Looking at a large amount of terrain to get painted for the Medea Refinery and needing to get it done so I can move on to other LibertyHammer projects, I did the smart thing—called for help. A small PAGE crew came out and pretty much took care of the whole task while I just kept things moving as the assembly line chugged away:

• Alex did some ninja spraypaint voodoo base coating, some details, and made a smoke column, in addition to also building a mine shaft entrance LOS blocker;
• Colin drybrushed all the ground surfaces and rocks, did the details on the utility truck scene, and tried real hard to start a game of Infinity;
• Jason cleaned his airbrush a whole bunch of times, and also managed to find time to paint some trucks and building details in between;
• Tom did details on all the tubing, mechanical bits, consoles, and so on, and even got to an unrelated bonus piece I’d built previously but never painted.

The fact that the whole set got done in an afternoon was pretty amazing, and it’s really great that this board is now ready to go a full month ahead of the event. But it was also just a fun afternoon of gaming projects with the guys. For me as the builder having sunk a lot of time into this, it was immensely rewarding to watch all these pieces come to life through a group effort among good friends. At the start I literally told them “I want it dark red, but otherwise I don’t care, just get it done and make it look awesome.” That they did, and in many ways quite differently than I would have, which was really neat to watch and gave the terrain a life of its own as I didn’t direct every detail or know what was going to happen.

I don’t have great photos of the final results yet; hopefully late this week. But this is a run-through of how we painted all this stuff.

Prep

First up was some basic preparatory work wrapping up construction. All of the ground pieces already had some gravel sprinkled on and larger rocks here and there. But that’s not nearly enough variety for a rocky, barren refinery world. Plus I wanted to base coat everything rust red but start the ground off darker to pre-shade it a bit. So I mixed some paint texture flakes with black paint, thinned it out a lot with water, and slopped and stippled it on covering all the ground surfaces. I would perhaps consider doing this step in latex paint for toughness, but I needed to get it done indoors late at night, and the latex needs significant ventilation. This coating took some time to dry because it was so wet and thick, but it really gave a lot of variation and interesting texture to the ground.

Next I covered all the foam and paper surfaces in Mod Podge. I’m a sucker for trash packaging foam. Besides wanting to recycle the stuff rather than toss it, I find a lot of inspiration in the various shapes and sizes it comes in. But two of the costs are that it takes dings easily in play, and, more importantly, gets destroyed by spray paint. Two layers of Mod Podge though sealed it up from the spray paint and should be a plenty hard surface for play. Similarly, in a few places I made papercraft constructions for various components. The Mod Podg coats basically lacquered those, giving them a hard protective shell to prevent crushing.

Primer and Base Colors

Next step was priming and base coloring all of the pieces. We used a mix of colors for priming. As noted above, the ground was initially primed black. Other pieces such as the smoke stack were also primed black. Almost everything then was sprayed dull rust red. A couple thin coats of that served as both primer and base coat for the un-blacked surfaces. A few areas though were primed and based in grey instead, such as the pump columns. In addition, before all this, the large plastic surfaces like the smoke stack were sprayed with a very fine texture paint to eliminate the smoothness and make it much less obviously plastic. Unfortunately this had to be done very carefully and sparingly because a quick test confirmed that the texture spray would burn through the Mod Podge and eat the foam.

With the basic colors blocked out, Alex went to town spray-ninja style. With very careful can control and repeated cleaning of the spray can heads, he rapidly base colored a number of the smaller elements, such as the barrels, hatches, tanks, exhaust vents, and so on. Critical here is to not just accept, but to embrace, some amount of overspray. In many cases it helps accentuate the component, in other cases it gives variety,  and for this style of terrain in no way does it detract from the pieces. Large surfaces were similarly striped with colors from our rust, black, and grey palette to give variety. The end result was that the pieces were already very playable in impressively short order.

Drybrushing and Details

Coming out of priming and base coating, the pieces went into a loop between Tom and Colin hitting the drybrushing and detail work, with Alex joined them as the spray painting wrapped up. Colin took charge of drybrushing the ground surfaces two shades of yellow-ish reds, making nice contrasting highlights. Then he painted the rocks dark grey and drybrushed them a lighter shade to really bring them out from the mostly red and black ground surface. Meanwhile, Tom went through and heavily drybrushed all of the mechanical components in various metallics. This was done heavily enough to make those pieces distinctly that color, but by drybrushing instead of painting he preserved hints of the variations and underlying colors from the sprayed base as well as leaving the recesses as dark shadows.

