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!)