Terrainosaurus!

As part of the second wave shipment, I received an avalanche of terrain with which I intend to make the best Deadzone board ever. I envisage a dense, three-dimensional battlefield, multiple stories high with lofty catwalks soaring over the ground battles. Ideally it would allow crafty models to traverse the full length of the board without ever touching the ground.

To this end I currently have 4 Battlezones worth of terrain, and I have spent the past few weeks painting much of it up. The progress that I have made so far can be seen below.

 Focusing more on efficiency than anything else, I have come up with an assembly line style process for painting up large batches of terrain panels as quickly as possible. This process is:

1. Spray black primer as an undercoat
2. Spray grey primer at a strong angle (from "above" the tiles) to give an easy azimuthal shading effect
3. Drybrush with very light grey to pick out edges/protrusions/features/bolts/etc
4. (Optional) pick out exposed rebar by painting with brown then copper
5. Wash with brown to further shade recesses and give a dirty appearance

The results of this process can be seen below:

This results in a battleground that is still predominantly grey, but it is a grey with a lot of detail, variation and visual depth. You can compare the finished panels to the original bare grey of the unpainted sprue shown below. Additionally, once the panels are all assembled into structures I will add a few detailed touches to liven up the grey and give each structure a bit of coherence.

The "ruined" Battlezone complements the standard Battlezones nicely by providing ruined versions of some of the default panels. The ruined panels shown below show gouged edges and exposed rebar. When used together the amount of ruin might appear like in a piece of 40k terrain. In my case I can spread these panels out amongst the other Battlezones to have interesting areas of damage without appearing to be too much.

Heavy and indiscriminate use of wash creates a large amount of variation over the surface of the panels. This also sometimes results in the panels drying and sticking to the newspaper that they sit on. I have to scrape this newspaper away with a hobby knife, creating localised areas of damage that actually enhance the appearance of the panels.

The effects of the azimuthal shading is subtle but important to establishing depth to the thin plastic panels. This can be seen in the reinforced column pieces shown below, which helpfully double as top-and-bottom connectors for adjacent panels.

These small pieces of damaged walls come in ample supply in the ruined Battlezone. Using these too liberally will allow many models to trivially prevent Clear Shots by hiding a foot behind such a piece, but I have also seen many creative and interesting uses for these pieces on the Mantic website.

Here are the next batch of panels to paint, just after the azimuthal shading stage. The grey primer is not uniform across the panels, creating an additional bit of variation that will add to the visual interest of the terrain. After this batch of 8 walls and another batch I will be moving onto the floor pieces, and then the Great Buildening can begin.