Category: diy

Tutorial – Frozen Pond

I have been busy building terrain to play in Frostgrave, a skirmish game set in a ruined city that has been frozen over in the past. I’ve been experimenting using aquarium and terrarium terrain to build cheap nice looking terrain pieces. I’ve done up this quick tutorial on making a frozen pond.

 

Things you will need:

  • Terrarium pond (Can be found at pet stores in lizard section)
  • Cracked ice fluorescent light cover (Big plastic sheets at hardware store)
  • Paint (I used a couple shades of blue)
  • Paper for making template
  • Woodland Scenics Realistic Water
  • Snow Flock
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First thing is to make a paper template of the inside of the dish, you could make your own outer dish with foam as well if you didn’t want to buy a premade one.

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Trace the pattern out onto the cracked ice sheet.

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Start cutting it out and realize you flipped it over and need to start over (you can skip this step if you like). I use a hobby knife and some pliers to score and snap the plastic.

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Cut it a little bigger and then shave it down so it fits.

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It fits!

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Get a couple different shades of blue. You can use cheap craft paint as this will be covered up.

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Paint the basin with the darkest color in the middle where the water would be the deepest.

Pour about 1/8″ of realistic water into the basin and let set over night.

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If you want just water in the basin you can stop here.

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Glue the plastic down. I used spray adhesive but any clear glue will work.

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Pour another layer of realistic water over the top (optional but I like the extra shininess)

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Combine snow flock and realistic water into a paste and apply to the gaps where the snow would drift into.

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Finished product!




Frozen River

Cracked Ice
Close up
Models on ice

I finally found an affordable solution for making the frozen river for my ice board.  Ceiling panels for florescent lights to simulate the ice. This is a translucent cracked ice type and runs about 10 bucks for a 2×4 foot section.  Two of them will be enough to do the large river on my table.  Certainly better than the estimated $100 bucks worth of resin I thought I was going to need.  I had thought about trying it, but saw it in action here and new it would be perfect.

The one problem I ran into is that the panels are actually 23.5 inches vs 47.5 inches.  So for one of the panels I needed to use multiple pieces.  Rather than have a straight seam, I cracked and broke it into pieces and then used Woodland Scenics Realistic Water to make it look like the water was flowing up through the crack.  The water seeped under the plastic to give a really nice looking effect.  I’m really happy, I just need to do some snow banks along the edges to cover up the rough cutting.




Eldar Aegis Defense Line Ideas

Eldar Aegis Force Field

Eldar Wraithbone Aegis Defense Line

 
In my last game, I took and Aegis defense line with quadcannon.  The 4+ cover save was extremely nice and the quad cannon was able to do some nice damage as well.

Here are a couple design ideas for creating an Eldar Aegis defense line.  The top is the force-field idea.  I would have it laser cut and engraved on colored plexiglas   I would then build a generator out of wraithbone to go in the center.

The second would be to just cut the shape into foam board or build it with clay and then texture it and paint it up to look like wraith bone.  I think both would look good, but I’m leaning toward the first option as I think it would look fantastic.




Deimos Predator

I’ve been wanting to try and do some custom building lately to try out some new techniques to bring my build quality up, and decided to try and built a Deimos Predator.  You can see the model I will be attempting to build here from Forge World.

Really enjoy some of the ascetics of the vehicle, though my conversion won’t have everything, but it should be fun to see what I can come up with.  I did some experiments bulking out the front tonight with some plasticard, actually I am using for sale signs which are much cheaper.  The shape isn’t right yet, but the main point was to try out the material and nothing is glued yet, so it will look much better in the final version.