Terrain - Asteroids & Planets

Along with spaceships come outer space itself.  What a boring experience it would be to play on just a flat space mat.

Asteroids

The asteroids are scrunched (technical term) up tin/aluminum foil painted with really cheap black tempra paint, the kind used at primary school: no sense wasting the good stuff.  Once that was done I used a sponge to add a teal green (P3 Meridius Blue) and bright purple-red (P3 Sanguine Base).  These are meant to represent various mineral deposits on the asteroids as well as just for general highlighting.  Once all that is done a liberal coating of Matte Varnish and they’re done.  I had previously attempted the styrofoam method but was not happy with the results.  The idea for doing them this way came to me as I was throwing out some used aluminum foil from a food wrapper.

Planets

I had a lot of fun painting these, so different from miniatures and just an infinite array of possibilities.  Each of these is made of either a full or half styrofoam ball purchased from an art store.  If it’s not obvious my favorite has to be the grey planet with the deep red scar running down one side; no good reason for it to be red other than looks.  After that I’m very happy with the blue planet; a mixture of techniques here: the blue was done with successive layers of sponge work using deep and blue-grey, the polar icecap was done using a mixed medium with small stones.  Lastly there’s the small “Sun”-like planet, but really more Jupiter-ish than anything:  this was done with lots and lots of short brushstrokes in layers of different colours.

There really isn’t much work involved in making space terrain like this and it adds so much to the battlefield.