Monthly Archives: July 2020

“GorkaMorka Junk Piles” Mostly-Scratchbuilt Scenery

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These three pieces of terrain were something I was inspired to build way back after building my cardstock GorkaMorka fort, sometime between the game’s release in 1997 and about 2010 when I had to move from the place where I had my desert mat set up. The fort turned out really quite well for the time, based on a large piece of thick card with a few bits of additional plastic kit and random stuff added for extra detail. I should take some pics and post it up here, really. Maybe when I do my next Ork army showcase…

Anyway, the first part, where I stuck things to the card worked pretty well. The second part, where I stuck sand to the bases was ..okay. I used sand that was much too coarse, much oif which can still be seen on these. The third part, where i added thinned paint to base coat the sand was when the real disaster hit, and as you can see, warping was a pretty severe consequence. This led to them being pretty much abandoned until, well, last week. After I finished the “Dug-in Tank” that was sitting on the side of the games table, I brought these three pieces in, as they were also sitting on the games table with the vague plan to finish them, well… sometime.

The parts used are a mixture of spare GW parts (tank wheels & tracks, some regular buggy/bike wheels and parts, oil drums) parts from a 1:48-ish scale die-cast 4×4, plasticard of different types, and a lot of bits and pieces from various old broken toys, including a few G1 Transformers.

As with the tank hull piece, despite the wonkiness of the bases on these pieces, they actually finished up decently well. Like, not amazingly, but they’re now pieces I’ll be happy to decorate a tabletop with that also work across a decent number of genres and time periods. While I’ve called them “GorkaMorka” junk piles, that’s simply because of their origins, but they’ll work for most any sci-fi or post-apoc game, and even a lot of modern settings in that a pile of metal and mechanical refuse isn’t exactly something unknown to our modern world. Additionally, I now have another three submissions for Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge!

Small Scenics: Secret Weapon Miniatures’ Traffic Pylons #2

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Secret Weapon Miniatures' Traffic Pylons

Seventeen years ago, back in September of 2019 I painted the first batch of “Traffic Pylons” from Secret Weapon Miniatures. I picked up 50 of the things on sale at a local retailer in however many little baggies of them, and then set to painting half of them. They weren’t hard to paint, but in such numbers they’re pretty tedious and so my original plan of getting to the other half got a little sooner than now got sidetracked initially by my hiatus, and then by not really wanting to do them.

This second batch then had been sitting in a chinese food container-style disposable plastic tub since last year, and sitting on top of a pile of my modelling supplies and such I kept seeing them, so resolved to getting them onto an upcoming Tray. Since official Tray business is kinda suspended right now, I’m allowing myself to work on terrain as well as D&D board game models, because Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge, and also because terrain can be a bit rougher and doesn’t need that fine freehand and careful highlighting and shading like regular models do, so it fits in pretty well for allowing me to keep getting stuff done right now.

Secret Weapon Miniatures' Traffic Pylons

The only difference between this batch and the first batch is I changed the “orange” to a slightly different shade, a little darker and a little more muted. I just wanted that slight variation that you tend to see between two sets of “identical” mass-produced products that have come from different batches that then often tend to have a small but uniform difference between the two.

…and now I have 50 Traffic Pylons for my modern+ games. Hopefully this coming summer I can get my urban Tablescapes painted…