Transcript
Let me let you in on a little secret: painting terrain is not my favorite thing to do. There, I said it. But you know that ain’t stopping us today. Cause Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars <snap> is going to work again, all not their own, hunting nightmares.
So let’s get to speed painting the bits we need for the next Silver Bayonet skirmish scenario!
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we’re just prepping for the next chapter in an ongoing story! That we’re making up ourselves … and using dice to see how things turn out. And where we thank our patrons for their help in turning the pages!
All right, for Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars’ next mission we need some specified terrain for our vampires and revenants <snap>. Here’s what the scenario asks for: ruins of a small chapel, six inches by six inches. Six grave stones. A bunch of trees and rocks.
Well, we’ve got the trees and rocks covered from the last scenario <snap> so I went digging through all my MDF terrain to see if I had something that could work for this chapel thing. I do have this cemetery set from Games Workshop but I didn’t think it was quite right. The mausoleums aren’t open and we’re supposed to put clue markers inside the ruined building.
I knew I had some TT Combat MDF ruins built and in a box, so I figured this was a good opportunity to paint some up. That’s why we do this right? We play games to build and paint figures and terrain and we paint figures and terrain to play games – the perfect circle. Which doesn’t exist. <snap>
I’m just trying to see how many of these things I can do in one video.
I chose a few pieces that should nicely fit the scenario requirements along with a couple of extras just for fun. And I ordered some 3D printed gravestones because I was planning this before I took my vacation and found those Green Stuff World resin tombstones. Ah, the life of a collector, huh? Cheers to all of us.
I primed everything gray with the airbrush and having essentially no idea on how to proceed decided to goin with some sponge texturing to start. Mostly the plan was to use a bunch of washes and some dry brushing to knock these things out.
While I really like the idea of terrain, it is not my favorite thing to paint. It’s rare that I feel like taking a lot of time on terrain and this is compounded by the filming process. But as Logan Nine-Fingers says, paraphrased, it’s better to get on with a thing than live in fear of getting on with the thing. The Bloody Nine’s anti-procrastination quote.
I used a piece of pick and pluck foam from an old Chessex case for the texturing, just tore the ends off a bit and I’m using craft paint because I default to that stuff for almost all the terrain I do.
I had grand plans for making the floor look like a completely different interior surface, like with black and white tiles and grout and leaves and, well, you can see I got real lazy and went for a bit of brown and green splotches instead.
Tabletop Alchemy – quality work guaranteed.
I felt the sponge texture wasn’t quite enough so I went in with some dry brushing just to bring out some more texture and the edges of things. There’s all kinds of things I could do to this piece to make way more camera-friendly, like puttying up the wall joints and picking out the window frames in different colors, but this is speed-painting terrain, so everything’s just getting the same texture and color and we’re not worrying about details very much. We need it on the table for gameplay and not for display, right, so tabletop standard is our goal.
These wash things I have are pretty old, I’m pretty sure the company that made them has gone out of business. I never used them much on figures because they are less a wash more of a heavy shade, they kind of color everything and don’t really just sit in the recesses. So they’ve been tossed in the craft paint box and I thought this might be a good opportunity to put ‘em to work.
I kinda had this idea of making the ruins darker at the base than the top so that’s why I ran the green down into the blue. Not sure if it’s working but I’m rolling with it. I’m not sure why I went with more blue for the floor, I initially thought I’d put some brown on there but then I thought that might look too contrasty for ruins, so blue it is.
Now this piece is part of a group of similar pieces that you can stack together to make an arched wall, but I got this idea for using it as a ruined entrance to the chapel cemetery, just thought it would be cool on the table when setting up the scene. So it’s getting the same process as the main building, but I there some of this red wash on the upper walking surface and now that I’m thinking about it, I probably should have used this color for on the main building’s upper floor too. That 20/20 hindsight, always a swift kick in the pants, ain’t it?
Now this piece is from a different set of ruins and I like the brick basing. I used more of the brown paint for some sponge texture on those bricks and we’ll get some color contrast on this piece between those bricks and the walls with the red wash again.
I used some Citadel Athenian Camoushade to really green up the walls here but I kinda wish I’d gone for a brownish color, like a sepia maybe. But it is what it is, there’s no going back in speed painting. Right? I thought I read that somewhere.
Now to let all those washes dry up, nothing more fun than drybrushing some tombstones. I stuck em all on these chopsticks for priming and it just makes it easy to batch brush ‘em. Again, just a very simple process, dry brush and wash.