Once all the many mechanical components had been hit and the ground surfaces done, Colin focused in on painting and washing the detailed bits of the truck scene while Tom painted various consoles and other small details. For the consoles he again used a drybrushing technique but with brightly colored blue, purple, and green metallics that make the screens and buttons stand out and glitter against the dark base colors.

Airbrush

Meanwhile, Jason cranked up his compressor and got down to business with his airbrush. He started with the Medea truck, and then it turned out Alex had three more trucks to go on another board he’s working on. All of these were spray primed black and then airbrushed. Alex wanted his in lighter tan shades, while Jason went with a drab olive army green for the Medea truck to complement the primarily red terrain. In absolutely no way did this take only the “3 minutes” Jason swore it would. However, the results were stellar.

With our surprisingly sizable fleet of trucks complete, Jason moved on to various airbrush-appropriate details on the buildings. Besides some stenciled building markers, some sort of large hatch built into the ground got hazard striped. A key detail in how Jason did this is the very gentle airbrushing of a brown gradient to make it seem worn, and to blend the hatch into the dark, grungy surroundings a bit. Combined with some drybrushing of the frame around the doors, this element came out really well and is a great contrasting color detail against the dark terrain.

Smoke Column

Along the way, Alex tackled the smoke stack for the furnace. I really wanted a huge column of thick dark smoke to convey that Medea Refinery is your standard Imperial eco-hostile facility. Importantly, I also wanted to put something so people couldn’t put figures in the stack. Besides the aesthetics of dudes standing there, it would raise a lot of gameplay questions. It’s too tall for anything but jump troops or similar to get up there, and has a substantial lip around the rim but not enough to stand on. So a bunch of Scouts or such could infiltrate into the position and be near invulnerable to assault, while also facing a lot of questions about how far the charge range would actually be, how many models could engage, and so on. Meanwhile, if the Scouts (it’s always Scouts causing these kinds of problems) in turn chose to leave the position, it would be too far for them to get down. 40k unfortunately has no clear rules for climbing up or jumping down heights you can’t cover in a single move. So, we obviated these and a few other questions by adding a smoke column to make it intuitively obvious that the stack is impassible.

For easier transport we made this as a separate piece that just drops into the smoke stack. That will also make it easy to deal with flyers and such passing through the region, the smoke can just be popped out to rest their base there. The smoke itself was done with cotton balls glued to a circle cut from PVC sheet, shaped into place and affixed with dull coat spray, and spray painted black, red, and yellow. As a bonus, there is a hole in the center of the construction to insert a tea light for a glowing effect. The final product makes pretty clear you don’t want to stand around the refinery taking deep breathes.

Finishing Touches

Fortunately we got all of that done just in time to get all the brand new terrain into the house right as the day switched from gloriously sunny to lightly raining. The next morning I did just a few finishing touches. I realized during the day that the furnace would disintegrate over time from people grasping it under the edges and slowly tearing at the foam underneath. So I broke out the Mod Podge again to coat the underside and give it a hard shell.

After that, I took the much more exciting step of adding printed advisory notices and building badges around the site. I’d included various signboards and other locations for these in the build. Artsy detailed notices came from Gitsplitta’s collection on DakkaDakka. The Medea building badges I made, using a grimdark-appropriate clip art gas mask I found and a vector art Imperial Aquila I made previously. My inkjet printer is not very good at all, but slight graininess is totally fine for this use and not very visible anyway.

I sized everything precisely in Inkscape (open source vector drawing software), cut them out carefully, and glued them on with spray adhesive. This is cleaner to work with than rubber cement and will not warp paper products (rubber cement in turn is much better than white glue for the same reasons). You spray the piece on a scrap sheet off to the side and then attach it, using a clean napkin to press and gently rub it into place. This yields a very clean placement with no risk to messing up the existing paint job. You just need to be very precise at putting the piece into position, as it attaches permanently almost instantly.

Once in place I washed the posters and signboards in sepia and the badges and their positions in camo green. Finally, I went around and just quickly washed a bunch of the mechanical bits in brown, sepia, and green to deepen the depths, add some additional variation, and tone down some of the brighter spots.

Done

We finished a project! Medea Refinery is complete. The only additional work I can see perhaps doing sometime is making matching table boards. However, it’s not necessary at the moment. Our home shop and host for LibertyHammer already has several dark brown tables; this was one consideration in choosing a color scheme.

