Comrade's Wargames

I’m having a great time lately exploring textures and weathering techniques, particularly on terrain since larger pieces offer a more expansive surface to play around with. Earlier this month I knocked out some simple terrain pieces for my grimdark battle board: a few cylindrical shapes that could work as silos, tanks, or other types of industrial ephemera.

The pieces themselves are from the Robotix toy line. These were modular building kits from the 1980s that could be used to make interesting spaceship-type creations. They even had some motorized gears and other accessories for making your stuff move!

Anyway, my buddy Karl hooked me up with a pile of leftover Robotix pieces a while back. As you can see, the plastic pieces have wonderful surface designs, with lots of valves, hatches, ladders, and other interesting details sculpted on.

I set to work grimdark-ifying them for use on my Inq28 battlefield. That entailed some heavy texturing, first with Vallejo pumice paste, followed by some haphazard sprinkles of sanded grout. I just wanted some variable textures on the large flat surfaces to create a little visual interest and pick up a drybrush.

I started by basecoating these silos with gray Rustoleum primer, then sprayed on couple muted colors … a light sage blue in the photo above, and red/white for the other two. The sage blue ended up a little too subtle, but that’s OK, it was a good starting point for all of the painting to come.

After that, I splashed on a heavy coat of my homemade black wash. I keep a bottle of this stuff close at hand whenever I’m working on grimdark terrain. It’s my personal recipe, rarely replicated precisely each time, but mostly involves Future Floor Wax, a dollop of black craft paint, a couple squirts of brown sepia ink, and water to achieve the desired consistency. It dries really fast and adds a protective coating, too!

From there, I broke out the sponges and dabbed on various browns, oranges, and yellows to achieve the rust effect. I also used some good old fashioned Dirty Down Rust in a few places, but that stuff is really too expensive to use at scale for terrain.

I was particular pleased with those recessed socket holes … I found some perfectly sized little ventilation fan bits to place inside the recessed areas. A perfect union of random junk I’ve been carrying around with me for 10+ years!

For the final touch, I affixed some Necromunda-inspired propaganda posters on the silos, toward the bottom at eye level for 28mm figures.

All in all I’m very pleased with these little scatter pieces. They’ll work great as objectives and tall blocking terrain on my grimdark battle board. I was particularly pleased with the creative process … I don’t think I used any paintbrushes smaller than a fat craft brush on these pieces. Most of the work was done with a spray can and a ripped up piece of sponge!

I’ll try to get these pieces on the battlefield ASAP, maybe for the next session in our Seditious Whispers Inq28 campaign. Stay tuned!