first deadzone terrain piece finished

Well the first piece is finished. Over the last week I've applied a bunch of weathering powders, some decals and glued on some little "posters" I've printed out. I've tried some different methods of using the powders mixed with washes which worked fairly well. I also have been using 3 different tones of the rust series. I do have to say that it is quite time consuming and I should maybe save these (or even sell them off) for very particular effects and that after seeing the results Anton achieved using modelmates rust spray, it definitely seems a better way to go for large pieces like this.  Perhaps a combination though I am not unhappy with the powder results.

a decal by the door plus powders & washes

The print outs didn't actually print that well - I cheated and just used some old photo paper in the inkjet at work, and some of them faded or misprinted. To be honest, many of them are still usable since they will match the aged/weathered look of the tiles.

fuel storage sign, covered with washes and powders

I am debating whether I should actually glue some fuel tanks to the side of the building or not, I am still leaning towards not, since they will be more useful loose to be placed wherever you need (they could go on the roof too.

warning sign posted and powders & powders/washes

Using the grid on the top I felt it looked really smart to have the rusty wash pool along the grid lines. I tried to use a marauder boot with some paint to leave boot prints but it didn't work very well. Instead I just ended up cleaning (not really the right word) up the boot print with some freehand. It looks OK, but not as nice as I'd hoped.

small decal - sorry for blurry photo

I am really happy with the deadzone terrain - I've mentioned to some friends it's right in between the necromunda bulkheads (which require some card) and the platformer/hexagon stuff (which are more complex to assemble, but can provide much more complex buildings). Looking forward to getting more put together - I hope to get some games in soon.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt7 (last)

The final post!  A week of necromunda terrain photos has come to an end.  I'm sure you'll be seeing more of these once we get some games started back up again.  So the final step after the weathering powders was a very light to light spray of black paint to give a soot effect.  I held the can pretty far from the pieces so it wouldn't just paint all over everything but give a nice dotted effect.  Between the weathering powder and this spray, it really helped to pull all the disparate parts of these terrain pieces together.

front

back

I also gave the undersides a much heavier spray.  Yes you mostly can't see the bottoms of steps and such, but in necromunda you are often leaning over to get a model's eye view and I couldn't put up with the thought that the bottoms of the steps would look perfectly clean.  This was a quick way to resolve that and it added a bit of extra depth to the soot being sprayed from a couple angles.  Then all it needed was sealing, and a quick touch up of water effects over the blood and they were done.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt6

Close to the light at the end of the tunnel now.  The pieces were painted & washed, suitably cluttered and had some rubble & blood effects.  The second last step (I'm not counting sealing, that was going to be required anyways for terrain this nice!) involved applying some weathering powders to give some rust effects.  I ended up cheaping out a bit on this step as apparently it's better practice to use a few different shades of the powders to really get the best effect, but I only started reading about using them after picking up a single pot and I was impatient so one colour would have to be enough.  Here's the final large walkway piece.

left side

right side

back

Applying the weathering powders was fun and easy.  I highly recommend using some rubbing alcohol as your "binding" agent (binding in quotes as you could still brush it off, but it held it well enough that it didn't all spray away under a coat of varnish) - I tried a few different methods I found online and determined that combining two of them really did well for me.  In future I will test with using one colour per method to see which works best.  Method one is apply some powder dry and then use the end of a brush (not the brush end) to drop some rubbing alcohol above the powder and let it run down.  Method two is once you have that wet streak - get some powder and kinda flick it off your brush onto the wet part.  Always do this over some paper so you can kinda save the powder.  You won't save it all and I just threw it into a "shit mix" of flock that I throw any kind of random flock bits into.  I suspect it will work best with a darker colour using method one and a lighter colour for method two but I could be wrong.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt5

Now these pieces were starting to come together.  All the junk piles and miscellaneous crap made them look busier and would also really influence the amount of cover provided from various angles.  I used various types of flock and foliage in certain places (tried to keep the foliage to a minimum) which was especially helpful in hiding the pennies used to weigh down the pieces.  This had the added benefit of avoiding the "clean" look.  Even though there was a bunch of junk around, if there wasn't any dirt or rubble it might still seem a bit too put together.  Here's another one of the small "gangways" which have steps that will allow gangers to get up the walkways from the ground floor.

right side

left side

I also decided to put a bit of blood splatter on each piece, some places it was obvious (like on this one, the serrated edge of that giant gear doesn't look very nice!) and on others I used it where the piece was starting to look a little plain.  Basically painted some red down and gave it some washes with red and brown inks, and then used some water effects to give it a glistening effect.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt4

After getting these all assembled, sprayed metallic and washed with inks - they still looked really clean and not very "underhive". So I decided I needed to add some junk to give them character. Here's one of the smaller what I call "gangways" - not sure why I've given it that name but just to differentiate from the walkways (still not digging the "catwalk" term)

left side

right side

What I did was take a bunch of various bits I had collected for making terrain and while I was spraying the trophies for the Canadian Open this year - I left them in a box behind what I was spraying.  So all the bits got some spray from gold, silver, bronze, and red.  Then I gave them a quick spritz with some grey and necrotic flesh.  Some got some green wash and some got some blue wash.  I mixed up these bits and glued them on, along with some bits of cloth and bits of bamboo sticks.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt3

I used one of the shorter set of structure bits to make a long and low walkway for this piece.  Once I had all the pieces assembled, my next step was to spray them all with the army painter metallic paint.  After that I used a mixture of the soft tone and strong tone inks - also from army painter to wash over all the pieces.  Some pieces got just soft tone, some got just strong and some got a mix.

left side

right side

This was the piece where I tried using a cut up longer railing and I ended up having to rip it off and use one of the actual laser cut smaller railings because it would have interfered with the connectors.  The balance of this piece also (along with the last piece) convinced me I needed some sort of weight along the bottom to make sure any heavy models wouldn't tip it over, so there are some pennies glued in inconspicuous areas.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt2

Here is another piece of the necromunda walkway scenery I have been working on this year.  I bought a couple sets of Micro Art Studio "catwalk set" made of laser cut HDF - funny name - makes me think of this.  I think it may have been more flexible if I left all the stairs separate and space to attach them, but at the same time it would also make setup take a lot longer and there would be the possibility of damage occurring while putting the table together.  So for the most part I assembled each piece with one set of stairs attached.

right side

left side

back left

Assembly was pretty quick and easy.  White glue was all that was really required.  You do need to be a bit careful, as I did break one piece just from pressing down too hard on it to try and pop it into place, but overall they went together really well.  The one thing I will mention about assembling them is I tried cutting up the long railings to use as short railings that would look a bit different, but you need to pay attention to where you will be connecting them.  They came with special connectors as well which are handy to string a bunch together temporarily.

Terrain: Necromunda Walkways pt1

I'm going to take some advice and split up these posts to stretch this accomplishment out.  Late last year we began talking about playing some more necromunda again this year.  The one thing I definitely was missing from my scenery collection is enough walkways to easily connect all the rest of my necromunda terrain and provide alternate routes for juves and gangers to traverse the gaming area.  More walkways will also help to fill a full 8'x4' table so 2 games can go on at once!

Here is the first piece.  As I go through the posts I will explain how I got them to this point.

right side

left side

back

These took significantly more work than I had anticipated to really give them some character.  I am really happy with the final outcome though and it is a very large project complete which is always positive.