Stargrave Trashbash Fuel Tower part 2

With the construction complete, it was time to get to painting! Because of the use of foam on it, I used my mod podge and black paint mix on all the foam before taking it outside on the first 60+ degree day we had this year and giving it a solid coat of Rust-oleum flat black. That was back in March...

Fast forward to MAY, and I was getting sick of looking at it and it's black primer coat... Not really sure what else to do with it, I decided to use the same green on the tank as I'd used for my other trash bash industrial terrain, but first was giving everything that was supposed to be metal a coat of brown metallic craft paint. Originally I was going ot use the airbrush paint, but I wanted to test out the bottle I got from Michaels to see how it worked.

 That worked out about as well as I could have hoped for! And as it's a lot cheaper, and I don't have to have it shipped to me, this will probably be my go to for undercoating my industrial terrain. 

 The main tank got the aforementioned industrial green, leaving the metallic brown in the groves showing, and the connector bit on top got a hazard yellow ring. I also painted the logo on the tank withe the yellow as a base. 

 

Onto the wood and stucko for the build-out portion, which was painted with the usual antique white, and a random mix of browns for the wood. 

 

Then I started picking out other details, like the wires and the junction box. 

And the final steps were to make the bands around the tank and the radar dish more silvery, black hazard lines on the yellow coupling, and add some weathering using a mix of dark sepia and black wash, putting streaks where it felt most appropriate. 

It's nice to finally have this wrapped up, and now it's time to get it on the table and play with it!  

Stargrave Trashbash Fuel Tower part 1

Following hot on the heels of the foamcore farmhouses, I got right to work on my fuel tank tower workshop. The only appropriate basis for the fuel tank was of course a coffee can. Digging through my bits boxes to find things to make it look less like a coffee can and more like something discarded from a passing spaceship, I grabbed a crevice attachment from a long broken vacuum cleaner, a peanut butter jar lid, and a plastic 6 pack can carrier. 

There was still a long way to go before this was going to be table ready... but I liked the start of it.  Except the crevice attachment was a little too tall. So I cut the bottom of it off, and stuck it on top of the main tower.

Of course there needs to be more to this... it' supposed to be the home and workshop of the main NPC for the scenario! I don't have any good tools at the moment to be cutting metal, so the can is going to remain intact. This means that everything I do to it will be adding onto the can. 

If this is a workshop that all the locals come visit to get their tech things repaired, he might have build out a shed/store front to work from... and a balcony because what's the point of having a big terrain piece like this if there aren't multiple elevations to put your minis on?

 I "built" paper mockups for what i was thinking, and... yeah. I like it. Originally I was going to base this on a bit circular 5" base, but the more I worked on it, the more it felt too constraining, and hindering what I wanted to do. So at this point I'm planning no base. I got a little ahead of myself and build the first support for the balcony out of match sticks. 

I then realized that I needed to do more work on the can before building the balcony, but... I might as well check to make sure it's strong enough, right?

 Yeah, that'll hold up ok it seems. 

 

So I started working on the can. The first thing I did was to cut out strips of cardboard box and wrap them around the can, and also to make some to wrap the crevice attachment to the can. At this point I started wondering how he's going to get out onto the balcony... So back to the bits boxes, this time checking out all the various tank bits I've collected, and I pulled out a bunch of hatches and doors. A Rhino top hatch will work for the ground floor doors, and a round tank hatch for accessing the balcony. 

Yeah, the Rhino hatch works. I made a frame for it out of corrugated cardboard and then framed out the build out structure from foamcore. 

I also added 2... handles? brackets? flanking the chimney that I imagine are used by the ship to help secure the tank in place. They are made from the tubes at the center of dog poop bag rolls with foamcore braces wrapped with zip tie, with the zip tie clasp on top.

I then started to build out the rest of the braces for the balcony. You'll note that the balcony and the door are no longer on the same side of the can. It started to feel too busy on the one side. There are also some clamps added to the opposite side of the can from the chimney. I found them in the street years ago, and I don't actually know what they're from.
 

I then added the stir sticks to the build out to match the wattle and daub I did on the farm houses. 

And finished the balcony. I decided that I'd skip the railings, as there isn't an OSHA to enforce safety regs. 

 I decided to add a satelite dish. Originally I was going to put it on the chimney tower, but decided to use a chopstick, topped with a bit from a lotion pump, some wires, and bits of matchstick and stir stick to secure the dish. I don't actually recall where the dish itself is from. I used various wires twisted together to make cabling running from the dish down to a box on the side of the tower, with one twisted wire cutting behind the vacuum attachment down to the front door.  

