New Terrain

So for quite awhile now I've been wanting to make a themed board. Currently for our games we have a mix and match selection of terrain, and a number of the guys have a Zuzzy mat (all in different phases of painting). So the boards are functional, but there's nothing awesome going on with them.

We've all been talking about stepping up our terrain and working on some boards. I imagine in the next few months we'll get a pretty good run at new stuff built.

I started working on mine on Sunday. I've wanted to do a 'Snow World' board for quite awhile and have been thinking about how to do it. I've decided rather than using foam to create the base I'll also give the zuzzy mat a shot and see if I can paint it in such a way that it looks like a snow field.

For terrain I was thinking it would be cool to have it look like a Tau Resource Outpost that has been abandoned/attacked. I am thinking of littering pieces of PVC around to serve as 'oil pipes' or some other liquid extraction that would be going on this world. I'd like to do a better forrest than the train set trees I've been using, and I'd love to play with some Water Effects and make some frozen lakes.

So I pulled out some bottles and bits and got to putting something together. I new that one of the centerpieces would be the main Tau Pump Facility.

Here you can see the first mock up. I've cut the ends of the PVC pipe and twisted them up to make them look like they've been blown up/sabotaged. I'm just putting everything on a foam board base, and I'm hopint it doesn't flex to much when I actually flock it. At this point I'm looking at it not sure if this is going to work out so well. So I hit it with primer.Hey, finally something to use that cheap shit primer on and it worked ok. Even if it did splatter a little it only added some texture and that helps! It's looking more like a building and a little less like a pile of junk...
Here's where I ended up with this piece on Sunday. I pulled the pipe and hit it with some metal spray I had from another project from yesteryear. I pulled out my airbrush and hit the edges of the building with a grey and a little more white. I didn't want to get more painting done, but I added a little electrical tape just to give it some distinction. While it isn't perfect it certainly made the building almost instantly look more Tau-like. I'll need to do some painting (details like the antenna and the door, maybe rust on the pipes, certainly battle damage/burns) and of course the flocking. I figure the snow will hide details like the words on the pipes. However I don't want to do the basing until after I paint the mat so I can see how to best make them look alike.

So I had some 'left over' bits so I figured I try to make a few smaller pieces. Here's what I ended up with at the end of the day.
I'll go through my bits box and look for other things I can add to the buildings, but even as they are right now they are functional for terrain.

I ordered the zuzy mat today, but that is going to take 2-3 weeks to get here so this project will probably be slow going until it arrives.