With the Rest of the Garbage...

Space Terrain for X-Wing

A buddy of mine got the X-Wing Miniatures Game and a bunch of ships for it. While I do not have any ships for it, this gave me a perfect opportunity to scratch build and sculpt some cool terrain for the game.

Using chunks of styro, plastic card and various bits, I put together two good sized pieces of space debris that could be used as chunks of space wreckage from a battle or stuff jettisoned before making the jump to light speed. I glued it all together with a combination of super glue for plastic on plastic and hot glue when I needed to secure pieces to the styro directly.

I based coated each in a sloppy, heavy coat of black paint. This was supposed to be space junk, so a little rough finish wasn't going to hurt anything. Once this had dried, I went back over everything with a hasty stippling of grey, making sure to try to leave some of the black showing through, especially in the deeper recesses and between the plates and creases. After the grey had dried, I went and added some color, stippling on red and a very pale tan (almost off white) color to color whole plates, leaving some of the grey and black showing through. I also added some red to random section and along some of the linear shapes. I painted a few stripes and some characters on some panels.

The final steps were to give the whole thing a rather haphazard drybrushing of the same off white focusing on the edges and a light dusting across the flat surfaces to show wear. Each of the two pieces then got a splotching and splattering of Army Painter Strong Wash to add grime. This I tried to lay on a bit thicker in the deeper parts and where many pieces collected. It helped to show where grease and space grit had collected and hid some of the heavier glue joins in those areas.

The other project was this guy!

As a bit of Star Wars accent terrain, I thought it would be fun to make an asteroid out of which was popping a hungry, juvenile Giant Space Slug. While not big enough to swallow a Millennium Falcon, it could still menace smaller fighters and just looked cool.

Sculpted from epoxy on a wire armature, i tackled this like any sculpting project. The main body and head were done as a single piece with the details of the upper teeth sculpted as part of the main body. the lower jaw was sculpted as a separate piece and then joined to the rest of the piece with more sculpted putty. A little shaving and some more putty work brought the final head shape together. The last part of the build was the eye stocks which were just bits of wire pressed into the side of the head with a little putty added to shape and texture them.

I should note that the tapering at the bottom of the sculpt is intentional and ends in a centimeter of exposed wire. This allowed me to press the sculpt into the hole in the asteroid he would be popping out of. Once I had pressed a fitting anchor hole in and was sure that the only parts showing were the fully sculpted bits, I set the mini aside. 

The asteroid was shaped from a block of blue styro. The basic texture was carved out with a blade and my thumb nail. I then applied several blobs of superglue all over the thing and spritzed them with accelerator. The resulting chemical reaction created some nice textural effect. After this had settled down, I sprayed the entire thing with rattle can black paint, knowing that this would result in further texturing caused by the break down of the foam. The final piece was then given a thick coat of brushed on black, over which I did a quick wetbrushing of brown. I then painted the whole rock with Army Painter Strong Tone dip. This is different than the small bottle stuff used for shading miniatures and is a full-on lacquer and sealer which I needed for this anyhow. I highlighted the whole thing with a much lighter brown.

Once the paint had dried, a little hot glue was squirted into the hole for the beast and he was pressed in, making sure that all that showed was his pale monstrous form.

I hope these add a bit of fun to my friend's games,

-Eli