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Last time I wrote about how “The Colony” Special Project came to life. A road from a tiny speck of an idea to a fully developed gaming table is a long one and I just begun my travel. I have gathered almost all of the items required to build my terrain set. I have revised my ideas and made peace with some circumstantial decisions. I was ready to start the construction process!
It all happened so quickly. One day I was engaged in my usual activities, painting miniatures, checking out facebook, writing articles… The other I got up to find myself knee deep in bitz, terrain elements, empty glue bottles and with my hands thickened with too much of dried out glue. It was as much glorious as scary. I couldn’t stop. Half kneeling on the ground, due to my workdesk being currently occupied with THIS – I felt like a child playing LEGO. Well – when inspiration comes a man is gotta do what a man is gotta do – I let myself be swallowed by passion and worked till all the buildings were ready to enter next stage.
So – this is what I had to work with. My ‘white boxes’ in all their glory. So many different sizes, that excluding six thin ones, no two are alike! I really love these boxes. Thanks to them I was able to play a lot of Infinity games and they received a really good feedback from my oponents. Of course I adorned them with different smaller terrain pieces for the purpose of quality gaming. Still these are my favorites and I can’t imagine gaming at my place with a different buildings set. That was the main reason why I choose to expand their properties instead of exchanging the whole set…
Fortunatelly for me both ReyCast and Micro Art Studio delivered a variety of cool pieces required to evolve my ‘to be’ buildings. It wasn’t easy and took over twelve hours to achieve, but I prevailed – I sorted all the pieces, counted them, divided them into groups (a separate group for each building type), marked my ‘white boxes’ for their corresponding rooftops and started putting walls together. A single test building at first, then whole set. I knelt on the ground, surrounded by a gaming table comming to life all around me…
Test building,
Mass production,
Somewhere about twelve hours, five Army Painter’s Super Glues spilled on my hands, their fumes stuck firm in my nosdrils, thousands of MDF pieces put together, dozen back hurts, hunders sporradic insane scientist’s laughters and one sympathetic look on my wife’s face, later – I was finally done! Done both literally and methaphisically, as my evil slavemaster – the muse – pushed me into yet another task. Battered, with my hands dirty and glued, with my head being dizzy – I started to write the first part of this article. I wasn’t even sure if it will be interresting to other hobbyists – just needed to write it. Couldn’t stop. Some of you know this feel for sure. But I’m starting to miss the topic – My gaming table was finally taken one step further on a road to it’s ultimate form.
Base layering stage is now complete. The buildings are ready to enter next stage, which is external layering along with addition of some cool looking details. Unfortunatelly I can’t proceed before receiving my order from the Titan-Forge. I don’t mind it, as except for the muse nagging me to work on this project, there’s no reason to rush things. At least I’m able to game on my good ol’ gaming table, taking advantage of all these cool new features. I just can’t wait to test these buildings next week. I’m sure they will not dissapoint me! If I’m lucky – delivery will come right after next game and I’ll be able to proceed to “THE COLONY” SPECIAL PROJECT part three. Keep your fingers crossed for me 😉
First of all I would like to announce that this project is huge. It is wast on a scale not seen here at Scarhandpainting.com ever before. The genesis of this project reaches January 2015, yet back then, I didn’t knew how things will go for this particular concept. To think that it started with a bunch of hardboard boxes being sprayed white makes me wanna laught. Right now some of you may recall ‘white boxes’ from my Tutorial: ‘Do it yourself’ Gaming Terrain. That is the right course of thinking as that gaming terrain and this Special Project have a particular thing in common – “Infinity the Game”. The hero of this article is none other than INFINITY GAMING TABLE: “THE COLONY”.