 I took some mesh from an old screen door out in the garage and cut a circle out for the top of the peanut butter lid, and glued it down with superglue, adding the little tube on top built from a can cap from a 6 pack of beer and the cut off bit from the vacuum attachment. As a decoration I added the same 3E shape as on the main body, and unseen, is the cap from a used tube of superglue inside the tube. Oh, and the little decoration? It's actually the carved out bit of the grey clasps so that I could bend them enough to glue onto the can. Literally just the scrap bits leftover and reused. 

 

Next (and last) up is the hatch for balcony access. Using a combo of match sticks for the outer frame, and stir sticks as the hatch itself, I glued them all together on a bit of paper, added the green wire to indicate the hinges and the handle. And because the tower is rounded, I added a pair of stir sticks to either side to accommodate the curve. 

And once installed, I realized that I still needed a ladder to get from the balcony to the roof, so taking bit from the bits box, and adding to it, I built a simple ladder.  It was then I noticed the grey hook wasn't quite big enough for my Sgt. Forscale to stand on, so I added another little platform so a mini can stand on it, which brings the usable elevations on this tower to 5! Not bad for a coffee can.
 

 And now, it's time to paint... but that's for next post, as this one has gotten way too long! 

Simple Foamcore Farm Houses

 Sometimes you just need some quick and decent looking terrain. 

 Scenario 4 of Stargrave Hope Eternal campaign is set on a world far out in the boonies of the galaxy, and as such is a little lacking in tech. The settlement is described in the book as being a combination of prefab structures, homes made from locally available materials, and one tower made from a recycled fuel pod. You need between 6-10 structures for the scenario. I own 2 small 3D printed prefab huts and so need at least 4 more structures, one of which needs to be a tower, so I need to make at least 3 houses. The game is played on a 3'x3' board, but the village needs to be at least 8" away from any board edge so none of these should be very big...

 Keeping the size manageable had me laying out a couple of different size bits of paper on the board, and placing some minis in and around them. 2"x3" was tiny, and 4"x6" was too big, but a 3"x5" note card felt just about perfect. Big enough for a full sized door and a couple of windows, but not so big that they'd dominate the table.  

 Not wanting to spend a lot of time or money on them, I grabbed a scrap of foam core that I'd been saving, and got to measuring. Prior experience reminded me that I couldn't just cut out 3" and 5" wall sections because then the footprint would be too big. I opted to trim the long edges by the thickness of the foam core so that the walls would fit neatly on the 3x5 piece that would serve as the base/floor of the huts. 

I kept the height of the walls at 2" knowing the roof would greatly increase the height of the finished builds. I measured out the doors and windows using a 1" square base, then cut them all out. I opted for one door for each building, and 3 windows. 

I turned on my glue gun to get it hot, then I pulled out some aluminum foil, rolled it into a ball, and rolled it all over the exterior sides of the walls and the floor. It really is a fantastic way to add texture to cheap foam core. Once done, it was time to get gluing. 

 

Not perfect. My measurements were not exact, but close enough. I do like how it's possible to shoot through a building. Then it was time to grab the cardboard recycling and dig out a cardstock box and start cutting thin strips. I was actually more careful with this part than I was cutting the foam.  I framed out the corners and all the windows and doors. 

 All told this was about 2 hours worth of work. I then brought it down to my painting desk and slapped on a heavy coat of mod podge mixed with black craft paint, and once dry, followed that up with a heavy drybrush of antique white.

 I was unsure at this point whether I wanted to paint the interior walls or tint the exterior... I decided to try tinting the exterior using just a tint bit of watered down speedpaint.

 And then onto the roof! My original plan was a standard sloped roof, but my cousin suggested an asymmetrical gable with offset ridge, so that it might look a little less average medieval fantasy 

Once I had the foamcore frame I used cardstock to make the roof, and then started cutting and gluing the shingles... This was a pain to do, and messy.  

I was finally reminded that you can do whole strips and it's a much easier process! Also less messy with the glue and looks neater. It was almost enough to make me redo the other 2... almost.  

Then it was time to put a hole in the roofs for the chimney pipes. These were made from the tubes inside dog poop bag rolls. I also added some trim to the gables under the roof line.  

 Then it was back to the mod podge, and onto painting! The gables were painted just like the walls with antique white and the zealot yellow speed paint, with the brown for the trim.

 The roof was done with a sponge leftover from a mini blister pack and a soft blue craft paint, with a gentle dry brush of antique white to give them some highlights. 

