A bunch of crates today. One thing that my self-imposed “minimum 1 model per day, per month” this year has really helped along is getting various bits of scatter terrain done.

Four of these definitely come from some duplicated Grendel (now Scotia Grendel) sets that I got back in the mid-1990s. The other ones were painted a long, long time ago. Hm. I see a couple of spots where I missed on the washes. Thanks photos! I’ll fix those shortly.

The way I painted these and got the various subtle and more obvious variations in the wood colours was pretty easy. Paint them in various shades of brown, as well as some in grey and ochre (and mixes of grey and brown for a few – because unsealed wood slowly goes grey). Then they were all drybrushed with a bone shade, then washed with a 1:1 mix of Army Painter Dark Tone and Lahmian Medium. The end result is pretty good. They look realistic enough for the effort put in. Not actually realistic (they’d be much duller, the shaded areas wouldn’t pop like they do here) but we really don’t go for true realism for the most part in this hobby – more a kind of hyper-realism most of the time.

These next four pieces are from a set I picked up later on, though still in the 1990’s. I suspect that they may have been from a WarZone-branded resin terrain set, since there were a limited few of those, and I did pick up a few of those back in the say. I need to un-photobucket that post, so marking it out here will help me to remember.

Those resin sets did come in the exact same packaging as the generic Grendel terrain pieces back in the day, just with a different card backing. I can’t find any sign of them online of course – they seem to have largely disappeared – as have many hobby things from the early days of internet.

In the end, these boxes end up looking pretty good once completed. They can be used in quite a variety of games, pretty much anything from Warhammer Fantasy & Fantasy Role-Playing to the Colonial period through to 40k and Sci-Fi games. A couple of The Emperor’s finest and a pair of Zombie Hunters provide us with some scale. Probably should have had some Necromunda figures in the photos as well, come to think of it – since crates and barrels always fit into our games quite nicely. I guess the marines work for a Kill Team scale shot.