At first it was supposed to be, a cheap and easy to make, gaming terrain set. Me and my friends were hyped for Infinity and needed a proper table with a variety of terrain pieces. I am a man of action so in few days I had my first Infinity Gaming Table fully thinked through and half way done. The terrain set expanded steadily throughout the year to finally crystallize into a fully developed and densely packed gaming table. That was the end of stage one and a beggining of an entirely new concept. In the late 2015 I was pretty much sure that my gaming table is very playable. I got a lot of feedback from more experienced gamers and got to know Infinity as much as to make a final decision – I decided to use both my financial and material resources to transform my gaming table into a new and extraoridinary form. Once again I was overwhelmed by the need of creation and started to work…
The easiest and most effective way to improove my existing terrain was to prepare a template for basic pieces and then use them to decorate my ‘white boxes’. The ideas came to me one by one and it took less than two hours to cut a sample for each type of piece needed. As they say – “One’s man trash is another’s man treasure” and that is more than true as I supported myself with some trash left out of Micro Art Studio’s bridge set. All the basic pieces you now see, were made using just a couple of HMD leftovers and a hobby knife. This way I prepared two major templates:
Walls: Designed as 7/11cm pieces to let me decorate each and every ‘white box’ from all sides. Some additional fillers were also designed, to fill the space, if a box happens to be too long for a certain number af wall pieces. I hoped to keep wall pieces separate to let players position their miniatures in selective cover, move with causions movement etc. Once these were done I used some Warhammer 40,000 bitz to see how the overall will look before painting. It passed the test.
Bridges: It seemed that all the bridges in the market lacked something. In my opinion they were either cool looking and not very playable or playable but ugly. Left with no other choice I designed my own bridge to fit into my new gaming table theme and provide a good cover.
Now the only matter to attend was to copy these templates a dozen times and more. At that moment I knew that to achieve my goal I will need some help…
1 REYCAST
I went forth and back through Facebook in search of possible allies. An obvious choice appeared in form of ReyCast.pl who evidently had hype for Infinity terrain and seemed to be an honest guy. Not only he prooved to be just that but also joined me in my quest for glory. Once I provided him with my prototype he took the burden of drawing and then producing a Bridge. He also designed roofs that would later be used for my ‘white boxes’ and all for a really fair price.
My initial drawing and prototype:
Final product:
ReyCast did a magnificent work for me and I was very satisfied with the results. The one thing he couldn’t provide was quantity. I required only couple of bridges and roofs but the walls – pieces varried in quantity from thirty up to four hundred with a total of over one and a half thousand pieces! We both decided that it would be better if I try and find another provider for these.
2 MICRO ART STUDIO
Thus I went straight to my good old friends from Micro Art Studio. We have a history me and MAS – For long time we gamed Warhammer 40,000 together at many tournaments. At some point I used to order a lot of different things from them including gaming tokens, bases and designs ‘for demand’. The final product they provided was always of the best quality and good price. Now I wonder why didn’t I go to them in the first place – but, spur of a moment – ReyCast was there, he was eager to cooperate and I was in the middle of my creation battle rage. I do not regret it as ReyCast did a hell of a good job for me and hopefully not for the last time. So I sent my project to Micro Art Studio and well… must say that they delivered in a crazy, fckn’ awesome way!
My initial drawings and prototype:
Final product:
And the package… I felt like if I had my tenth birthday. Let’s say that the guys from MAS bought my eternal loyalty and gratitude.
3 TITAN FORGE
For the final set of pieces – an enormous quantity of ventilators, electric boxes and other stuff used to decorate, I went to my friends fom Titan Forge. They possess both the technology and expertise needed to provide me with such quantity. Unfortunatelly I’m still waiting for this gargantuan order to be fulfilled – but hopefully I won’t be waiting long.
In modelling you never know what you will need unless you stumble upon it by accident. For me it happened during a local Infinity Tournament where I stumbled upon a gaming table designed by Zen Terrain. Soon after that, I purchased a set of sweet looking Neon City Signs and Planters. Surely I could have made my own but Zen Terrain has a unique desing that I just fell in love with.
