EXT: Plasma Meter Station

A terrain commission! I'll give you three guesses whether it's for General Stylus or not.

This is a pair of Haemotrope reactors, courtesy of the splendidly cut-price Conquest magazine. I've always been a fan of magazines that build into a comprehensive binder over time. Replacing the binder with a pair of armies and a table for them to clash over is nothing short of genius. Shame it hasn't made it to Sweden, other than as the sporadic bootleg copies Stylus has sent my way!

(Speaking of which, I have a pair of these of my own I need to paint at some point. Very easy to build, all four took about twenty minutes.)

Lovely pieces, bigger than I realised and suitably morbid for a grimdark power generator. There was a decent length of pipework to go with it, plus the computer terminal thingy, all pre-painted in a perfectly functional but perhaps rather drab rusty metal.

These have been painted to go on Stylus's desert map, so I tried to match the paint scheme his buildings have. Dusty creams and corroded bronze, plus martian desert bases. The glow was surprisingly easy to do, and really makes it pop.

With these kits came ten of the original Necromunda bulkheads. Once I'd stopped pawing them, misty-eyed with fond remembrance, my task was to turn them into some flexible scatter terrain. A few minutes with my hi-tec design software...

...and Stylus chose a mixed option of some walkways and some ruins. Five days of prepping and painting later, here's what he got!

Various stages of construction - this is nearly done and ready to prime

The bases double as reference cards from the rejuvenated remains of my teenage collection. There's a Heroquest Barbarian card in there somewhere, which may well be heresy. But it's also the perfect thickness and strength of card!

Primed and ready to go

Now with extra salt

Finished - the longer platform

Small Platform A

Small Platform B. Top decks on all of these are plasticard decorated with mdf offcuts, nothing very sophisticated but quite functional

Corner Ruin A

Reverse angle - I tilted it up on the edge of a shoebox while the babywipe plus PVA was drying to get a little wind in its sail

Corner Ruin B

Reverse angle - I'd read somewhere that using wood glue to stick your posters on gives them a nice faded tone. Not with my wood glue, must be the wrong kind! It dried into a kind of bubbly foam, thickening the posters out a lot and obscuring the details a bit. It didn't totally wreck it, but I put more posters on over the top to mask it a bit, it wasn't quite working as intended.

Good fun to build, and it used up some of my less interesting mdf offcuts from previous scenery builds. The tarps are babywipes, the posters are from Peachy's pdf set, available somewhere on the GW website.

Painting Guide:

• Basecoats - Burnt Sienna paint over black
• Painted Metal - Dark Tone wash, then Karak Stone sponged on, then Karak Stone plus White stippling
• Exposed Metal - Tin Bitz, Agrax Earthshade Gloss wash, heavy drybrush with Brass Scorpion, Nihilakh Oxide to finish
• Grey - Eshin Grey and Dark Tone wash
• Glow - Watered-down Ahriman Blue carefully applied to the recess where the glow was coming from and its edges, then the interior shaded up four times with increasing amounts of white added in
• Reds - Dragon Red, Agrax, Pure Red
• Golds - Greedy Gold, Agrax gloss wash, some Auric Armour Gold highlights but not much
• Basing - Very little, just sand, glue and Iron Oxide pigment
• Necromunda Bulkheads - Metallic Silver spray paint, some very spotty Chocolate Brown spray from an almost empty can, heavily watered Black paint slopped on, then a salt weathering layer left to dry and lightly sprayed with Mephiston Red before scrubbing off the salt. A lively mix of Rust Orange, watery Skrag Brown, Typhus Corrosion slapped on, then Wild Rider Red to pick out the red paint a bit. Final drybrush with Plate Mail Metal and a little Shining Silver in places, plus Greedy Gold on selected skulls and bolts. 

Stylus - it'll be in the post shortly!