The Sentinels

I meant to post this about 10 days ago as my final Season of Scenery entry, but totally forgot what with the sci-fi scenery and getting into Space Station Zero. And thanks to a cock-up on my part, there are no sentinels. I just couldn't think of another title.

I saw a piece of scenery like this on the r/terrain subreddit and thought I'd rip it off as it looked great. So I once again covered the kitchen table with foam, cork, glue, paint and all the other bits and pieces I'd need, much to Alicia's chagrin as I'd only cleaned it off a couple of days before. 

I kicked off by cutting a rough oval shape out of half-inch foamboard and bevelling the edge. After doing that I reached for my new sharp DeWalt knife and...

...yes, five minutes in and I've managed to slice my finger open. I hunted down some Band-Aids, slapped one over the cut, put on my British stiff upper lip and soldiered on.

To make the rocky platform I used torn-up cork tile, which works so well for this kind of scenery. You can see where, in a burst of uncharacteristic forward planning, I marked out where the steps were going to be placed (me from the future: there are no steps) and a bloody fingerprint thanks to the cut soaking through the Band-Aid.

With the cork ripped to the right shape, it was hot-glued onto the foamboard.

I wanted to make a wall around the back of the platform, so I got some of the leftover XPS blocks from my ruined temple and cut them up into brick-like shapes.

But then, out of the blue, I remembered that I have these plaster bricks I bought in late 2018 and have never used. It didn't take long to hunt them down, and they're way better than the foam ones I cut up.

Using superglue I built a wall and sliced some bricks in half to make a couple of small pillars. A short length of XPS went across the top of the gap, and in a development that came as no surprise to anyone who's ever met me I broke it about ten minutes later.

I added a couple more bits of broken cork to the base, slathered it with Mod-Podge and applied a ton of sand. The lines you can just about see under the sand are for the muddy path, and that area wasn't supposed to have sand on it. But this is me, so it does.

I gathered my craft paints and started slapping on some colours. You can see at the bottom where I tried Marshy Green first only to discover it's a bit too bright, so I switched to my usual English Ivy green. The rocks got a once-over with Khaki, as did the wall.

The rocks and wall were heavily drybrushed with Pewter and Granite greys and I added some patches of Athonian Camoshade to them. Then the whole thing was plastered with homemade black wash and some daubs of brown wash.

While waiting for the washes to dry I started making the sentinels, which were to be standing stones. A couple of months ago I got an Army Painter hot wire foam cutter, then promptly forgot about it. I rescued it from the shelf in the spare room and after a quick trip to Dollar General for some C-cells (literally the only type of battery we didn't have in the kitchen junk drawer) I set about trying to carve XPS foam into exciting shapes.

Here's the result after a lot of mucking about and getting used to how quickly the hot wire goes through the foam. I didn't want  straight sides so I carved away until I got this kind of sinuous shape. I was happy with it, so I made three more and put them to one side.

In case you're wondering if I burnt my fingers on the hot wire, the answer begins with "of" and ends with "course". 

With the wash finally dry I did some more drybrushing on the rocks and wall to bring out the details and the edges, and then I used Mod Podge to apply flock. It's the usual random mix of four colours.

The path got a coat of Melted Chocolate craft paint as a basecoat for the mud.

With all of the flock done and dry, I used Stirland Battlemire to get the muddy look I was after. I slapped it on with a small spatula, shaped it a bit and left it to dry. Then I sealed all the foam, flock and mud with more Mod Podge and after taking the trash to the local dump I returned to the model. I was still shiny, which was odd because Mod Podge dries quite quickly.

Crap, I was using the gloss stuff by mistake. Christ on a bike. After determining that it was fully dry, I got the matte Mod Podge and gave the model another once-over. Noticing that the top of the jar and the inside of the lid were plastered in dry PVA, I decided to clean them up with my X-Acto knife.

And I ended up slicing into my other index finger. Ooo, a matching pair! Slapping on another Band-Aid I once again knuckled down to finishing this piece off, only to discover that the standing stones had vanished. After a bit of searching proved fruitless, the only thing I could think of is that I accidentally chucked them in the bin when throwing out leftover bits of foam and cork. In the words of EMF: Unbelievable.

This annoyed me so much that I didn't bother making more and just cracked on to finish the model.

So to cut this one short (and there was much rejoicing) I added static grass and some tufts and it was done.

I'm not too happy with it. I mean, it looks great but the static grass on the right-hand side of the path is shorter than all the other grass, because I did that bit first, left it overnight, then forgot I was using 4mm dark green grass and used 7mm lighter green grass for the rest of the base. Basically it resembles my dad's lawn after teenage me gave up mowing and buggered off down the pub.

The wall looks great, and I'll be using these bricks again. I'd love to know where I got them.

The back view. The static grass is a bit of a mess, but the tufts on the brickwork look good.

But here's the main problem: it's too bloody small. For some inexplicable reason I didn't measure the initial piece of foamboard when cutting it out, and didn't use a mini to check the scale while I was building it. It needs to be a couple of inches bigger in length and width, the rock plateau needs to be taller, and the wall should be larger. The 7mm grass looks way out of scale too; I really need to get some 2mm stuff.

Overall I guess I'm happy with it, but the loss of the XPS standing stones was a bugger that really made me just want to finish the piece simply to get it out of the way. On the upside, using the cork tiles worked really well, they look very realistic and I'll definitely be using them again in the same way on another scenic project in the future.

I played a game!

I played my first game of Space Station Zero and am currently writing it up. It was fun, but it didn't quite go the way my team of space pirates would have wanted. Stay tuned!