I also ordered a set of plants to use in the end step of decorating my gaming table. As it happened the courier delivered these in less than two hours after MAS’s package came in. I was just finnishing a test building which can be seen in the picture below 🙂
After two months of waiting I was finally able to lay my hands on most of the items needed to continue my project. I managed to wall-up all the ‘white boxes’ which from now on are no more boxes, but buildings. All bridges are also done. I’m eager to share some pictures, but it is really late and I’m weary after over twelve hours of terrain making. “This projecs it huge” and it deserves at least three entries as much as I deserve some sleep. Let this building be a glorious end of the first part of this article. See you soon in “THE COLONY” SPECIAL PROJECT part two 😉
I drilled. Slowly, gentle at first, then harder, with more and more pressure. My movements became more firm when I grabbed the lower parts and drilled deep and hard. Upon a finale my hands were covered with a thin layer of sweat. I fealt the fastened beat of my heart, when I plucked the drill out of the hole. It was there – vast, shiny. I never had time to fully appreciate it. I grabed a hard metal pin and sticked it deep into the hole. Metal squealed under pressure but that only made me push even harder up to a rapid stop. I sat then, in silence, breathing erratically. The miniature stood before me, pinned to a scenic base. So delicate and yet unbroken. I wanted more. More of the purifying labour. My airbrush responded in appreciation – It twitched once in agreement…
It started a bit awkward, but what the hell. I’m currently drunk with excitement and happiness so I hope you’ll excuse me. Today it’s Party Time – Scarhandpainting.com’s first birthday!
Who would have thought that Scarhandpainting.com is already one year old!? For me it’s like if it came online just a month ago. One moment it was 17th of February 2016 with me copying old articles and estabilishing a new website, and now BAM! It’s a full year later with a tone of new content added to the site’s Blog and Gallery. If not for the stathistics I wouldn’t believe it, but here I am, appreciating thousands of visitors and views. This seems unreal, especially in comparisson to my old blog at blogspot.com, which generated less than one fifth of the activity. I’m thrilled to see the popularity of Scarhandpainting.com. It means a lot to me. I see that all the work I put into writing articles is totally worth the effort.
The concept of Scarhandpainting.com appeared in the late 2015th. I always wanted to start freelancing full time, but untill then I had an estabilished source of income and a trustworthy employer. Needless to say that I had this ‘sphere of comfort’ built around me and it grew as vast as to provide me with confidence to start my own project. I knew that success is not something laying around for everyone to pick at leaisure and without a good fight. Calculating risks and eventual gains, making plans, switching towns – it all took around two months, after which I decided to go all-in. I rent a huge server, registered the domain and purchased a professional theme. First steps almost made me regret the decission, cause I was an utter noob about such stuff. Still the site came to life one piece at a time while I uploaded previously prepared content and learned a thing or two about how things work in the site’s Dashboard…
The idea behing Scarhandpainting.com was and still is to express myself. I love to paint miniatures and feel extatic each time a project is nearing the finish line. I know that there’s plenty of bussiness-like sites around the web, but I had something more friendly in mind. I wanted to let you into my thoughts and lifestyle a bit. Scarhandpainting.com is my home where I share not only the miniatures I’ve painted, but also some of the techniques and colour recipes that I use. Like many artists, I want to share my passion with all of you. This domain is a medium I chose for the purpose. For me Scarhandpainting.com is not a strict advertisement, but a way of life. Painting miniatures keeps me hyped, while writing articles helps me reset, calm down after each major project. Every comment I receive is precious while each awesome friendstomer that I meet thanks to the site is just a hidden bonus.
For you to understand how my life changed upon dedicating myself to Scarhandpainting it is important to get to know how things were before. So, here’s a quick look back. Just before Scarhandpainting.com hit the internet, I used to paint in a corner of a living room, surrounded by utter chaos, not having an Airbrush and working with a limited choice of colours and materials. Might be difficult to believe it, but that’s my old working space. Here’s where all of the early projects of 2016th came to being…
For most, a year is not much in terms of a lifetime. For me ‘today’ is a lightyear jump distant from how I used to work, how my workbench looked like, what equipment and materials I owned and how everything was organized by the time in 2016th. I still spend most of my time near a desk in the corner of a room, with a brush and a miniature in my hand, the fact did not changed a lot – but all the rest is just forced evolution step ahead of what it used to be… And upon that I recently got married, so you see… a lightyear jump.
