Building Bug Canyon Part II

The glue was mostly dry on my terrain project, so I jumped right into the painting stage. The boards and the separate pieces were spray painted with a Krylon H2O black spray paint. Most of that was done here and there over the last few nights. Tonight I had really planned on getting more done but the rain clouds came blowing in. I hate it when the weather forecast is right about rain. I was able to get one layer of the base color brown on the tops of my rock formations. This was a standard interior flat house paint. Latex based, not enamel. A picture or two will tell the story better.

I was rushed getting all this stuff back inside before it started raining or I would have laid out the individual pieces (seen on the left) where they belong along the seams of the joined terrain boards. I'll have to take all this stuff back outside again when I start painting the sides and lower surface brown.

The picture above shows a better view of all 8 board sections. Each is 2x4. I've got 28 separate pieces to place along those seams and another 8 pieces I'm painting up to use as optional pieces for changing the configuration around in later games.

The reason I painted the top surface first is that I intend on leaving this somewhat smooth. I'll be taking this color paint and mixing in some sand texture product before I start painting the rest. When I return to the tops of these split rocks I'm going to attempt a faux painting crackle technique. So essentially I'm going to have these cracked rock formations in a crack pattern with a crackle finish. I crack myself up sometimes.. :)

My goal is to get some more paint on these boards tomorrow, but with a busy weekend coming up, Sunday afternoon is looking to be more realistic.

Building Bug Canyon Part I

My intent is to make an actual web tutorial article of this project for the following Starship Troopers fan site: http://www.fednet.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index.html
..but for now I thought I'd just share a bit of what I've been doing. As I mentioned, this is going to eventually resemble a dried out mud flat on a large scale. Imagine if all the water in an ocean or great lake rapidly evaporated away leaving a roughly level but deeply cracked surface..

So I started with a plan drawn out on pink foam.


This started out as 114 distinct sections, but I've since eliminated a few and combined others so maybe only a hundred remain.. All sections needed to be cut twice in 2" thick pink foam for a total height of 4" from the lowest ground level. That's a lot of cutting which was done by hand with an old kitchen knife and razor. I enlisted the help of some local gaming pals later in the cutting stage. One of them is also making a matching game board half the size which will have a crater hole as the dominant feature. What he's done so far looks awesome but I don't want to steal his thunder. Here are two pics of my boards with all the cut pieces. There are 28 pieces that are removable and overlap connecting board edges.


Here is a close up of the Roughnecks investigating the new game board.


You'll also notice that this is not the only construction project going on in the room..

June 20th, 2007

I got a little bit of gaming stuff done today. One of my current miniature gaming passions is the Starship Troopers miniatures game by Mongoose Publishing.

http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/

Anyway..I've been hoarding figures for both the Arachnid and Human armies. Yesterday I received the support missile set for the Mobile Infantry and today I worked on getting them assembled. These are multipiece metal models and required a fair amount of fiddling around to get them assembled without gluing my fingers together.

I also started work on a large terrain board for a game I'm running at an upcoming convention. It will be 4'x16' when finished. I hope to post a few work in progress shots as work on this advances more. So far I've just been cutting a lot of pink insulation foam. The end effect I hope to achieve is a look reminiscent of a dried lake bed except that the cracks are deep and wide enough for figures to move within during the game.

Day Zero June 19th, 2007

I never thought I'd start a blog. But here I am. I hope to capture some of my RPG and miniature gaming activities here. The gaming hobby has always been a large and fun part of my life since I was in grade school. Those were the Atari days..but I was playing Dungeons and Dragons instead. More on that. I would decide to start a blog during a lightning storm..time to go..