Terrain for Mattias, Part 1: The Negotiation

There's a lot of painting talent in our club. One member in particular has a very unique style that I like a lot. Mattias's approach has a palette and look that is quite unlike most other painters. You can see it on his less-than-accurately titled Amateur Hour blog.

When it came time for Necromunda, I really wanted him to paint my Eschers for me. I simply don't have the skill to paint these amazing miniatures in a satisfactory way. However, knowing his schedule, and my inability to pay him what his skill would deserve, I knew I would have to make a big offer.

I convinced him to accept two Macross models, a mess of custom terrain and use of the Eschers in the our Necromunda campaign in exchange for him painting up a 14-member Escher gang. In a few weeks we should be able to see the entire gang (his starting warband is already finished, and some are in this post), but today I will present my half of the bargain.

The rocks are seat cushion foam, torn by hand and then painted black with drybrushes of brown and bamboo.

A few of them have tunnels running under them. The piece near the middle with the monster on it was cut from the piece in the upper right with an electric carving knife. It perfectly matches and can be used separately or together to make a taller piece.

I hadn't though much about it, but Mattias showed me how they can be combined for some cool looking formations.

The buildings below are made with my typical methods of Dremeling away any sections I don't want, then covering the resulting openings and details I don't like with corrugated cardboard and sci-fi bits, plus lots of additional greebling. These first two in particular have lots of nice junky bits in the receptacles. Feel free to ask any construction-related questions in the comments section.

The first two buildings are similar in style, both based on Thomas and Friends railway buildings. I've painted them similarly and made them into a sort of recycling center.

I'm particularly proud of the spot on the back where minis can be placed in a lookout.

This second piece is more like two buildings on the same base.

I've cut away the chute that once connected them and put a dumpster in between them. A few bits on the other side implies a covered trash compactor.

This third building is a stock model from Dust Tactics Airfield Quonset Hut Accessory Pack with an added smokestack.

I really think that 28mm wargamers owes it to themselves to buy a box of these. About $20 will get you 4 incredibly useful buildings that can fit into any setting from 1941 through the far future. They even have opening doors! I've also found them useful as roofs on top of Dust Tactics Warzone Tenement buildings.

The final building is a converted Fisher Price toy.

I removed a window to allow access to the upper story and added a bit of machinery inside.

I also removed a variety of other parts and bracing from the boom and bucket to make the area accessible to miniatures.

An added shelf makes the upper first story window a nice lookout.

I was so happy with this one that I didn't want to let it go, so imagine my joy at finding another one at the resale shop a few weeks ago! I'm eagerly awaiting the completed Escher gang, though I will have to wait until the end of the campaign to take possession. When they're ready, I'll post them up and you all can judge if I made a good bargain.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Fantasy Terrain Bits and More Waterfront

Here are a couple more fantasy terrain pieces that I recently finished up. This first bit came in a bag of HO-scale items I found at a resale shop. It is a base to a plastic model building, but the building wasn't included. My original intention was just to make a piece of ground that I could put my individually-based trees on to denote an area of a forest. But that would be too simple...

So, I added some of Tim's Hirst Arts pieces to suggest very old ruins and glued down a thick layer of the "sand mix" concrete product that so nicely replicates slightly rocky soil.

A quick paintjob and a bit of greenery and it's done.

And here is a pier and boat set that I picked up at the bi-annual Games Plus auction. I'm not sure of the make -- perhaps Anisty or Ral Partha?

The casting is less-than-ideal, with quite a few air bubbles, and unfortunately some of these are on notable areas such as EVERYWHERE!

Luckily, termite-infested wood doesn't seem at all out of place on a medieval waterfront, so I just left them as-is and made almost no effort to clean them up.

Nothing fancy about their paint jobs, but the detail on these is very robust, so they are a cinch to paint with fast wet and dry brushes.

These items should be a nice addition to my slowly growing collection of waterfront terrain.