The road throughout the year was very interresting. I was able to lay my hands on many sweet new releases, rare pieces, awesome scenery and miniatures I never ever knew existed. At many occassions I had an opportunity to paint on a much higher level than in the years before. During all that painting I met a bunch of great people, many of which are at least as passionate about hobby as I am. This led me to redevelopment of my preferable painting style and learning a lot, both in terms of painting and taking pictures. I also evolved many of my habits, got better acquainted with airbrushing and made peace with the fact that some projects are meant to be painted on a lower level than the others. The amount of experience I have earned is vast and the best proof of that is the series of Monthly Galleries. In the comming years I aim to further expand the variety of techniques at my disposal and become a better painter. I only hope you will stay with me to witness it…
Using this opportunity I would like to thank all of my friendstomers who accompanied me in this crazy, heroic journey. You all are very important to me and without you I wouldn’t be where I am today. For your support, for all the hours spent talking, for your friendship and trust with which you honor me – I thank YOU. This was a fantastic year and I hope we would still be a great team at the same time next year and the year after and the next, just until the end of the world!
Special thanks to Andreas and Markus. You guys were the reasons I decided to choose this glorious path of life.
Among almost eighty articles on Scarhandpainting.com there are those which viewers found the most interresting. As this is a 1st year anniversary, I have selected twelve articles that were viewed the most. If you don’t know some/any of these then here’s what makes Scarhandpainting.com worth reading today’s entire article.
COLOUR RECIPES: INFINITY USARF
TUTORIAL: PAINTING MICRO ART STUDIO CONCRETE WALLS
REVIEW: HOBBYZONE ‘MODULAR WORKSHOP SYSTEM’
REVIEW: BRUSH CLASH TAMIYA vs CITADEL
TUTORIAL: INFINITY DIY CONSOLE
“THE COLONY” SPECIAL PROJECT part one
TUTORIAL: INFINITY ‘DO IT YOURSELF’ GAMING TERRAIN
TUTORIAL: PAINTING NOMAD RED ARMOUR
Today a brand new chapter begins for Scarhandpainting.com. The website is still young but there is a strong community of viewers. I look forward to bringing yet more miniatures to life under the Scar_hand Painting logo and further evolving myself. I hope to produce more articles to keep all of you here. There should be many opportunities to do that, cause things that are currently awaiting paint job are just crazy awesome. Stay tuned…
“It is a Dark Time.
The might of the Empire is dust, their crown is lost to them and their glory forgotten.
The promise of an age of peace and prosperity is drowned in blood.
This is your time. For the ruins of Mordheim hold prize beyond imagination: stones of power which can grant all your wishes.
But beware of your enemies.
Fear the Possessed, the Beasts of the Pit which roam the night.
Watch for the thieves of the Rat men, the Skaven of the Underworld.
Dread the corpses who walk like the living: the foul Vampires and their rotting minions.
This is Mordheim, the city of the Damned. This is the home of all your hopes. Be wary or it will be your grave as well.”
