I've been gathering parts for a few weeks, and this past week I managed to get enough of everything to move forward and start making some terrain for my tabletop battlefields. I wanted to make a set of jungle themed terrain, with some primitive ruined structures or evidences of past wars, to go with my tyranid army, matching their paint scheme. There's still quite a few pieces to be made, but I think these are a good start and represent a notch or two better quality terrain than I made years ago.

I used plastruct card for the base, then sculpted some elements from Polyform Model Air clay amd used some ruined building bits from a WWII scenery box. When those were arranged and glued in place, I put down a mix of three sizes of sand to texture everything and then undercoated with primer. After the primer was two base layers of brown and some drybrushing of a ground highlight (sort of a golden yellow). Then for the burned out building, I used black to char the ground and ruins, finishing off both pieces with some drybrushed green - growth over top of the old damage. I then glued on the flock to the base, but I think I should have done this after the next step - attaching the plants.

The plants are mostly cheap plastic aquarium plants cut into smaller pieces, but I used some fake plants from the craft store floral department and even some banana tree models that came out of a box. To get them fixed down, I put little blobs of green stuff (epoxy putty) on the base of each and tried to secure it to the base by mashing it in there. When it was dry, I went back with superglue to glue the plant in the epoxy and glue the epoxy to the board - the green stuff does stick pretty well on it's own, but I wanted to be sure. When that was done, I coated everything with a matte undercoat and then a few drops of gloss coat where I wanted it to look like there was a puddle.

Just for a height and color comparison, here are both pieces with some of the painted tyranids who are supposed to match.

September 11, 2014