I also got four of these stone coffins, they are pretty fun. The ones with the half-open lids have a bunch of 3d printing supports in the interiors and I just left those in there, I thought they kinda looked like spiderwebs or something.
For the bases I used that Camoushade and then alternated Nuln Oil and Targor Rageshade on the grave markers. And on the sarcophagi I mixed three or four different Citadel washes, including my favorite Coelia Greenshade, which is a really nice blue, just to give the things more flavor.
I tried this Vallejo moss and lichen stuff, but it’s pretty bright and I should have spotted it on there in little tiny patches, I didn’t like the large swatches of it so I only did that on one. The slimy green stuff is darker and works fine, I just put a little bit here and there, I think I’d get into using these things more on more detailed models. I mean doing more detailed work than tabletop standard.
Using green and brown inks I went over all the vine things on all the tombstones and coffins. There are quite a few vines. I just randomly put down the brown and greens and just sorta mottled them up. I probably should have gone back in with a dry brush or a highlight on the vines after the fact but I didn’t, I kept moving.
Using that same sepia ink from the vines, I cut in these window frames on this stretch of ruins, just to pick them out a bit from the walls.
Oh, right, I nearly forgot the portcullis thing. I just used black ink, could have used black paint but I had a bunch of these pieces sitting on top of the regular paint box so the inks were the lazy man’s choice. The other matching arch pieces in this set, I think there are four of them, all have the portcullis bit set at different heights. This one seemed the best match for this particular scenario.
There were also these two other MDF pieces, just a couple more extra bits for the table. I decided to try out a lightening dry brush over the washes with the idea of going from the top down to the middle and letting the lower halves stay dark, just to lean into the top down gradient thing.
I think it worked out so I went on to apply that to the bigger pieces.
Now my favorite part of most terrain, I don’t know why. Flocking is always just fun to me. Probably because it’s like a wash, it’s got two steps: put down glue, put down flock. Walk away. I grabbed a couple of little containers of left over flock from other projects and just through them all down randomly. The one thing I was really looking forward to was just using straight medium green fine flock to create some moss growing over the stone or down in the crevices. I really dig this effect and I used it everywhere.
Now for the final touch – some very hastily applied ivy and shrubbery. So here’s something I’ve discovered recently: this gorilla glue superglue says it sets in 10-seconds on the package, and it’s pretty accurate. I’ve been using this Bob Smith Industries stuff for so long I just thought all superglue was the same.
It is not. The Bob Smith stuff takes forever to set, it got so frustrating that I grabbed this gorilla glue as soon as I noticed that blurb about 10 seconds. So I’ll be using this stuff from now on. Now here’s the thing, I like the replaceable tips the Bob Smith bottles have available and I’ve got a handful of them. The gorilla glue bottle doesn’t have a fine tip, but I realized the cap that screws onto the gorilla bottle is actually the same thread as the replacement caps for the Bob Smith bottles. So off-camera I cut the gorilla glue tip off at the top of the threads and put on a fine tipped replacement cap and it works great!
All right, so after I stopped shooting I added more ivy stuff to the main ruins piece and this just makes the model more expensive. I could have used like two or three packages of ivy on this thing and that would have been like $40 in just ivy. So it just got a few small bits. It also got the moss flock in some of the cracks and wall joins, but I did a very sloppy job on those. But anyway, in this particular case, half-assed is better than not done at all! At least for today.
So there we go, all the individual pieces, they’re fine, they’re usable. You can see that I worked really hard to make them stand out from the gaming mat, the contrast is stellar. I realized halfway through these were gonna blend in almost like camouflage on my mat, but, you know, I can just say I was going for “realism”. Ha. Well, it is what it is. But the group will make a perfect setup for the scenario as intended. You can see I added some ivy and stuff to the upper walls of the centerpiece and overall that thing really needs some additional paintwork to kinda make it actually look finished, like maybe painting the window frames and stuff. My two favorite bits are the red leaves on the upper floor and the mossy bits added to that low brick wall, those two things came out just like I thought they would. I like the overall color of the ruins too, I just wish I’d gone with maybe a more neutral gray, but that’s really just in the context of this particular game mat.
Anyway, that’ll do it, we’re all set to play the next game and find out how Otillie and the rest far against the undead. So I guess I better get to writing and playing, so I can get that show in the can.
See ya!