Mordheim rb.s.124
It all started with a single idea that came to me one day. I installed “Mordheim: City of the Damned” on a PC and played for the first time. It took me back on a memory trip through all the campaigns played throughout the years and further – as for the first time I saw Mordheim in it’s dark glory! It looked so effective. I figured to make myself a gaming board based on this…
You see – terrain making is similar to PC map building. You take base shapes, you texturize them and then color them. If you happen to plan it beforehand, you will have just that: base shapes, texture pieces and paints – to work with. So , the idea was totally within my reach. Not a priority – just ‘an idea’. One to haunt me throughout my everyday life from then on. Sometimes it stayed dormant for couple of weeks just to emerge from the depth of imagination without any warning. Many times I was on the verge of realizing it into existence, then just hid it deeper within me like “meh, takes up too much time, I don’t need it right now”. But the right moment finally came. I was gaming in a local hobby store, where I saw an inspiring collection of Mordheim scenery. This was too much – I couldn’t resist. There was just too much inspiration to walk by. I broke that invisible mental barrier – took this like a man – a day later I went to construction store, purchased all necessary materials and started working on this project…
I already had a Mordheim Gaming Board along with all the terrain that might come in handy throughout a vast campaign. The old scenery set was rather solid but lacked some key features in terms of theme and most importantly – texture. Back in the days I praised short construction time and playability over looks and strong theme. I produced terrain pieces really fast, but at a cost of visuals. This time around I set off for looks and theme as the highest priority with playability a bit lower, followed by durability and other usual stuff. Due to current Nomad’ish way of life I also wanted for this gaming board to be transportation friendly and rather light. To achieve that I had to fulfill these assumptions:
As with most terrain projects, I started by preparing a simple visualisation of how much space the foundations will take up on the gaming board. By ‘the foundations’ I mean simple terrain pieces that will take up most space, creating different levels on the gaming board. In case of “The Colony” gaming board these would be buildings, but this time I’ve decided to use urban hills for the job. This was just a formality, but as usual I wanted to be prepared for what’s to come…
The base concept was to create four urban hills, that might be combined in many different ways to create a large elevated space, or set up individually. Along with these, two small urban hills and two platforms were to be made. While small hills might be used for shape diversity and to link the bigger ones, platforms were to provide easy access to elevated positions on the map…
One of the most important things in terrain building is choosing the right materials. Let’s say that I wanted to provide a lot of texture and detail, keeping gaming board/scenery durable, easy to setup and easy to transport (Not to mention – wallet friendly), at the same time. Plaster was obviously a bad choice as it’s heavy and tends to get damaged all the time. Personally I try to avoid it. Any type of Resin or Hardfoam might do but these are extremely expensive and in case of a project on such a scale, they would require professional equipment to be fully implemented. So I decided to go for styrofoam for base shapes and wallpaper for texture. I personally hate light terrain pieces, that tend to fly all over the table, but in this case – solid buildings could keep the rest pinned to the table, thus following all the assumptions of my initial idea at the same time.
I had all the materials needed along with the concept. The only thing left was to start working on the project. I started with the most simple task – preparing a ‘cobblestone’ gameboard. It took like half an hour with me just applying a lot of basing glue onto the board and then cutting large pieces of wallpaper to be gluedon top of the board. The picture looks nothing special, but once painted – small cobblestone could be seen all over the game board…
As soon as I took on the platforms, an idea of additional items appeared. Having in mind that the upper level should be rather accessible for all the miniatures I added four sets of stairs to the fold. Started with base shape cut out of rough pieces of styrofoam, then added texture on the sides to finally cover certain places with handmade stones. The stones (or just ‘huge bricks’) were made by cutting the base rectangular shape out of styrofoam and then rolling droves of these in my hands so that all the hard angles became nicely rounded.
Along with all the platforms and stairways I also prepared a set of urban hills. I used ‘Legend of the five rings ccg’ boxes to gain access to base shapes of a similar height. The best method to texturise them was to cover entirety of them with glue and then use wallpaper all over it. Once glue dried out I added styrofoam pieces cut out of the fridge protecting casing ( I like to keep such stuff in case it’ll come in handy – and guess what – it did…). Just like with stairs and platforms, I texturized urban hills with styrofoam bricks/blocks of stone.
Usually at this point I would have spent a lot of time correcting small imperfections, but I’ve figured out to cover them with a finishing touch of fake autumn leaves, once the paint job is done. This way I wanted to strengthen the mood of the entire table while having all the small holes and defects covered.
One of the things I usually mess up aree bridges. Up to now I can’t recall any of these that would actually turn out to look good. Having excess materials I decided to give it a try, this time though I used the same concept as in case of urban hills. I tweaked the design a little to better suit the gaming board and added two short bridges to the set.
