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Modeling, painting and weathering pretty much fall under what gamers call "terrain," but my background is model railroads and 1/12" scale miniatures and I can't stop thinking of terrain as the ground... Building models is a lot of fun, especially when you don't need to follow the plan exactly - or at all! But even painted well, it won't look like much just sitting on a table. This page shows my efforts to create buildings and scenery as realistic as possible. It's also to provide others with links that I have found helpful, pages that show really good examples (maybe mine will be among those one day ;-) |
| This is the chamber under the storage room attached to the Wizard's Lair.
It shows the raw bricks, cast usually in Plaster of Paris, sometimes mixed either with a
small amount of grey hydraulic cement, or with Durham's Water Putty which is yellow and super hard, but expensive. It's a 3-stage process from the plain white bricks, to something that looks like real stone... |
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Here's a sample of an early model, early paint job. Both suck... I didn't use a jig to keep the walls straight, so some of the bricks stick out a bit. It may not look like much, but in scale, the bricks would probably be sticking out about a foot!!! Inevitably, glue will get on the bricks. I just went ahead and painted the raw bricks with watered down black craft paint... you can see patchy spots where the paint didn't adhere to the glue. |
| For me, the learning curve seems to consist of rushing through a project, being disappointed with the results, and then doing my homework!!
I studied the techniques on the Hirst website, where I get my molds (see Links below) and practiced on some smaller pieces. I'm going to demonstrate with this bridge... |
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Unfortunately, this is one of my early projects and so it's not constructed as well as I would like now, but you can see that the paint has filled in some of the gaps, and the color is even. |
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I've primed the bridge with Krylon's Home Decor latex spray paint... I decided to use a brown primer, in the hopes that the finished bridge would be a warm sandstone look, not the forbidding cold stone of the prison building at the top of this page. |
The idea is to cover the entire surface (with the exception of the spaces in the railings) and it looks dark at first but because of the high water content, it lightens when it dries. |
 | The paint is still wet, but you can see here how the detail on the stone arch is coming to life as the dark paint stays in the crevices... |  |
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Looks a little dark now, doesn't it? |
The color wash emphasized the crevices in the model; the dry brushing brings out the high spots, lightening them as though light were touching them...
| Using acrylic craft paints, I'm going to mix some of the brown from the wash (but not thinned) with a warm light grey for the dry brush highlights. The trick to dry brushing is exactly that - a totally dry brush - I use a flat ½" brush - wiped lightly in the paint and dabbed off on a rag (paper tower will leave lint) so that there is next to no paint on the brush. The brush is then swept over the dried wash coat, almost parallel with it, so that only paint is only deposited on the high spots. |
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Here you can see the detail that is brought out by the dry brushing... Although it's not exactly the sandstone I had envisioned, I'm pretty happy overall. After 24 hours, I'll seal the bridge with a matte urethane spray. |
At the Hirst Arts website, check out the Tips & Tricks sections as well as the building instructions
for each model for some great pointers on painting and landscaping!
To see other people's dungeons and terrain, check out my Links Page.
Here are some other modeling references:
