Building Planets for Battlefleet Gothic
Axtklinge
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Planet anyone?
The main idea behind this project is to give some clues on scenario building to “modeling newbies”, in order
to help them add some “flavour” to their gaming table!
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Materials
- PVA glue (glue mostly used for wood, white colored that turns transparent when it dries)
- Expanded polystyrene (lightweight kind of “hard-foam” that can be found packing around the tv,
or computer, or any DIY shop or builders merchants)
- Craft knife (or any other good knife)
- Spray primer - black
- Black, white, blue, red and yellow acrylic paints
Note: Don’t forget, you should have some kind of thick cardboard to be able to cut all you need without
damaging the table!
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The first step is to glue a couple of polystyrene pieces together (or use only one large enough), to get the
volume you find to be reasonable. This should be left to dry from one day to the other, with some weight on the top.
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When the polystyrene pieces are glued, you may start to give them the shape you wish, cutting off the leftovers.
(Note: Hands and fingers are quite useful for lots of things such as “dice rolling” so try to keep them “on”
while you cut off the chunks of polystyrene!) You may find (like I did) that after the “initial shape”, there
were still very huge irregular holes in the surface. Now it’s the time fill them up, gluing to them some of
the polystyrene leftovers you have cut.. (Don’t forget to let it dry again!)
Next you should prepare some watered down PVA glue, to protect your “planet” from melting with the
primer and to give it’s surface some texture (if you wish) by adding sand or even modeling flock.
(Note: Usually the watered PVA drops on the floor/table, so be sure to protect these surfaces with some
old newspaper!)
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After the watered PVA dries, you can prime the planet black.
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The painting of your planet can be done with any colors you like. In this case, I chose a mix of white, black
and blue in different proportions, and drybrushed the surface.
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To add a little detail, I’ve painted some craters with a mixture of red and yellow.
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Conclusion
There are many different colour schemes you can use depending on the kind of world you wish to represent (agri-world,
death world, forge world...) keeping the building process similar!
(Meteor’s can be done in the same way, maybe with smaller chunks of polystyrene!)
This has been a very easy, quick and cheap project, and all the materials used were either leftovers or very
'easy to get' kind of things. There are some good sites on the web specifically on terrain modelling, where valuable
advice and technique’s can be found, adapted and used. (For example, see the links section of this site.)
Feel free to post any questions on this (or any other) modeling project in the
EpiComms forum!
Cheers,
Axtklinge
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Date: 29/01/2004
Author: Axtklinge
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