From this point we could continue on endlessly just doing weathering, let alone any other work, but this is a good place to stop. The set already strikes a great tradeoff between high quality visuals, playability, durability, and the simple requirement of getting it done. Anything further hits diminishing returns, and we all have other projects to work on toward the event.

This has been a great project, and I’m really excited to see this terrain in action. It was made even better by being completed by a group of great friends, and hopefully we’ll have many amazing games on it. Still and finally to come, late this week I hope to take high quality glamour photos of all the final finished pieces and post them along with some of my observations and lessons learned.

Having spent the day at an X-Wing tournament, 10pm Saturday I finally got going on the last two pieces for the Medea Refinery. After cranking away through the night I managed to get them done just in time for our group painting session on Sunday…

Both came out pretty neat: A reservoir tank, and a processing site.

Reservoir Tank

The reservoir tank was really fast and fun to put together. The core component is a great piece of junk plastic, half of a broken hot tub filter intake; the other half made the smoke stack on the furnace piece. This part though was actually the first bit I worked on for this build. Way back at the start I cut a chunk of foam to fill it as a quick test of a foam cutter I got, then put it aside until I knew what to do with it.

Picking it back up, I looked around my bits pile to see what could finish it up quickly. The big find was that the lid of the hot chocolate canister used to make the water tower worked really well as a top component, looking like some kind of access compartment. Unfortunately it had a significant undercut to slide into the canister that didn’t look good set directly onto the top. I’m not sure how I would have addressed this manually. Probably cut some foamcore to slide it into, but I hate cutting circles. Instead I 3D modeled a collar to fit exactly around the lid and fill out the undercut, included some bolts for detail, and printed it out.

After that I built a ladder following the procedure I’ve used throughout this build, glued on a bunch of hatches and wall bits I downloaded and printed, and called it done. A simple, effective piece that’s a solid line of sight blocker at 4″ to the top.

Processing Site

For the final piece I wasn’t sure what to make. Pretty much out of time, I didn’t want to embark on a building or similar structure. I also kind of wanted a piece of just area terrain/partial cover, not a chunky line of sight blocker like the other pieces.

Rooting through my bits and supplies pile again I started looking at some large wood dowels I have. It got me to thinking about a collection of small tanks making up a little chemical processing site of some sort. In the end I only used the dowels for the tallest tank because it was unfortunately a hard enough wood I didn’t want to deal with cutting them all to size. But I started by designing caps to fit the dowels, and only at the last minute decided to print the barrels as well.

One somewhat interesting modeling detail is that the caps have a concave underside so the barrels fit slightly inside the collar, rather than just surface mating. It seemed like it might be too much area for the print head to traverse in space without potentially distorting the shape of the cap by collapsing a bit as the underside hanging in open air sagged. The printer software I use can automatically add supports, but in doing so it would also unnecessarily support the bolts hanging off the side. The underside supports would possibly also be a hassle to cut off because the automatic supports would cover a lot of area. So instead I included the supports directly in the model as concentric rings of little divots that provide just enough support, but flick off with your fingernail. After doing a test print to check the supports and sizing against the dowels I decided to double the number of them to eliminate a few loose stringers from sagging plastic that had to be cut out. But after that these pieces required essentially zero post-print cleanup.

With some tanks in hand I played around a bunch with different layouts. Eventually I decided to make another component, some sort of mixer that they all feed into and then push out to a larger tank, or a splitter doing the opposite. In retrospect I wish I’d made the faux ports deeper so that the tubing had more length to sit in as it’s glued down, but I eventually managed to wrestle them into place.

Done

That’s it for the construction of the Medea Refinery! In fact, as I’m sitting here it’s actually already entirely done; we had a very successful group painting day to knock it out. Pictures from that will be up very soon. All of the printed models for the processing site are up for free download on Thingiverse.

Two more pieces completed for the Medea Refinery board: A water tower and a resting place. I have two more in progress to complete tonight, and then tomorrow a group from PAGE is coming over to paint, paint, paint! With these last pieces the set will come out to almost exactly a 2’x3′ area and thus definitely cover almost precisely 25% of a standard 4’x6′ 40k board.

Resting Place

The resting place is straightforward, just gluing things together and onto the board.

Originally I had sketched out this piece to be based around a shipping container providing some heavy cover. But in the age of MDF terrain it has become clear that the worlds of the future will in no way want for shipping containers. There will be shipping containers everywhere, just laying around to be used for any purpose. So that wasn’t very exciting to get started building.