-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

More Toybashing: Creepy Crawlers and an Egg Box

I'm back with two more pieces of sci-fi terrain made from old toys and cast-off junk. These started life as a "Creepy Crawlers" molding station and a vintage refrigerator egg box that Josh gave me.
 
For the egg box, I flipped it over and used the lid as the roof. I used a bunch of Rokenbok pieces both as supports and as flat sections for the floors.

I added some plastic slabs on the sides and roof, plus a few bits from the Pegasus Chemical Plant kit. This kit has become hard to find in the USA and I highly recommend buying it if you can find it. I use pieces from the kit on almost every terrain piece I make.

The end pieces are plastic doors are upgrade pieces from the Sedition Wars game. The ladders are cut from pieces of toy Power City train track.

Here's a look at the original Creepy Crawlers kit. I don't have any in-progress pics of the Creepy Crawlers piece, but here's what it was made from.

I separated the toy from its base to shrink the footprint a bit, then rebuilt it into a sort of forge.

I covered up many of the screw holes with either plaster or round bits of plastic punched from blister pack plastic with a standard paper hole punch.

Except for a small grate and a few other pieces, almost all the added bits are from Mantic Battlezone accessory sprues. This thing just screams Necromunda to me. Though it's finished, I feel that I need to build some kind of gondola or reservoir to hold whatever it dumps out of its bucket.

The egg box building doesn't have quite the same Necromunda look, but it's a nice piece that is perhaps a bit more futuristic. It looks to me like some sort of chemical storage facility.

The simple orange, green and gray scheme has some nice contrasts.

I really like these Sedition Wars doorway bits, though I wish I'd chosen a color other than aluminum, which looks an awful lot like the grey walls after a couple washes and a dusty tan drybrush.

The bit in the middle is a hatch that lines up with a ladder from the 2nd level. The roof looks good enough, but perhaps I should have done something to split up the one-piece look of the lid.

Overall, the egg box building has a very unique look that sets it apart from the rest of my collection. I particularly like the way miniatures can be on a second level elevation and still have overhead cover. Now that I'm occasionally playing Necromunda, I'm thinking a lot more about multilevel terrain and cover. Both of these pieces are well in that vein.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Dust Tenements + Mantic Battlezones = Cyberpunk City

After building a set of seven urban buildings based on the Dust Tactics Warzone Tenements, I felt that I had nearly exhausted the possibilities of this kit. But once I got my hands on a batch of Mantic Battlezone sprues -- which are packed with nice detail, but can often result in modular, samey-looking structures -- I decided to put the two batches together and see what I could come up with.

The result was a pair of buildings with a striking near-future cyberpunk look blending early 20th century architecture with futuristic elements. These buildings used Dust Tenement pieces for the main structure, with a few Mantic Battlezone panels and parts mixed in. The Battlezone panels are just a bit shorter than the Dust Tenement walls, but a piece of Plastruct I-Beam fills the gap nicely.

The medium-sized hatches are Pegasus Platformer and Hexagon pieces. I used a wide variety of other smaller bits as well. This first building is a bit residential in character.
 

Battlezone pieces provide some nice street level detail. The door piece easily scores and snaps apart. I then glued it in to imply a door that's only partially up.

On the back, I used some the Battlezone panels for a balcony. I created a double-doorway section for the balcony by cutting the bottom out of the double-window battlezone panel while retaining the center beam. It's a simple and very useful modification, since Battlezone sets only seem to come with few doorways.

The roof is a piece of adhesive floor tile with some food pouch caps and a few other details.

For the second building, I wanted to give the appearance of some kind of business The front has another modified Battlezone double-window panel for an entrance.

On the sides I've used medical specimen cases to screen the lower windows, plus guardrails from the Pegasus Hobbies Hexagon kit to bar the upper windows.

Note that this building doesn't use any tenement corner pieces -- I ran out of them. However, by clipping away the tab side of the small wall and part of the inner section of the large wall, I was able to make the two wall sections mate nicely to form a corner.

