small swamp after I finished painting my Heavy Recon Grenadiers for my Dust Warfare Axis army.  The next day I got out the paint, some resin, and these GW plants and whipped this out. The water is really murky, I just mix some paint right into the resin.  They sell dyes but this really works fine and has not yet had a negative effect on the resin.

When that was done being poured I finally painted the sentinel and dead pilot to finish up this piece.  I have been working on this on and off for over a year, don't know why it took me so long but it did.

Sunday I started out by making the bases for a duo of ponds to be used for terrain.  Not really picture worthy, but it took a little while to get them how I wanted them.  Next we went supply shopping.  Lots of stuff was purchased, spray paint, glue, resin, stuff to make trees, craft paints for terrain, plasticard, and some other nick-nacks.  I was looking for pre-made trees like I've seen at Millenium Games tournaments but they did not have them at my hobby shop, despite having a huge selection of model RR stuff.  They sell higher quality single trees and I got one of those to use as one of the random happenings from Mordheim.  We had to buy the raw materials for trees instead.

After shopping we headed over to Kevin's for terrain work/ game night.  My brother and I got to work priming all of the buildings(expect the church, it still needs a roof) either brown or black.  It was nice out so we opted not to do the spraying in the basement this time.

Most of the buildings will be black, with the mechanicus ones getting a reddish brown base.  The bases will either be urban or sand waste to match my table so they got the black or brown paint as well.  My brother helped me out and really made a mess of his hands with the spray paint.

Once that was done I cracked open those new craft paints and got to work.  Here are the first two buildings.  I opted for a somewhat simple painting job as I have a lot of buildings to do and they are just terrain.  The buildings get a drybrush or two over the primer and then I picked out some of the key details.  Same goes for the bases.  It's pretty fast and looks pretty good.  Not my best work, but for this it really gets the job done and is much better than the unpainted buildings we have been playing on for the last 5 years or so.

Monday night I started out by doing a bit more on the ponds.  I did some sanding and filling where required on the clay and then added some sand and texture around the outside (it will end up matching the sandy part of the table there) as well as some places in the pond where it will be a gravel bottom.  From the outside to the waterline will be static grass and tall grasses, perhaps some cat tail like plants like the ones around the mini-swamp.  In the water will be algae like stuff, some lily pads I bought, and some fish I am going to make from plasticard.  Most of the bottom will be mud.

Since I could do no more on the ponds until the Elmer's dried I started to work on some trees.  Since they didn't have the multi-packs of the cheaper trees we opted to make our own using the Woodland Scenics supplies available at the hobby store.  We bought the largest armatures they had and 3 boxes of the fine-leaf foliage; dead, olive, and medium green.  Here are a bunch of the wire cored armatures.

Here you can see how it works.  You bend the flat armature into a 3d shape, then you tear out little tufts of the foliage and superglue them to the branches.  It takes some patience and a lot of time to do each tree, but it's really kind of fun.

I built 4 trees so far one with the dead brush, 2 olive colored ones, and one medium green one.  My brother wanted a scraggly looking tree so he built the one in the lower right.  I really like Woodland Scenics for this kind of stuff, they have a great selection and it's usually good to work with.  If you want great looking trees I really recommend doing it this way.  It may take some time but you should be very happy with the results.  It's amazing how lifelike they look when seeing them in real life rather than through my mediocre camera.

Well, my rulebook is set to arrive tomorrow so you may expect a reaction to that tomorrow.  Otherwise I won't be getting much terraining done until perhaps Thursday due to Tuesday disc golf league and Wednesday being Independence Day here in the USA.

I ran out of room on google for images for this blog, so now it's become a pain to add them to my posts.  I first have to upload them elsewhere then add the image URLs one at a time.  I may just cave in and buy 10gb of storage from google for the 2.50 or so a month that it costs.  May not. I still have 2 free gb at the other site so we'll see how my patience lasts.

They wait for me in the forest.