Scratch Built Orbital Cannon for Apocalypse

Our local gaming group has been playing a lot of apocalypse lately, and in preparation for our upcoming 12,000 point game, the biggest we've tried yet, I decided to build a special terrain piece.

It's obviously inspired by the fortress in the Apocalypse supplement book, and I really hustled to get this built in about 2 weeks. While it lacks loads of detail that the Apoc fortress has, I'm happy to have built something on this scale to completion.

Here are a few WIP shots with some models for scale. I'll be getting paint on this eventually but for the meantime I need a terrain break, time focus on the Iron Hands.

Mysterious Lakes for 40k

During our Escalation/Stronghold Assault mega game a few weeks back I had the opportunity to play on some of Gale Force 9's Battlefield in a Box Ponds, and realized I had nothing in my own terrain collection that would allow me to bring mysterious water effects from 40k into my games. Well following that game off I ran to my friendly local game store and picked my own mysterious ponds (along with the Apocalypse rulebook).

Out of the box they're pretty nice but the tinkerer in me wanted them to have a little more depth and a reflective surface. I decided to hit the water portions of the terrain piece with some black shading to make them look nice and deep and some turquoise highlights to break up the surface a little. Once I was done I put down about five or six coats of Future floor polish with the air brush and finished with a little bit of Future mixed with some old GW blue ink. I waited a day for them to dry then gave them a hearty helping of my usual mix of Woodland Scenics turf.

I'm pretty pleased with the final result and though the blue ink sort of conceals the highlights on the water it also give the ponds a really clear deep look. I suppose next I'll need to work on my Warhammer Fantasy rural walls since they're a nice achievable goal and they'll help to round out my shrine world terrain set.

Citadel Woods ready for the Battle Field

After being so productive, and completing the Arcane Ruins I posted about a few days ago, I decided to keep true to my word and get the Citadel wood completed. This was in base-coated in the same manner as the arcane ruins, a earth colored brown Krylon spray paint that's very comparable to GW Steel Legion Drab.   I airbrushed on some GW Charadon Granite as shading then some GW Snakebite leather mixed with a little GW Charadon Granite. The trees were painted with GW Rhinox Hide then got a little bit of the Snakebite Leather mixture for hightlights. Then I Drybrushed the whole thing with a pair of the GW Dry paints whose names I don't recall, and finished with a bunch of spots of various Woodland Scenics turf. 

The trees are bare right now because I was completely underwhelmed with how poorly the plastic leaf pieces from the kit failed to stay attached and I've decided to make a mixture of various basing turfs to add some spotty foliage for them. I think it'll be faster, and make them easier to game on, but also the plastic leaves just kept falling off and made the trees difficult to handle. Now that the paint job is done I need to pick up another color or two of turf and get these guys completely done.

The Arcane Ruins are ready for the battlefield

I've Had the Games Workshop Arcane Ruins model kit sitting around with a brown base-coat for literally years, so today I decided to check it off the to-do list. Here are a few shot's of the finished product with a nearly completed GK Strike Marine for contrast. All told it only took about 3 hours to finish up, so I feel kinda stupid to have ignored it for so damn long.

I used a Krylon spray that is almost an exact match for the old citadel Graveyard Earth for the base color (I don't remember the new citadel color equivalent, maybe Steel Legion Drab?) followed by an airbrush shading with some Charadon Granite (perhaps my favorite GW paint color ever). I then airbrushed some highlights with a mix of Bleached Bone and Steel Legion Drab, and ended with a light drybrushing using Citadel Dry:Terminatus Stone with very pleasing results. I really didn't think I'd find the new Citadel Dry paints very useful but they seem to work great on terrain for my purposes.

I think I'll try to give my Citadel Wood Kit, that's been sitting around for the same amount of time, some TLC while I'm on a roll.

MDF Terrain for wargames

When I was at the NOVA Open recently I did a fair amount shopping in the vendor hall. One of the cool purchases I made was a defensive bunker from Tectonic Studios. It caught my eye because it looked similar to some other GW terrain pieces but lacked the overabundance of skulls and gothic bits the tend to plague 40k scenery. The gothic stuff is cool but I've got plenty like that, and this bunker looks to have a lot of value for 40k and other games like Infinity as well. It went together well with the help of the instructions found on the Tectonic Studios website and overall I really like it.

The best part is that the top level is easily removable.

Also from Tectonic Studios, a "Tau"style objective marker.

I also recently built a fence set from Laser Cut Card and while simple, this set was really fun to build and will be great for all types of wargames.

Finally, I picked this up at the NOVA as well, it's a garbage dumpster from Bandua Wargames. I know it has the recycling symbol on it but do you really think those Ariadna trash recycle?

Exploded Vehicle Markers - Phase 3

Airbrushed and quickly base-colored the debris. Washing, drybrushing, and details still need to be done.

Exploded Vehicle Markers - Phase 2

...Add some sandy paste, black lava, bits of rock, cork  and sprue, or whatever else is laying around.

Exploded Vehicle Markers - Phase 1...

...rip up a bunch of rhino parts and plasticard and glue to appropriately sized base.