 

Overall, these are great. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but solid looking and usable for the games I want them for. I still want to make little HCAV units to fit over the chimney pipes, but that's going to be its own little project. For now, it's onto the fuel pod tower!

The kid decided the houses needed a little something extra, so they all got some stickers. 

 And credit where credit is due, a hefty dose of inspiration came from this video. 

Amamao Paint Pens Review

2 years ago a friend gave me a box of Amamao paint pens for the holidays.. and I was skeptical. I'm really happy using my reaper paints on my minis, and I didn't see what advantages these brought to the table.

I remain skeptical on their use painting tabletop minis, but I discovered back in April that they are fantastic for working on my 3D printed terrain. I also this month discovered that they're great for my 5 year old to use to help me paint my terrain. 

Not only does it minimize the mess he can make as compared to the craft & hobby paints, but he has a lot more control with the pens. An additional benefit is that he has the entire array of colors to choose from, and a love of rainbows, so everything he's worked on has ended up a lot more colorful than it would have been if I'd been doing it by myself. 

Being 5, and easily distracted, he's a little sloppy, but with the pens it's easy enough to go back over and tidy things up. I've also made sure to use the craftsmart antique white somewhere on all the buildings to help tie it all together. 

As for the pens themselves, each pen actually has 2 colors, one on each end. Interestingly the tips on each end are different. One has a larger tip, and the other a smaller one. Both come to a pretty fine point, but for terrain painting, I've largely found the larger tip more useful, and have switched pens and colors if I wanted the bigger tip. There are a few narrow spots the pens can't reach into, but that's a minor issue overall, and mostly spots I'm going to paint a dark shadow color anyway. I've also found that the paint colors don't always match the tip. Not a wild difference, but enough that I've a couple of times swapped pens for something more to my liking. 

 

The color selection is almost perfect. My biggest issue is the lack of a good red in the set. Seems an odd oversight. The selection of metallic paints is fun, but I would have liked a dirty bronze color to work with. 

I have to say that for the price these are absolutely worth it, especially if you have a bunch of terrain to paint. 

Noodle Bar & Industrial Scatter Terrain

This past weekend I got a couple of solid hours to paint when I wasn’t dead tired, and decided to spend it on the 3D printed Flatline City Noodle Bar that was gifted to me, and I have to say that I’m really very happy with how it came out. 

It's almost entirely painted with cheap craft paints. I used Antique White for the walls, Terracotta for the roof, and the inside was painted with Red, mixed with a tiny bit of Black to darken the shade a bit. Details were picked out with various Reaper colors, including Punk Rock Pink for the signs. Everything was then washed with my usual grimy mix to help it blend in more with my industrial terrain. 

I also learned that one of the local libraries has several 3D FDM printers available for use, for the low low cost of $0.05/gram of filament. I grabbed some industrial scatter terrain STLs and $8.60 later I had these 4 pieces! 

And because I couldn't get them and not paint one of them, I took the smallest, and tried out the Amamao paint pens I got for christmas on it. 

Gotta say it was worth the price. This is a great quality print, and the pens were easy to use. I think I'll probably basecoat the other 3 before using the pens, if only so that the main colors match with my other industrial terrain.  

Sci-Fi Terrain: Transfer Unit

 

Another of my trash bash terrain pieces, this one started back in April of last year, after making the Chemical Processors. The body of it was the cap for a set of sidewalk chalk. I added a pill bottle lid that I embellished with some thin plastic from a blister pack. 

 

On the top were several other bottle caps and small lengths of thin straw, and I used the same hair elastic from my other build to make a pipe running from the top down the side. Since I didn't want the pipe down the side to be the only thing on it, I used 2 more lengths of the thin straw and a bit of sprue to add more detail. 

 

On the back side I used another small length of the elastic, a bit of zip tie, and a couple of cut up pieces of leftover gun from the Reaper Black Star Corsairs that I converted a while back. (This is why I save all those bits of trash!)

The final side of the build I left blank, mostly cause I couldn't decide what to add to it.

One thing I quickly noticed was how unstable it was. The big bottle cap on the front was too heavy. That was an easy fix, I just glued in a wall fastener I had saved from some IKEA furniture.

Some time later, I primed it black, then in December I based it with the metal tone airbrush primer. As with the Chemical Processors, I painted it with the same green craft paint that seems to be the color bulk purchased by the owners/operators of the industrial zone I'm assembling. 

Feeling that the blank side was missing something, I decided to paint a number on it, and as I'd been gifted some paint pens, I decided to try them out.

 Gotta say, I think it looks good! And I've already started on my next one! 

I think its an incinerator. But more on that later!