Saturday 24 February 2018

And the terrain collection keeps on growing

The hobby butterfly visited once more, and this week's hobby time found me casting my eye around my extensive collection of Unpainted Stuff looking for something I could finish in a single painting session.

I bought a number of terrain pieces from Amera during their Black Friday sale last year, and I had painted one of them using standard brush techniques:

Terrace Ruin
The Terrace Ruin is a reasonable size piece (15cm x 15cm) and whilst fun to paint I wasn't relishing painting the remaining bigger pieces using an ordinary brush as it would take *ages*. I recalled watching a tutorial video on youtube for painting terrain using spray cans, and decided to use this technique on the other pieces.

The Amera terrain is made from vacuum formed plastic and each items comes as a single piece; no assembly required.  It does need a little bit of preparation (washing in soapy water to remove any remaining grease/releasing agent).

Pyramid (36cm x 32cm x 9cm; a very respectable size!)
The Spray Paint technique involves giving the model a solid black base coat, then gradually building up other colours, leading to highlights, spraying from further & further away than you'd spray when priming. This leads to an almost dry brushing like effect as the dispersed paint will naturally settle on the high points. If you hit too hard on the spray can's nozzle and end up with too much paint then you can always go back to a darker colour and rework it.

Pyramid: Front

Pyramid Side
The Pyramid was a good piece to try the technique out on as it's essentially just a single colour; this was achieved using Grey and White sprays over the black base.

My two other pieces were ruined buildings on top of small hills, so I decided to use a brown for the earth/rock, and the grey for the stone work.

Castle Keep: Front (34cm x 32cm)

Castle Keep Side
You obviously sacrifice a level of accuracy when painting in this manner, and there's a level of bleed across between the grey and brown, which I quite like as it ties the whole piece together.

I finished the model with some poppy field flock in patches (as I had it to hand and I like the colours); I've got some alpine green flock hiding somewhere which is probably more Frostgravey, but this stuff is fine.

Here's the last piece:

Castle Ruins: Front (34cm x 30cm)

Castle Ruins: Side
I still need to trim the excess plastic sheeting (another job for another day); but I'm pleased with how these turned out. If you want to get a table's worth of terrain ready quickly, this is a pretty good way of doing it (you could easily do a whole table or more in a day). Can't wait to try them out on the table top!

And as always, thanks for reading.

3 comments:

  1. Bryan, thanks for kind comments love what you’ve done!

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  2. Replies
    1. Thanks! They will hopefully get their first outing at the club in a couple of weeks time.

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