But then this truck model in my closet caught my eye. It’s a WW2 US Army Eager Beaver 2 1/2 Ton Truck 1/35 scale model from Monogram. That scale is oversize for 40k, which is closer to 1/48 as much as it has any scale (it doesn’t). But these older trucks and vehicles tend to have actually been a lot smaller and more frail than our modern mega-sized age conceives of them. To put it into some perspective: WW2 Jeeps had 4″ wide wheels. I have a mountain bike with 4.8″ wide wheels, and there are 5″ and 6″ models available. On top of that, 40k and many other miniatures games have an oversize aesthetic to accentuate (and render more easily paintable) guns and other equipment details. So, between our modern expectations and the dramatized aesthetic, many—though not all—1/35 model kits like this fit in just fine.

I’m not sure if this specific model is still in production, it’s no longer available on Amazon. But you can generally find 1/35 and 1/48 trucks like this for $20–$25US. Many of them, like this one, have been manufactured for thirty years or more. So some of the idioms and conventions are a bit different from a modern kit. For example, the front cab assembly on this one didn’t really lock into place, it all just sort of lined up and hopefully you held it in position long enough for the glue to set. On the flip side, these older kits are cheap, go together quickly, and look great.

Around the truck I wanted to suggest a little story vignette of a team of refinery workers, scouts in the ongoing conflict, or vagabonds driven on by the war to have roughing it here overnight among some cover, but having to hurriedly abandon the position for whatever reason. The bags and small drum are from a Tamiya 1/35 Allied Vehicles Accessories kit, a great source of these kinds of bits. The rifle is from a Space Marine Sniper Scout box. The wood oil drums are from CraftParts. You can find them at Michael’s and other arts & crafts stores, but usually only in bags of ~2.

The rocks are some kind of chalky, very light material that I stole from a friend’s miniatures basing kit while we were working on a project. Rather than using my limited supply of them to build up the pile in the corner, it’s cut-up scrap foam under a single layer of rocks. The small gravel is affixed by brushing on a layer of Mod Podge and then sprinkling it around, as I’ve done with all the pieces in this set. The primer to be used for the ground is a texture paint that will provide some smaller grained variety, though in the future I have to restock on a larger variety of gravel sizes and mix them for this sort of thing.

Water Tower

The water tower is a more elaborate scratchbuild, much of it digitally. I started with some inspiration from a canister of hot chocolate powder and wooden dowels. From there I modeled some feet for the legs and an insert for the bottom of the canister.

The canister I wrapped in cardstock and tape, then added Plastruct struts regularly around it for texture and to mask its identity. The outlet pipe I modeled as parts to be assembled, to be printed without supports.

Throughout all this modeling and building I try to think a bit about how the terrain structures and represents the gameplay on it. For example, most people play a piece like this in 40k such that models on the top of such a structure would get some kind of cover. That’s kind of funny seeming thematically if it’s just a bare roof or top. So I like to have bits around to give a suggestion of the kinds of things the figures are hiding behind. For the bits on top here I used some of the generic 3D printed bits I’ve designed, as well as some I downloaded. Of course then the soldiers need a plausible way to get to the top, so a ladder was constructed as in this tutorial and hung off the side.

Beyond that, I was thinking a bit here about the story image of the civilians who operated this tower. Specifically, I thought about the engineer having to climb up this somewhat perilous ladder to turn the wheel controlling the outlet, and then the even more dangerous task of climbing up to replace the small fuel tank powering the machinery on the roof and inexplicably hung off the side. So there are a couple real design details, like they ladder has been placed in reach of both, and the fuel tank hanger designed with a bottom insert and a backing cage with rounded edges such that you could plausibly hang by the ladder and throw a tank on. That said, it’s important to not worry too much about the story. For example, how does this water tank get refilled? Don’t know, don’t care.

The train track is a random HO scale piece I had laying around, cut down a bit with a Dremel. The scale of it works much like the truck discussion above but in reverse. HO scale is actually much too small for 40k, being 1/87 whereas 40k is around 1/46. For train cars, buildings, and equipment, O scale at 1/48 is much more appropriate. However, set on their own, I think HO tracks like these work visually. People underestimate how wide train tracks are in reality. Plus, in a use like this it’s easy to imagine the tracks being for very narrow gauge rail or even just small material hopper carts such as is used in mines.

Models

Both these pieces were a lot of fun to put together, in different ways: One very old school modeling, and the other very futuristic high-tech crafting. The 3D models developed so far are available for free on my Thingiverse account. More to come as the remaining Medea Refinery pieces get completed and painting begins!