Once undercoated I set up couple of different battlefields to take proper pictures. I was able to confront the idea of a modular table with what I’ve created. Checked out different layouts but also made mental notes of what and how many buildings I would require in the future…
Paint job followed soon after. I used entire 200ml of Vallejo Black Surface Primer mixedwith gray and white to provide different layers of both wet paint job and drybrush. After that I also edged all corner stones with GW’s Pale Wych Flesh and added some extras in form of broken skulls, torches and Wyrdstone Shards. I also covered some spots with Autumn Leaves made out of Birch-tree seeds. This set a strong, dark mood to the scenery and comboed nicely with already painted ‘Toad Fountain’ and ‘Dead Tree’ pieces…
More than happy with the visual results I put the project on hold until end of the year in hope to get back to it with some cool looking buildings later on. We’ll see how it goes once 2017th hits the callendar…
Airbrush blow, Airbrush blow
Add the flow
Mix the paint in the cup bady di-di-di-ding
TKO, comatose adios
Slow motion on you muddafuckah (Booyah!)
Super man, airbrush gun
Make ’em fun
Paint ’em down with the wicky-wicky, wa-wa-wa-wash
Automatic now ya minis looking supapainted
Paint splattered, when I hit ya with the “Booyah”
Good brush get the cash get the ching, ching
Get the gold, get the green, get the pin-pin-pin-pink
Get the purple, get the flesh, get the brown
Ten hundred, minis, baby get that (Booyah!)
Passing time, passing time
On the brain, on the mental
Got minis on my mah-mah-mah-mind
Make ’em stop, painting time
Painting time, keep on painting…
Twelve months, dozens of finished projects and hundreds of painted miniatures have happened since last anniversary. Here I am, yet again, delving into past year, assessing progress and boring you to death. Woo hoo!
Scarhandpainting.com visit score is closing to 500000. That’s just insane! When I started this journey about three years ago I never imagined the site might get that popular. Even though the site itself is not meant to generate any income, I’m very happy to have this platform, through which I can share my passion for painting miniatures with all of you. I appreciate all the positive feedback and your e-mails. This means a lot to me.
I know that lately blog section was a bit neglected. As some of you already know, last few months were a bumpy road for me for couple reasons. I moved out to yet another place. On top of that there’s also less projects than it used to. On the bright side I use my spare time to settle in a new place, set up brand new workshop, redesign some parts of the website. Less projects does not mean I sit here looking at the ceiling. I just don’t have much material for tutorials. Things should get back to normal soon and I look forward to start blogging vigorously once again.
Previous year was spread across wide range of projects. A mix of fantasy/sci-fi from entire spectrum of games and ranges. This time with scarhandpainting.com growing popularity among Infinity the game community I spent most of the year painting my favorite game of all time. Alongside Infinity there’s also a lot of Shadespire. Yup, thanks to a commission for a friend, I got into the game myself. Oh cruel fate of a miniatures painter 🙂 Below you will find some of the highlights from the last twelve months. Be sure to let me know which ones you find the most interresting in the comment section or at my facebook.
Looking back I can’t help but feel excited for all the cool projects I worked with. All the challenges, uncommon colour schemes. Considering skill progress I think I’ve made some. Opportunity to paint on higher levels plus moving my palette away from GW and into the colorful embrace of Vallejo brought many new possibilities. I’m very happy with results and hope they can be seen.
As usual, I would like to thank all of my friendstomers, for the support and trust. I wish you many exciting projects to come.
Special thanks to Andreas, Thomas, Bettina, Romana, Clemens, Behemoth and all friends who stick with me for good 😉 My hobby wouldn’t be the same without you.
39 new articles showed up since previous anniversary. These are the ones you found to be the most interresting…
TUTORIAL: INFINITY ‘DO IT YOURSELF’ GAMING TERRAIN
“SHADEGLASS SCENERY” SPECIAL PROJECT
TUTORIAL: ENHANCING NECROMUNDA BASES
…and some long term favorites:
TUTORIAL: INFINITY DIY CONSOLE
TUTORIAL: PAINTING MICRO ART STUDIO CONCRETE WALLS
COLOUR RECIPES: INFINITY USARF
I stand on the precipice with another happy year of hobbying behind my back. What lays before me is an unknown but I cross the threshold with excitement and confidence. Surrounded by friends, armed to the teeth with Vallejo paints, Airbrushes in both hands – I’m ready for everything 2019 is gonna throw my way!
