Like rather a lot of the scenic items I’ve been showing here recently, I picked these up ages ago – a couple of years, in fact. After getting some pretty sweet ready-to-use pieces on massive sale from the local Pet Warhouse (which all seem to have disappeared – before I could game with any of them or even photograph them all!) 😦 I thought I’d do one better and see what eBay had to offer. Turned out that eBay was actually pretty crap. While the price was alright, for my money I got four pieces, one of which arrived broken, made of a cheap, fragile resin, painted badly, and with smooth black internals visible. I mean, for your cheap Aquarium they were probably alright, but for scenery, I did the only thing I could do – put them in a tub and forgot they existed.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I found them while rummaging around looking for something else, and once again, with Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge being a thing, I recided “fuck it” and got them done. Vallejo Mud Effects on the insides of the holes to cover that horrible smooth texture, black primer, a pretty bad brownish-grey spray from Bunnings, several layers of drybrushing, and then three shades of weathering powders mixed with brush-on matte varnish added and tissue-wiped to give some variation to the colour. A tiny application of my Sepia-Black mix of Vallejo model dip in a few spots to uneven-out where the powders dried too uniform, and we’re done. As out models show, they’re an ok size for line-of-sight blockers and will work well enough across most genres.
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
Your painting has certainly elevated the pieces, and have a far more natural feel than the normal painting you see on pieces like this. Very useful in gaming terms and would look at home on virtually any board required
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Thanks Dave, making them look decent is enough for me, but the thing I lke most about these (andmodels like them) is that they provide a low-stress chance to play with weathering techniques I can then carry across to much more important models. 🙂
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You made them look as good as any “dedicated” scenery piece sculpt out there, as far as the pictures tell! Those new Idoneth Deepkin would feel so immersed! *double pun.
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Thanks mate – you’re too kind, I think though! (and a badoom-tish for the pun!)
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Yup, looks good! If you wanted to take them one step further I guess you could add some Tufts or little bushes, but really – 100% workable as they stand.
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I thought of that, (and often add tufts to terrain, as you know) but leaving them bare makes them a little more versatile across even the most arid wasteland landscapes.
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You’ve turned those around nicely – I’ve seen that kind of thing for aquariums plenty of times and it always looks really naff (frankly I pity the poor fish) but you’ve turned them into something really decent.
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Thanks mate – they’ll work well as peripherary pieces, or combined into an area with other scenery. They’d look a bit dull just placed on the tabletop in isolation I think. 🙂
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These look great and I remember you showing off some really cool aquarium terrain before. It is something I forget about but I will definitely have to look around in the area near me to see if I can find anything interesting in the near future.
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Yeah, this kind of thing can really provide a good “drop it down” bit of terrain or in caes like these – give a decent starting point. And so often they’re much, much cheaper than “proper” commercial tabletop scenery!
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Absolutely. I could see where you might get a nice cave entrance terrain piece by raiding aquarium supplies which would be a real pain to do yourself.
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