The roof is a Dust Tactics Quonset Hut adorned with various Battlezone bits. The sign is bottom-side-out standard Battlezone half-panel with some of the detailing picked out in neon yellow/green paint.

A balcony made from Battlezone pieces allows one to use the Dust Quonset Hut door panel, which actually opens and closes.

The rear is very similar to the front, but I set back one of the Deadzone panels to suggest a garage entrance.

So there you have it, some cyberpunk structures to adorn a gritty futuristic city. Who knows -- there might be a replicant hiding behind those bulkheads?!

These turned out even better than I had expected, but I probably won't be making more. I don't have many Tenement parts left and with nine buildings based on Warzone Tenement parts finished already, I've got more than enough. Keep watching the blog, though, as I've got two more terrain posts coming soon packed with grimy industrial goodness!

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Waterfront Sections with Hirst Arts Blocks

After making my previous batch of walls, I found that while I had used up all the basic block pieces, there were still quite a lot of pieces left in the Hirst Arts batch that Tim had given me. Sorting them out, I found a big pile of arches and some cobblestone floor pieces.

I already have a few bridges, but I've been thinking about adding some more waterfront or canal details to my medieval town terrain, so I got to work.

First, a few simple canal sides.

Here are a few more, this time with arched edges.

This last one I'm pretty proud of. There was quite a pile of these long arched pieces, so I flipped them over and made a sewer culvert. Just the thing for a party to escape into! And who knows what kind of monsters could crawl out of such a portal?

It should nicely break up the monotony of the water's edge and also block line of site a bit. It could also be used to create a patch of difficult terrain, which isn't always readily available in traditional town layouts. Culverts can be awfully slippery after all...

I'm considering adding a bit of water with some epoxy, but that will have to wait until later. Here's a couple of more possible waterside layouts.

The painting process was the same as before. Some dark tan housepaint (added a bit of black and brown craft paint to the mix) drybrushed with Delta Ceramcoat "Bamboo" and then sealed with Galeria Matt Varnish before adding a bit of flocking.

This pretty much exhausts what I can think of doing with this particular batch of blocks. Unless we do some casting, I probably won't be making any more Hirst Arts constructions anytime soon. That's probably a good thing, since I've got so many other projects in the queue (note the Reaper "Dragons Don't Share" ruins in the background), but this has definitely been a nice diversion from my usual figure and terrain projects.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Small-Scale Building Commissions

I recently completed my first small-scale commission work. Two different customers both requested 6mm buildings. The finished structures below borrow shamelessly from Sean Patten's inspiring Gundam terrain, and like his, they are based around cassette tape cases with a variety of added bits.

As I don't have any 6mm miniatures, I've used 10mm rebased Mechwarrior units for scale purposes. Except for a few very small ground doors, I think these pieces will work equally well in either scale.

These first two are a pair of Mars Colony themed buildings. The quonset-style roofs were a surprise resale find and are from the "Robotix" line of toys.

I only got one picture of this one, but it's pretty symmetrical anyway.

These next three are more traditional urban-industrial style buildings. These are more directly based on the Ironhands style of Gundam buildings. This customer is working on a Gundam game project of his own.

Small Warehouse 

Medium Factory 

Large Repair Center 

Small-scale building was a bit of a switch for me from the 28mm stuff that I usually make. Extensive fine detail at this scale isn't really doable without a massive investment of time and bits, so it becomes a matter of viewing the building at arms length and deciding what details will make the structure "pop" on the table. I'm still working on the balance between contrasting colors, but I think I'm getting to a method that produces pretty solid results.

I'm fairly new to commission work, but I can build/paint more of these on request. The starting price is $15 + shipping for a building the size of the white structure and goes up from there based on size and individual requests. Of course larger and other scale buildings (28mm, etc…) can be done as well.

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member