I recently purchased a new ground matt for playing Star Wars Legion. The matt will work as a space port or spaceship hanger. Having that, I needed a bit more terrain features to make the board a little more tactical interesting. I started by going to Legion Terrain and looking through their catalog. I decided to go ahead and order the tractor beam tower piece. It looks very Star Wars, into the cart it went.
Legion offers their terrain as STL files (for those of you that have 3D printers) and printed items done in filament plastic. I am generally not a fan of the material, as I do not like the look of the layering lines. However, I thought it would be OK for this piece. I got the order and went through everything. The layering was heavy as I expected, so a little work would. be needed to camouflage it.
I started by priming the piece with a thick coat of grey auto spray primer. Once that dried, I hit the whole model with some Woodland Scenics black. My hope was that these two step would smooth out the worst ridges. Next was the painting. I started with a heavy wet brush using some darkish gray craft paint. Looking at the ridges, I decided to go light on the dry brushing the flat(ish) section and just did edge highlighting in light gray. Next, I painted some details using gray, white, blue and green. I hit the areas in green with a lighter shade and hit all the red and blue with white dots. Once that was done, I hit the whole thing with some krylon matt finish. It is not really matt, more satin. However, that is what I often want for terrain. It gives a sheen and helps tone down the layering even more. In the end, I am happing with how it came out and think it will work great on the table.
- Manteuffel