CD Terrain: 40K earth works

With this post I’ll be finishing the CD terrain project begun a few weeks ago.  The 40K earthwork is a simple piece, but it illustrates the basic tools needed to complete larger projects.

Step1:  base coat the sand and plaster with a health coat of acrylic house paint.  You can use just about any paint – but the buck a quart oops from Home Depot is about as cheap as paint can get.  If you don’t have the good fortune to pick up miss-matched paint – think about buying a quart.  Model paint is far too expensive to use for terrain work and even those large bottles of craft paint well be used up before you know it.

The sand is coated in a layer of Black, the plaster earth works gets a layer of medium grey.

Step 2:  Dry brush the sand.  For a muddy look, I first use Folk Art:Dark Brown, followed by a light brush of Folk Art: Mushroom. 

Step 3:  Wash the plaster with a bit of black/brown.  For terrain work, I use a formula of 50% water & 50% Future floor polish, with Michael’s Powder Paint as the colorant.  Once again, cheap is the primary concern.  At $5 each, the two jars of powered paint have been used on dozens of projects and I’ve hardly used a quarter of the paint.  Add half a tea spoon black + half a tea spoon brown to a table spoon of water/Future.  This will give a gritty black wash.  For browns, go with 90% brown with just a touch of black paint.

Step 4:  Clean up the wash with a light dry brush of Folk Art: Sandstone.  I like to add a bit of Woodland Scenics blended turf as a mossy covering to the piece.  To apply the turf, paint on a bit of Elmer’s white glue with a medium detail brush & shake the turf over the piece.  It’s handy to have an empty box to work over – the turf makes a bit of a mess when dumped on.  While it might not always be appropriate to have grass & moss on a battle field, but I find the green breaks up the monotony of an all black/grey project.

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Adepticon Tournament Objective Counters

The Gallery page is updated with pics of the three objective counters created for the 2007 Adepticon Gladiator and 40K Championship.  The markers will be a fun add-on to the normal tournament fair:  not only will you compete to control the markers during the game, and get to keep them once the game is over, but you will receive a bonus in the subsequent game!  The objectives are one-piece resin models and will be provided unpainted.

  

Creating and casting the objectives was a fun little project.  Calling myself a sculptor is a bit of a stretch, how about assembler? The markers began life as plastic card, floor tile and a bit of green stuff.  I think I see another How-To article coming out of this. 

One of the bigger challenges was learning to cast in volume.   Because every table at Adepticon needed a marker, that means I needed to cast 90 copies of each objective.   Not wanting to try this one cast at a time, I created “production” molds for each of the markers with 6 cavities.   Saved a lot of time only having to cast 15 sets instead of 90.

CD terrain

CD Terrain part 1:
or
Son of Clay Molding 

CD terrain is a big fad going around these days.  As the name implies, it’s gaming terrain based on a CD.  I was looking for a good way to base up the plaster piece cast in the Clay Molding post, and for want of a MDF base of the correct size, I found an old AOL CD that I’d saved.

If you’re following along from the Clay Molding post, clean up the rubble piece you created with a bit of sand paper.  The flatter you can get the bottom, the less clean up work you’ll need to do after attaching to the base.

 

Step 1 is to glue the terrain piece down to the CD.  Elmer’s wood glue is my all purpose glue for most of my plaster projects, but the glue failed to gain any grip on the CD face.  Plan B is 2 part epoxy, this little marvel has been in my inventory for only 6 months but I can’t live without it now.  Now that the rubble is secured to the CD, all that’s left to do is to cover up the hole in the CD, I used a bit of card from a Dunken Doughnuts box.  The box paper is thin, but waxed on both sides to give it a stiff and sturdy finish.   I find the boxes to be a cheap substitute for plastic card.

Step 2  is to Spackle the base to hide any gaps where the rubble did not meet flush with the CD & clean up the line from the card used to cover the CD center hole.  At the same time, the Spackle also begins to texture the dull, flat CD face & starts to add a bit of life to the piece.

Step 3 is apply sand.  Nothing like a bit of grit to make dry brushing easy.  Some time ago Home Depot carried “tube sand”, 60lb bags for $3.00.  The mix is a rough collection of many sized sand grains – perfect for terrain basing.  The sand is applied using Elmer’s white glue and a bit of water.   Combine the glue and water in an old bowl & apply with a brush.   Michael’s Craft store carries a line of large, cheap brushes(GW tank brush sized) that are excellent throw aways for terrain work. 

Now it’s time to wait while the glue dries.  I find that terrain building is a lot of hurry up and wait.  Many is the time I’ve sat swearing a blue streak because a wall has broken free before the glue sets, or the sand pulls up with the dry brush because the base coat lessened the glue.   Each of these steps (except for the epoxy, which sets in about 5 minutes) was left over night before beginning the next element. 

Games Plus Spring Auction

Games-Plus is hosting their spring auction in March.  I’ve never made it to one of their auctions, but have had great fun at other game auctions.  Reports from previous auctions make this out to be a must attend event.  Apparently the stock of product is large and the auction goes all day long.  Time to start thinking up a shopping list.

New market & new tank

WarGamers Market a new gamer run auction site. 

Feed up with rising fees and endless clutter on Ebay, these guys decided to open their own site.  Basic listings are free, with addon charges for upgrades.

Hard to beat those prices for listing.  It’s entirly possible you will see Chicago Terrain Factory castings posted for sale in the near future.  All that remains to be seen, is if the site will pull in enough volume to make ‘free’ worth the effort of listing.

Leman Russ Annihilator for 40K

Forge world has come out with a las-cannon equipt Leman Russ. The trial rules have the tank listed at 145 pts, which gets you a twin link LC in the turret & one more in the hull.  A bit less fire power than a predator, but more armor.  For the same 145 points I can get 1.5 IG squads armed with LC.  Seems like at least an adaquate deal for IG.  Only down side is it eats up heavy slots normally used for templates.I like it, a dedicated tank buster with lots of staying power.  Best part – a simple turret swap turns a normal Russ into an Annihilator and back again.