Monday, November 26, 2012

Lunar Sticky Bush

Here is one of the terrain impediments of Luna:

Movement through the totally gluey "bushes" can slow or really slow a force. Stickiness is rolled for when they enter the placard. It has been given the fond name of "that damn crap"......

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Finished Lunar Pieces

Here's a few of the pieces done up with paint and stain.....though not quite completely dry yet....

Still tweaking the staining, have to have the wash almost dry before I hit it with the blackish stain so it will penetrate the surrounding almost dry wash as a smear.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Lunar Landscape Advances

In a burst of effort I have roughed out most of the terrain pieces:

First up are Dust Pools. Low density caverite ore powder sometimes hovers in low spots, suspended by its gravity neutralizing properties. Some times these low areas are very shallow, sometimes quiet deep and some  times they hide nearly bottomless chasms.............

Next up is broken ground which slows movement but little else.

Lunar Ridges next. They block movement, line of sight and are otherwise only crossable by rocket pack and fliers.

Small Lunar Crater, defensive position and takes some extra movement to enter/leave.

Near 2 dozen features to start slapping paint on ..... should be couple of hours.

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Lunar Matt Progress

Lucked out a bit and had the time and materials to finish off the lunar game matt.

Here's a close up of the ground with a stout fellow looking for action.  Painted the surface with a grey wash, applied with a 4 inch brush. The Blackish areas was very thin black wash dribbled on from finger tips from a small glass.


Here's a look from father out.

And there he is in the wide shot. Craters and othe features soon.

Lunar Surface Project Continues

Waiting for the craters glue to dry so I can treat them roughly with tools.......... so I got to work making some surface matts from old paiting canvas sheet.

Here I have the old painting canvas drop cloth spread over a 4x6 plywood board. I used the staple gun to tug and snap the edges down. This serves the purpose of preventing the sheet from puckering up when I slathered paint over it. Once all the edges were secured I got out a large 4 inch paint brush and some left over white house paint and proceeded to put 2 coats on the canvas letting it dry between coats. When second coat was dry I trimmed off the excess material, leaving the 4x6 sheet on the board. The matt has a lot of old paint splatters that have been folded and creased, giving some basic texture to the matt to start with.


Not very clear here, but I have used the brushable caulking (kel seal) to smear here and there, dragging it around with a spatula, then sprinkled sand over it and rear smearing it to work it in.

I'll be using a large type of Wash coating on the matt.Then I will try some dark splotch staining to get a nice variation of shadings.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Onwards to Luna !

Long Break seems to be over and backto Terrain Making!

Gearing up to return to Martian Empires, Luna, the campaign. First step a series of Lunar landscape terrain. Figuring the quickest and easiest would be Craters, some for decoration but others for real impact so:

Able to provide cover to one or more units, I plan to leave their "defensibility" till they are "tested" by gun fire, in that they may be mostly dense rubble or powdery dust that offer little resistance to gun fire..........oh, and by the way, you don't need space suits for the Victorian Lunar surface, just don't forget to take your daily Air Pill !

Next up some small craters, Dust Pools and crevasse of varying depth and width. Rock out croppings and other natural geographical terrain bits.

Lastly that the moon is a source of Caverite, used to coat items to block the pull of gravity. Large chunks of ground have broken free due to Luna quakes and now they don't have enough Caverite Ore of fine enough quality to leave for space, rather then just bumble along as dense "clouds" that sometimes scrape the surface.............