Strange New Worlds – a TerrainFest of alien forestry

One minor flaw in the number of ground base parts supplied is that when you use all of them, you can’t build too many tall plants before you end up with empty spaces. This could easily represent plants that have been cut down by the local villagers/xenos. But this is me, and I like to do things as complete as possible.

Ripping apart some of the cheap plastic plants from Temu (see earlier posts), I glued them back together and filled the trunk so I could add a magnet at the end.

They’ll get painted up accordingly (at least the trunk will) and allow me to easily build tall trees and fill in gaps along the way.

I’m not going to be able to post any more updates this week, as we are now on holiday in Rome!

October has gone so fast – I’d love it if this TerrainFest could last as long as the Spring Cleaning Challenge. Next weekend I’ll try and finish what I can, and hope that it’s enough.

Here’s a base piece which I’m happy is now 99% complete.

I’ve added quite a few of the Gamers Grass paper plants, along with some little floral tufts. You can see I also painted up some of the MTG resin Monstera (cheese plant) leaves and added those in too.

As final details, I’ve dotted around a fair few snail shells, with a glitter nail polish mucus trail – to make the jungle look lived in.

I’d not heard of the Codex Seraphinianus that Gerry @avernos recommended. It’s an absolutely gorgeous, batshit crazy looking book which I’m definitely going to keep an eye out for.

However, I do have Art Forms in Nature by Ernst Haeckel- which I’ve had for many years now. This book has some absolutely gorgeous spreads showing really alien looking but realistic flora and fauna. I’ve used these as inspiration to give ideas for that balance of fantasy jungle and distant worlds.

Here’s some (what I think are) awesome progress pictures showing how all the base pieces are coming along.

I’ve been working away with contrast and drybrushing to get the first 4-5 of the 10 base sections completed. I love the brightness of them, and this style of bright hue is definitely outside of my comfort zone!

With those colours all in, I’ve put the magnetised flora pieces onto the bases so that I can arrange the plants closely but without getting in the way.

Using contrast paints, I’ve started blocking in broad groups of colour. This is always the stage in a terrain project where things look at their clumsiest. I’m letting the colours bleed into each other a fair bit, allowing the paint to do some of the blending for me. It looks messy, but helps me establish the feel and get that balance of alien world and fantasy jungle.

Once I’m happy with the over-all colours, I’ll then start drybrushing, adding additional washes and picking out details.

Colours I’m using are GW contrast:

• Gutrippa Flesh
• Plaguebearer Flesh
• Aeldari Emerald
• Nazdreg Yellow
•  Blood Angels Red
• Gryph Hound Orange
• Shyish Purple
• Skeleton Horde

I’ve sprayed all these bases using a kind of zenithal priming. It’s harder to get true zenithal on very flat pieces, but I tried.

Sprayed with grey, then white before finishing with a dusting of wraithbone. It instantly makes all the precious work look more cohesive, and allows me to see what order I can start painting the different textures and elements.