Draconis does…. TerrainFest 2023 (Deadzone, KoW Vanguard and Mordheim)

2nd October 2023

Last year (and into this) I built a lot of terrain for Deadzone, using up all of my standard tiles. Earlier this year I picked up a Mantic crazy sci-fi box – it did have some deadzone terrain sprues, but none of it were standard tiles sadly…. Plenty of the 1.5 length bits and some triangle pieces I could have done with during the project ?

Recently I picked up a box of bits from my local store owner, and, although most of it is repeats of spare stuff I can’t use, there were some ordinary deadzone tiles in there – enough to build another building.

So, I need to come up with a plan of how to make best use of my very limited remaining stock so that it is a worthwhile addition to my deadzone terrain set.

2nd October 2023

For Kings of War Vanguard I have a set of terrain objectives to work on.

Should be straight forward I hope. They were going to be part of my Kings of War Vanguard project that is ongoing, but with Terrain Fest underway they have been promoted to here ?

8th October 2023

I found myself in somewhat of a quandary…. I couldn’t quite decide what to build with my limited supply of tiles (and having no doors…).

So, as I often do, I decided to knock up some sketches in order to get my grey cells going. But first I needed to take better stock of what tiles I had available.

Initially I thought I was going to make a 2×2 cube block building – but that wouldn’t make use of any of the triangle tiles, and I felt that I should try to make use of them since I now had some.

Finding some scrap paper I sketched out some thoughts on potential layouts, then added more and more….

Feels like some progress – and I think I will do the same soon for my Mordheim/Vanguard construction thoughts.

9th October 2023

With some relief (not making any progress was getting me down a little) I managed to get construction underway at the end of the weekend.

First off cleaning and prepping the tiles – an important stage to ensure a good close fit on the joints.

Then into the construction. I finally decided on a mix of a couple of designs.

Thinking back to my main Deadzone project I remembered my build plan was about modularity, so I opted to break down a couple of the designs into parts, and working out extra pieces that would be needed to make it work.

To paraphrase, and in the voice of, Bardic Broadcasts (regarding Heroquest)… ‘Look at the Modularity’ ?

Since I had no doors I have just left open sections to represent entrances. This does mean that I actually used less of the 3” tiles than planned, so have some left over for potential other construction.

However, I don’t want to rush in and just use them up, so I will think on this more.

11th October 2023

With work and other things I haven’t made any significant further progress, so may be a bit of a hard push at the end of the month.

To try to keep a little focus on the terrain work I laid out a few rough designs for some Mordheim style buildings that could be used for several fantasy games.

These will be constructed using foam core board, balsa wood, match sticks and coffee stirring sticks as the main materials.

Adding these to the existing work initially seems like a bit of a mistake seeing how far I have got so far – but I figure that if I get creatively stuck on the Deadzone I can come across to these and hopefully still get some overall progress – we will see how well that pans out when it comes to the end of the month ?

16th October 2023

Over the weekend I managed a couple of early morning rattle can sessions.

While prepping the terrain for spraying I decided that I would also paint the barricades from my Star wars Legion boxes….

They all had quite prominent mould lines, but conscious that I had limited time and needed to get the spraying underway I just cleaned off the most obvious ones. (Sundancer – plenty left for you to spot ?)

The Deadzone terrain was to be sprayed red first, and the Vanguard terrain black. I also decided to spray half of the SWL barricades red first and half black, to give some more tonal differences in the final look.

They then all had a zenithal spray of grey, followed by a lighter spray of white (although the rocks for Vanguard only had a very light touch of white). This ate through the spray cans quite quickly….

It was then that I noticed I had a duplicate of one of the stones in the Vanguard objective set, but was missing another. Oh well, can’t be helped now.

Next up for the Deadzone terrain was some of the yellow splash colour that I used in my previous project.

I masked up the pieces, using some clear tape (low tack) as I ran out of my masking tape.

With the last remnants of the yellow can I just about managed to cover all the parts I wanted to.

The fun part with masking is always in the peel off. I had a little bleed under with the tape, but where it was looking too much I scraped away at it with my finger nail. Since it had three more layers of paint underneath scraping it back here makes it look like wear and tear revealing the primer underneath – since it was exactly that ?

18th October 2023

With core colours down it was time to add some detail and weathering, to hopefully bring things to life a bit more.

Started out with a thin black wash over all of the panels.

Followed this up with edge highlighting across all of the edges, using a white paint pen. This stage is pretty tedious to be fair, but does (in my opinion) give a good result.

Using black legion contrast I sponged it on in numerous places across the terrain pieces to add areas of wear, chipping and general dirt. When the sponge started to get a bit dry I would then use it to smudge areas wear on the surfaces, before loading up again with contrast.

Next up it was adding some black templar contrast to the edges of all of the battle damaged areas.

With this done I then turned to a brown contrast and carried out the same process.  In some places I overlaid the brown on top of the black sponging, in others it was separate.

At some points I felt that perhaps I had gone a bit too far – but when I took a break for a bit and came back it looked ok to me ?

Still more to get done, but it’s moving along now.

Need to roll the brown out across the rest of the pieces, add some metal chipping, some more blood splatters and also perhaps some spot colours around the small crane arm piece and the small barricades.

I quite enjoy the weathering stages with sponge work – just need to find the correct balance for it really.

21st October 2023

I carried on by rolling out the brown weathering stages to all of the pieces.

The small crane arm piece received some more detailing work, adding some hazard markings (health and safety is paramount in the deadzone) by painting yellow then masking off and stippling on black. Then there was extra chipping and weathering over that to make it look well used.

I added extra colour to the roof sections by colouring in the small triangles with blue. I masked off with tape, then stippled on some shades of blue. This was followed up by a weathering pass of sanding. I sanded panel edges and also the newly painted blue triangles to make them look well worn.

For the metal walkway extensions I used some of my new rust effect texture to add rust patches across them. May have done a little too much, but maybe its been very rainy there…

The barricades and walkways were painted up and weathered too…

Then I went back to the crane piece and added some more detail and weathering, plus a small radioactive symbol on the side. This was one I printed out quite some time back – just cut out, glued on and weathered a little.