Cyrx Terrain: Storage Tanks

Onto the Storage Tanks!

This was a lot of fun as well. It really let me think "outside the box" when it came to terrain building. Again the idea came off of Terrain thralls. I was trying to think of things that the Cryx would have in their swamp. I did not want "buildings" like the Cygnar ones I was working on so it had to have a certain "feel" to the terrain.

So doing a quick google search on Cryx terrain I came across these "storage tanks" on Terrain Thralls. I loved the simple way the author put these together. A soda can. Damn, I would really never have thought of that. Then I started looking around at the "bits" to add to it. I looked at my Hot Stuff glue containers. They fit on top of the can "lip" with the help of said Hot Stuff. In hindsight I would have loved to add lights and power to these tanks. If I ever decide I need a couple more they will have electronics in them.

Now the author of the Terrain Thralls tutorial spoke of using bits from a space shuttle. Well, not having one of those handy I went over to the local dollar store. I found these little toy "city sets". They came in a hard plastic folding box. When you opened the box there was a little construction set on them. They came with these neat transformer looking peices along with a toy crane car. So stripping those down I ended up with a lot of bits and parts for only $2! Needless to say I grabbed 4 of them and will be going back to clean out their sets.

The toy crane became my "contol panel" after the undercarrage and crane was stripped off. A couple peices of plasticard made the sides up and one of the little "transformers" capped it off. The cans were each cut down a bit to give me a semi-flat bottom. Using plasticard I created the bands around the bottom and then punched out more rivets.

My buddy Paul always complains on how many skulls the GW terrain always has on it. Well at least those are molded into the plastic and he doesn't have to spend an hour punching out rivets. ;-)

I decided to make each tank "lean" to a side and one I cracked open the back to make it look like a containment leak. Once again I grabbed my Sculptamold and worked that onto the bases. I wanted each one to look unique, so the large "transformer" was placed to a side, or behind the tank. Once the sculpatmold was in place, I just pushed the cans into the stuff and then leaned it to a side (or backwards) and added the large transformers off to the sides.

Then it was onto the priming and painting. Adding the water effects etc. Pretty much same as the "Sludge Pump". But then I really concetrated on adding rust to the peices. Now this sounds easy until you try to do it "blindly". I had done rust before, but it never looked right. Something was always missing. So another quick search on google and I found a couple of rust tutorials. My basics were all the same: bloodstone brown/brown wash/kahdor highlight. That is the base. But then I read something I never thought of: a sponge!

People can get into the habbit of painting the way they always do and I am one of those people. It never occured to be to dab a sponge into my Khador Highlight (a kind of orange) and then dab it onto the brown. This does 2 things:
1- It adds that orange color of rust that you see in the "centre" of rust all the time.
2- It gave it TEXTURE! That is what I was missing. With the sponge it created peaks of paint and that really sold the look.

The last thing was to string wires from the small transformers on the can to the large one. Lots of super glue to hold the wires together and of course to the peices. Once again, in hindsight, I would drill holes into the pieces and run the wires into them for more stability.

Once that was done then all the Sculptamold got a high gloss varnish coating. The reason I did not just use a matte sealer is that the swamp terrain needs to look wet and slimy. Matte Sealer would not do it, but the gloss varnish does the trick.

Now it's onto the Khador Terrain. Again there are a lot of peices and I will have that up next week (at least whatever I get done!)

Our Cryx Terrain pieces

So this year I set out on a mission: Create better terrain for our WarMachine players. Sounds pretty simple doesn't it? Yes and no.

Luckily, I have a lot of resources when it comes to running a game store. One of those is terrain experts and the other is of course the interwebz! So using some inspiration from places such as terrain Thralls and some inspiration of my own I decided to create a Cryx `Sludge  generator , 3 storage tanks and 3 swamp pieces.

So looking around the store for bits and pieces for the Sludge Generator I came across a DVD that had been hit with a spary primer. So it was toast, but it gave me a great idea! I grabbed 2 mini pringles cans (something we have in bulk from all the hungry gamers!) and glued them to the DVD. This gave me a platform to seperate the 2 tiers. A packing tape roll became the storage bin to the side of the generator. Some plastic tubing, popsicle sticks, a tim horton`s fruit smoothie lid, green stuff, styrofoam and sculptamold and it was off to the races!

You can flip through the slideshow to see the various stages. Basically I had to cut out the base (1/8" particle board) and then grab a chunk of styrofoam to make the bottom. Once that was in place the pringle cans w/ DVD centre were glued to the top.

After that the Timmies' lid and some plasticard made up the roof. A few cuts with an exacto knife and in slid the plastic tubing for the main pipe. That one needed some fancy cutting to make the 90 degree joint and to hide all the seams I used Green Stuff. A drinking straw was added to the side of the building and down to the base.

Cutting up a small forest of popsicle sticks created a larger platform on the DVD to fit a 30mm base (a small WarMachine figure) around the middle. Then I cut up some push pins and attached them to the platform for the posts where the string would end up.

The next part was fun: Sculptamold! This stuff is AMAZING! You can't find it in Canada so I was lucky enough to convince my parents when they were down in Seattle to swing by a store and grab me 25lbs of it. Dad said the border guard gave him a very wierd look when he declared it at the border. I love my folks! They are such a help. ;-)

At any rate sculptamold is a paper mache. But regular paper mache shrinks as it dries. This warps projects like you wouldn't believe! I have crates I made a few years back that look more like bowls than craters cause of all the warping. But I digress, The Sculptamold was spread around the base to create a wall to stop the water effects from spilling everywhere. I then had a flash of inspiration and smeared the stuff on the sides of the styrofoam as well. This worked out perfectly as it gave it that real rocky look. Perfect!

The last thing to do before priming was to add more plasitcard for "seams" and then rivets. Those are a bitch to do. I have a hand punch and litterally spent close to an hour punching out little rivets from plasticard. This is a project I have now reserved for my staff when they get "bored". Amazingly, my staff has found a lot of other projects to keep themselves busy.....

Once all the pieces were in place then came the spray primer. Black primer from GW was the best for this project as I wanted everything to be dark. Then the basecoating started. Boltgun metal for the tower and pipes, Umbral brown for the wood and Exile blue for the "swamp". Then highlighting, washes, drybrushing etc.

The final step was to add the water effects. Again fun but messy. We use a 2 part resin and you must ensure that you get the 50/50 mix right or the damn things never dry (they stay "tacky") as I found out on the swamps.

A cool trick I learned: Use inks and other mixed paints in "drops" around the swamp areas. When you pour the water effects in and then slosh everything around to cover the piece, the paint slowly seeps along with the resin and creates wicked looking swirls. Super cool.

Next post will be about the Cryx Storage tanks!

Welcome to the Myth Games Blog!

Hi Folks!

Well, I have been in business for over 4 years and I have learnt a lot and made a lot of friends. Talking to a lot of people daily you hear tons of stuff that just has to be shared. So this site will be a mash-up of the one-liners I hear often, demos and reviews of games I have in store (or ones I have had the privelage of previewing) as well as ongoing projects such as our terrain building etc.

You will notice I use "we", "us" and "I" interchangeably. This is because there are several staff plus myself and of course our players that make this blog possible. I also look at the store and myself as one in the same (hence the "we"). Yup, it's a little odd, but that's me!

I will try to update this blog roughly twice a week when a get a few minutes to myself (or when something truly humourous happens!). The blog may be in video form (when I do a review or demo) but most of the time it will be in written form.

My next blog will be a terrain project I finished last week. This was a lot of fun and really turned out well.