Cathayan Borderlands scenery (WIP+Completed)

cianty wrote:

Well, this is a "corner piece"

Yep, that makes sense. Sweet. Can't wait for the pics.

Here are some shots in subpar quality. I'll try to take some better pics when I have the time. I'll include some miniatures then to give a better idea of the size.

I'd love to add some bushes to the piece but I don't know what to use. If anyone of you has any suggestions for material and/or product/producer names, please let me know. Currently I am afraid to simply buy something off of ebay without seeing it in reality.

nice work, it looks great! The board looks awesome 2 with the trees and stuff!

That is a very attractive addition to an already nice gaming board.Well done.

I usually make my own bushes, but I know there are a couple of German companies that make some nice bushes & hedges. Check through some of the stuff at Walthers [ www.walthers.com ]; Busch, Faller, Heiki are a few manufactures. Another company [location unknown] that makes some really cool rubberized battle mats is www.zuzzy.com ; they've got a line of moorland scenery that's rather chaosy & quite spooky that you might like to check out .

I bought a pack of foilage yesterday which looks pretty good to me. I really like how it looks on my forest sections. I'll post some pics later.

First I'll finish the second fir tree terrain piece.


Forest section II







This one will be snow-clad, first time I use my snow flock. It's about time I learn to apply it so I can finally finish the Cathayan borderlands gaming table.

There are even enough trees left for a third piece. I'll think thoroughly how I want that to be.

Looks great man! What foam/material are you using for the base?

Ashton wrote:

Looks great man! What foam/material are you using for the base?

I use a special kind of hard foam called "Modur". I ordered mine at the excellent MICROCONSTRUCT shop which unfortunately is currently down. From what I read on various websites this seems to be quite popular among professional terrain builders. I like it because it's so easy to shape and can be glued and painted easily. Especially the dreaded melting effect you get from basecoating styrofoam does not occur. The only disadavantage is that it is extremely crumbly and after sawing it into shape the fine dust is everywhere. However, I don't know of any material better than this for our purposes.

Very nice piece of work. I love the effect of new fallen snow. I really turned out very nicely. WELL DONE, AMIGO!

The snow-clad forest piece is done.

That really looks terrific. I love the way the minis and terrain come together making the whole picture greater than the components. Excellent work as always.

I'm really looking forward to the battle reports all this great modeling is leading up to.

Nice! Very moody.

(Ich sehe du hast die Konsistenz der Snow Paste sehr gut hinbekommen! Congrats)

That is awesome! I esp love the slope of the hill so that there isn't any spot on the hill where a model can't stand (except where teh threes are... ) Great work. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks, folks!

Admin Tom wrote:

(Ich sehe du hast die Konsistenz der Snow Paste sehr gut hinbekommen! Congrats)

Man, that was a pain. Finding the right mixture of water, PVA and snow flock was really hard. I guess it came out ok.

In the City of the Damned you can easily use barricades made of all the debris like stones, wooden slats, broken wheels, etc. etc. They provide great diversification on the gaming board while being both eye candy and of strategic relevance.
In rural settings such as Empire in Flames you can use fences to fulfill this purpose. But what about the wilderness setting of the Cathayan borderlands? Here, there are no fences to be found - in fact, signs of human activity are quite rare. Yet I didn't want to miss these kinds of gimmicks for my board.


Snowy barricades

I chose to make a sort of "barricade". Actually these "barricades" are of natural origin; they are random collections of stones, snow-clad, that fit perfectly in the Northern Wastes part of the table.
But they are far more than mere obstacles. I wanted to keep the gaming table itself flat in general so that the different terrain pieces could be placed anywhere anytime so that the table is different each game. Especially for the snowy part of the table this meant that I could not use all the scattered stones that I wanted to use. The "barricades" provide a way to make this area more interesting, and more individual.

Alright, a long intro, I know. So here are the obligatory pictures:

(NB: Some of the pieces' borders need a second layer of snow because the base still shows through here and there.)

wonderful as always! your snow looks really cool (cool as "awesome" but also as "cold" )

What's the name of the skeleton guy? how did he die with his axe in his hand?

Very Cool snow effect [no pun intended (likely story)]. It looked good in the forest piece, but up close...WOW! BRAVO!

@ Tortiou: see how great minds flow in the same channels.

nice work! The snow effect is great.

First off, thank y'all!

Tortiou wrote:

What's the name of the skeleton guy? how did he die with his axe in his hand?

Heh heh, yeah, I thought that this guy had a story to tell. But for us unomniscient, he is just one of the many aspiring worshippers of the dark Gods, who at one point decided to travel north and prove himself to the ungracious Chaos Gods. The weather, the journey, the unspeakable horrors - it was all to much in the end...

Great work, cianty!

What about a fallen tree as a natural barricade?

Erkwin wrote:

Great work, cianty!

What about a fallen tree as a natural barricade?

Yep, definately. But I have yet to decide whether I want to do that with the third and last fir tree piece of terrain or as a seperate "barricade" or both. I don't have that many trees left that's why I didn't alreapy choose the last option.

Encouraged by Erkwin I created another ...


Snowy barricade III: The Fallen Tree

I like this one quite a lot. It's fun creating snow-clad scenery, I highly recommend trying that.

Looks like you had a whipped cream overdose...

Nice job man, I think this is my favourite of all your tree bases !
Keep up the good work!

Wonderful, exactly as I imagined

The smashed skeleton is a very nice gimmick

Keep it up

WOODSMAN SPARE THAT TREE.........

Excellent piece of work. I LOVE the Skeleton's legs sticking out form under the fallen tree. Getting a bit of a story from a piece of terrain is very cool,; it's an art in itself; you pulled in off perfectly! BRAVO!

BTW did the tree make a sound when it fell?

DeafNala wrote:

BTW did the tree make a sound when it fell?

You mean because no one was around to hear, except for the poor skeleton?