Category Archives: Wargame Scenery

Small Scenics: Secret Weapon Miniatures’ Traffic Pylons #1 (Scenic September ’19)

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Secret Weapon Miniatures' Traffic Pylons

Well, like the best laid grand plans I had hoped to get some larger, more impressive terrain completed in September, but unfortunately life events and shitty weather conspired to prevent it. I did, however, continue on the Scatter Terrain train, and so I managed to complete the first of what will no doubt be two batches of “Traffic Pylons” from Secret Weapon Miniatures. Basically, I was buying some other stuff from a local retailer, and saw that these were cheap, so I got several bags. Turns out that each bag had 10 of the pylons in it, so I didn’t manage to get them all done. The 25 shown here are the ones done so far, and are about half of the ones I picked up. I’ll paint the others in a month or two. Or work on them slowly when tired after work.

The good news here was that they are/were simple enough to paint, and so during the perios where I was feeling under the weather, or tired, I was still able to plug away at a few of these at a time. Once they were painted, it was gloss varnish, satin varnish, paint wash to grime them up, and then matte varnish. As scatter terrain, and especially being resin they need to be pretty durable, so with that in mind, three coats of varnish isn’t overkill.

So yeah. Not impressive in any way on their own, but they’ll add a lot of that little extra layer of detail to any urban locale in a modern, post-modern, or even many sci-fi tabletops. I do have my Secret Weapon tiles that I’ll be making another pass at once the weather gets consistently better and I have a bit more time from work to work on such things, so let’s all cross our fingers and toes…

Small Scenics: Reaper Bones 4 Fantasy Scenics Fountain, Dreadmere Raft + Mantic Terrain Crate Crystal Formations.

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Reaper Bones 4 Fantasy Scenics Fountain, Dreadmere Raft, Mantic Terrain Crate Crystal Formations

A long and paintful title up there, I know – but the stuff in here comes from a couple of sources, they really don’t merit three posts, and I want people searching for this stuff online to be able to see how it looks and turns out with a bit of paint on it. I know when I google models it’s always helpful when I can find painted examples of the things online.

Reaper Bones 4 Fantasy Scenics Fountain

The Fountain got painted because easy wins. I added some green above and below the water to suggest age, moss and algae, and cared enough to use water effects to add some water depth, but not enough to fitz around with finshing line and realistic water in order to make a “working” fountain. So we’ll just call this water stangnant, yet remarkably clear. Just like magic water in a dungeon, amirite?

Reaper Bones 4 Fantasy Scenics Fountain

Not a bad model. It’s made of typically crappy soft bones plastic, but at least it wasn’t warped like pretty much everything else in the “Fantasy Scenics” set. I’m sure their terrain stuff was better in Bones 3…

Reaper Bones 4 Dreadmere Raft

Next up is a raft. Nothing special at all, and once again painted because “easy wins”. This pic shows the underside of it, where I’ve again added a bit of algae-suggesting green to it. This piece came out of the Dreadmere expansion, and is made of “Bones Black” (despite being the same light grey that everything in this KS arrived in). It’s a much, much better material than the original Bonesium PVC, is harder, and took a spray primer and spray varnish. Finally! The drawback seems to be that it’s more breakable, as a couple of my larger models from the KS arrived broken. I’m still slowly doing inventory/QC of the KS because time and tediousness, but I’ll contact Reaper once I’m done and see what they can do for the broken stuff. They’re always been good in the past, at least – and more fragile material or not – it’s a mile better than the original stuff!

Mantic Terrain Crate Crystal Formations

Here we have some little crystal formations from Mantic’s Terrain Crate KS. Have I said “easy wins” enough times here? The crystals were painted with Old-GW Putrid Green (similar to Moot Green, but lighter – from the original hex-pot days), then gone over with Warp Lightning from the Contrast Paint range. Afterwards, I lined the edges with putrid green again, and then went over those lines with a really thinned yellow. It turned out okay, I think. 

Reaper Bones 4 Fantasy Scenics Fountain, Dreadmere Raft + Mantic Terrain Crate Crystal Formations

Here’s a second group shot that is also a scale shot. Because I realised there was really no useful scale reference for any of these things in the previous photos. Enjoy! 

While none of this stuff is super-exciting, it’s all pretty decent and pretty versatile, fitting into pretty much any fantasy gaming setting from Warhammer to LotR to D&D, as well as grimdark 40k. The raft and fountain could even be used in some historical games, depending on the period.