Category Archives: Wargame Scenery

Mini-scenic items, from 40k 3rd Edition

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Hell of a week. Back to work, the beginning of daylight savings, a local heatwave, and a close family member in hospital. They’re out now, and ok-ish and the other things have resolved themselves as much as possible, but I’ve had little interest in picking up the brush outside of my lunch hour meditation. When I’ve been home I’ve just binged on trash TV via Netflix and wasted hours and hours on Mad Max and now Destiny’s expansion on PS4. The only real respite was a bit of Zombicide with friends on Friday night. Now if I can just convince Orez to buy a PS4 and Destiny…

Last night and today I did these. Gluing and so forth yesterday and painting today. Mostly because I found them in a little baggie, and decided it would be nice to just get something done from start to finish, even something as simple as these, which it turns out are from the 40k 3rd edition starter boxed set. So I’ve had them since 1998, or 17 years. Oh. Apparently I’ve lost one of the little bits, as I only had the three when I should have had 2 of each. I must have just shoved them to one side and forgot about them until whenever I was sorting through stuff and chucked them into a zip-lock. I might have decided to save them to incorporate them into something more grand, which clearly never eventuated. Whevever. Now they’re done and have been added to my collection of little bits of scatter terrain.

40k 3rd Edition ruined bits.

Sprayed black, a mixture of cat litter and coarse sand applied. Painted black again. Drybrushed through VMC Black Grey, Basalt Grey and then VGC Bonewhite. Varying shades of weathering powders added for colour, and then another Bonewhite drybrush on top. Matt varnish, done! The technique isn’t especially interesting, and I’m only writing it down here so I’ve got a record of it in case I find more of these little blighters and want to keep it consistent.

Dark Angels stalk through the ruins.

Undead warriors lurch through the shell of a ruined building.

I was going to add some static flock to them at first, but decided against it for the same reason I avoided doing so on the Citadel Craters I painted a year ago. I’d like these small bits of ruins to be of indeterminate age. I want to be able to use them in a game of Bolt Action or 40k to represent a building that was shelled by artillery that very morning, as well as to use them to represent a small corner of a town like Frostgrave, or Osgilliath, or any generic place in most any climate. Adding grass instantly means it’s been there for awhile, which I wanted to avoid.

They’re a little smaller than I’d like, but they’re decent. More of an obstacle to movement than something that provides any cover, as the pictures-for-scale shots show.

Which colours? These colours.

Which powders? These powders.

Hopefully I’ll have something more interesting up in this coming week, but hey, at least I painted something this week…

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains

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Another blast from the past today. Well, not that long ago in some ways and a long bloody time in another.

These scenery pieces, more of the Grendel stuff I picked up in the mid-1990’s sat like so many others in storage for pretty much 20 years until 2013, when I finally got them out and finished them. Sometime around the 8th of August when I finally tallied up a bunch of stuff finished in the weeks before then.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains – Front-on.

As with so many of these old scenic pieces, they’re still available in Scotia Grendel’s website: 10010 – Skull Fountains. Amusingly the description on the webstore suggests that to make them particularly evil, you can paint the water as blood(!) I don’t think painting the liquid as water ever actually occurred to me. The paint was the usual greys for stone without any additional brown weathering along with an attempt for a kind of brushed-steel look with a minimal amount of rust, provided by my early experiments with MIG enamel washes. The blood was painted via a mix of GW and Vallejo reds and a touch of orange, with clear red and gloss varnish added after the rest of the pieces were matt sprayed.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains – Side-on.

As you can see, they’re drop-moulded and so the back side of them are completely flat and lacking in detail. You can butt them up against a wall, or either side of a dungeon archway or whatever. If you want something less dungeon-ey and more wargame table-y that’s free-standing, I guess you can always butt them up together like I have above.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains

A little scene to provide scale for the Skull Fountains.

Edit – After getting a request for scale shots on Dakka, I went out and added this one. They’re a fair bit bigger than they look when in the isolated shots.