Category Archives: Terrain

First weekend off in a month! Update time!

Man this last month has been a right pain. Sickness, travel, other crap… No time to paint at all.

Well Saturday was free and I was finally able to finish some stuff I started!

Terrain Tile

With some help from the Corvus Belli forums, I was able to figure out what to do with these blasted tiles. I have additional changes in mind for them but I’ll need to have all of them done before I can work that out.

Office Main Floor

This monster took forever. It’s basically a 2-3 buildings combined. Took days to finish. And I have 4 more to do…

I added a few shots with one of my universal buildings on top and with a Naga for scale.

Scatter Terrain

Made one of the large boxes from my order. These will make for some nice scatter terrain.

Cerberus terrain tiles

With my order from LosBlock picked up a bunch of the city tiles. These things are so damn cool! But there’s a problem…

These things have a lot of detail on them and they cause some of the obsessive elements of my personality to rear up. Remember when I mentioned my desire to pump ‘visual interest’ (excessive detail) into what I’m working on? Yeah… Trigger’d

I’m trying pretty hard to restrain myself. I don’t want to go over the top and uber-paint these tiles. I’m trying to keep them clean. Here are the first 2 I started working on:

With this scheme I think a black/white or grey layout would look good. The white tile is the one that is really triggering my OCD. All those little check marks around the boxes demand to be painted! With some of these tiles that equates to 400 check marks each. Ugh!

The black tile is way easier to do, but is low in detail. I’m afraid I’m not taking advantage of all the cool bits etched into the sheet. Needs moar visual interest!!!!

In the end I think I’m going to go with the black design. I like the red glowing lights and its minimal look. Here’s it finished with some terrain on top. I’ll have a better impression when I’ve finished 4+.

More to come as I progress.
Shawn G. (SoI)

New Table Time!

So, I took a long break from painting. I found myself exiled to Wraeclast and just found my way back home. Now I’m back and I have a painting itch to scratch. I will be returning to m OSS force here after a while, but for now I’m going to focus on terrain.

Back in August of last year I bought a table from one of the hottest Infinity terrain manufactures on the market, LosBlock. I picked up the City 3000 Armotek Corporate Unit bundle along with some other bits. The spark to paint it hit me on Monday and I’ve decided to get cranking.

Trying to find a scheme to do this terrain justice was a real bother. Here’s my first attempt:

I stole this scheme from the Warsenal (another badass manufacturer) Cosmica line. I tried the scheme out on an objective piece I got from Wild Land and expanded into one of my Universal Module buildings from the LosBlock set.

My good friend Robert reminded me that I initially purchased this bundle to be my Aleph table and I was going down the damaged weathered look again. I already have a table that looks beat to hell with my Yu Jing compound, and I should go in a different direction. I needed to paint ‘clean’.

Let me tell you something, that “painting clean” concept was/is a real struggle to understand for me. I have this infatuation with applying ‘visual interest’ to everything I paint. This infatuation can get WAY out of hand and I can end up going too far like I did with the Yu Jing Compound. Don’t get it twisted, I love that table, but looking back at my work I can see I went overboard with the colors and weathering. The hunt for ‘Visual Interest’ consumed the whole project. I found myself slipping back into that with this scheme.

Robert reminded me that the LosBlock terrain does not need help to look good. I needed to restrain my desire to pump detail into this project and let the architecture speak for itself. Don’t ‘Gild the Lilly’ if you will. No weathering. No layered highlights. No dark shading. No excessive detail. So, I went back to the drawing board…

And here’s where I ended up:

This scheme is stolen from my favorite game(s) of all time, Mass Effect. Cerberus to be precise. I like this scheme so damn much I’ve decided to turn the corporate plaza look I was envisioning to a paramilitary bio-research facility. APCs parked on the road (Puppets War Brick). Unmanned Atlas (Puppets War Enforcer). Perhaps some specimen tanks. The occasional automated turret. It’s going to be awesome!

I’m in love with this scheme. It’s become my new obsession. The pics are going to be ‘raw’ for a while. The images will get better as I move them to my gaming table.

More to come as I progress.
Shawn G. (SoI)

Sponge Weathering Technique

Salutations!

I have been receiving a great deal of requests for a tutorial on how I did the weathering on my Wild Lands table. Here’s a quick rundown:

I painted this terrain set using inks primarily. They are perfect for painting MDF terrain for two reasons; first, they go through an airbrush with no need for dilution. Second, the MDF is porous and absorbs the paint/ink cutting drying time.

Weathered Dice Box Weathered Dice Box

Color’s used:
Daller Rowney – Burnt Umber 223
Liquitex Ink – Carbon Black
Citadel (GW) – Mournfang Brown
Vallejo Game Color – Hot Orange 72009
Vallejo Model Color – Light Orange 70911
Vallejo Surface Primer – Gray

Materials Used:
Egg foam

I currently don’t have any new terrain pieces prepped for painting so I’m using a cast of the dice box I made for my Necrons a few years ago. It was sitting around and looked like it would make a pretty cool cistern for my table.

Step I

 

Step I – The box was primed gray. Since the cup is made out of resin it lacks the nice quick drying quality of MDF, I used a hairdryer to speed up the process. In fact I did the same thing with the MDF terrain. Really helps to keep stuff rolling.

 

Step II

 

Step II – All the cracks & crevices were airbrushed in black. It looks heavy at the start but once you start weathering you’ll be glad for it.

 

Step III

Step III – I took a piece of egg foam I had sitting around and cut it into pieces about 1 by 1.5 inches wide. Then, using my fingers I pulled plugs out of the flat side to make the surface uneven. It’s important to pull the edges as you don’t want a ‘square’ sides on the sponge. I like using the egg foam for this process as the ridged side have little finger holds.

 

Step IV

Step IV – Break out the burnt umber. I used condiment cups for this but a palate is fine. Dip the textured end in the ink and place a few practice dabs on your palate to get full coverage on the sponge. These practice dabs also help to control the amount of ink on the sponge as it can be heavier then you expect and you don’t want to make any mistakes on your piece.

 

Step V

Step V – Lightly dab the surface you want weathered. I turn the sponge around to add to the randomness of the ‘splatter’ look. As this surface is not porous, I had to use the hairdryer between panels. I decided to go with a heavy rust/corrosion look on the cup. I went lighter on the buildings.

After the large panels were done I noticed I had a great deal of ‘white space’ along the edges. I ripped up a smaller sponge and used that to get ink in the corners/edges as that’s where rust would accumulate first. The smaller sponge was also used to color the rest of the box and to create some areas where the ink is applied heavily. These heavy splotches are needed for the next step.

 

Step VI

Step VI – Rip up an new small piece of sponge. You can also wash the smaller piece you made for the umber phase. Using the Mournfang Brown, add new splotch patches over the umber. You want to aim to cover the areas (not completely) where the umber was heavy as these spaces will represent your rust areas.

 

Step VII

Step VII – These last steps go fast. Repeat the process you used for Step VI but this time using the Hot Orange followed by the Light Orange. Cover the brown with patches of orange but again not completely. You want the previous color to show underneath. The key to this phase is to go easy. Less is more.

And that’s it! I painted the rest of the cup with some glow effects and called it a day. The weathering process took about 10-15 minutes to complete and 20-25 minutes for the whole paint job. You’ll kick yourself at how easy this is to do in the end. Feel free to shoot me any questions.

Shawn G. (SoI)