Aircraft Crash Board

The idea is to build a small terrain board (roughly 2’ x 2’) featuring an aircraft that has crashed into jungle.

Constraints and choices:

• It must have fairly small surface area, I don’t have a big storage space.
• Playable for 28mm – 25mm warband type skirmish games. I’m thinking Drowned Earth, 7TV, maybe Judge Dredd. So handful of models.
• Historical plausibility. No weird alien plants etc.
• No need for modularity. I want to be able to model cool stuff, and this is more intended as a showcase piece.
• Playability in the sense that figure bases fit, and there aren’t too many sloped surfaces.

What I have so far:

• Crashed Aircraft STL files from Printable Scenery: https://www.printablescenery.com/product/crashed-aircraft/
• Above partly already, the printer is hot as a write.
• Ikea Lack table as a the base board. I’ve few spares and have used them successfully before to build terrain. Cheap, light and durable.
• Cheap jungle plants from eBay.
• General modelling materials.

Below is a super rough pencil drawing. The plane is enough in scale to fit to the Ikea board, leaving enough space to fit models in between.

I started off with cleaning up with prints. The parts are printed with FDM printer, and I want to smooth down the layer lines.

Going down with various grits of sandpaper and a Dremel.

I don’t mind a slightly rough surfaces at places, it’s a crashed air plane after all.

Quick update. Printing is progressing well, I just put the last bits to print overnight. The forecast says rain for the weekend — perfect time to TerrainFest! The plan is to get the primer on the printed parts and start building up the layout.

Parts are printed and mostly sanded. I started laying out the board.

As originally intended, I’m using an Ikea Lack table as the base board. It’s 55cm square, so just under 2’ but I’m fine with it. Cheap, light and fairly durable.

The raised areas are built with basic styrofoam to save weight. Glued with PVA and some cocktail sticks to hold them in place. I’ve shaped them very roughly with a knife, creating an absolute mess of polystyrene balls.

I started covering and smoothing the polostyrene with Geek Gaming modelling compound. New material for me, but seems to be working rather nicely.

The aircraft pieces aren’t glued on yet, I will be priming them separately before I start blending them into the board.

Today I’m still going to get the primer on the plane and finish bulking up rest of the raised areas, to have everything dying for tomorrow so that I can start slapping some paint on.

Cracking on with the project!

The plane was primed Skeleton Bone last night. I will be painting it white with an airbrush, the theory is that skelly bone gives a good weathered base.

I glued the parts of the plane to the board and blended them in with some PVA, sand and modelling compound.

The with the modelling compound PVA’d sand dry, I got a coat of primer on. I used Army Painter terrain primer ”wilderness and woodland”.

After the terrain primer was dry, it was time to start slapping on some colour to the raised areas.

I used my trusty artists acrylics from big tubes. Applied in very slapdash manner, all will be blended in with washes and drybrushing later.

One observation on the modelling compound: it dries a bit brittle. So parts were chipping off when I was brushing on the paint, which was alright as I was able to cover any patched with paint. If I wanted to avoid that, it would have been a good idea the give the whole piece a coat of PVA before painting.

While the acrylics were drying, I went with the airbrush to add white colour to the plane itself.

Next step: bringing up rocky details with a drybrush.

I made a mix of neutral grey, light yellow and a bit or raw sienna.

Then drybrushed the parts I wanted to end up rocky with big brush.

Then to blend it back in and bring in some natural tones, I made wash with green, brown acrylics and water. Nasty looking stuff.

Getting carried away with painting, I forgot to take a photo of the end result with the was. You can kind of here see it in the background.

Below is the cheat code for dying time: cheapo hot air gun from Amazon.

First pass on weathering the plane. I intend to go back as final steps to add some pigment powders and perhaps some overgrown grass. But first, some colour tones on with an airbrush.

To give the resemblance of the engine have been on fire, I airbrushed on some Vallejo black shade wash.

And Army Painter strong tone to weather the interiors and adding some colorisation here and there.

Here’s the whole build after the drybrush, washes and weathering stages. Next up is the ground cover.

For the ground cover I used the classic three Javis colour tones and some heavier clumps. I sealed everything twice.

Quite happy how it looks!

Next I’m going to do a quick rattle can varnish for added protection and start planning the trees and other bits that will go on top.