No Place Like Home!

Apart from Orktober, the only other community painting challenge I was aware of this month was the Apocalypse Me challenge run by Dave Stone over at Wargamesculptors Blog. Wasn’t sure I’d be able to participate in this challenge, but Dave said that an alien invasion would probably count as an apocalypse and that got me thinking about what I could do!

Alien invasion for me means my War of the Worlds setting and my Squid army, readying itself to invade Earth in the 19th Century! I’ve added bits and pieces to suit what I want in this army, so I’m not conforming to the Martian invasion force that H. G. Wells described in his book. I’ve got some metal creepy crawly type minis that I want to do, so they got dug out of a storage box in preparation for some of them getting painted, but then I saw some spindle drones over at Leadballoony.com and thought they’d look ideal as Martian drones. I duly found some on Ebay and got them ordered, but the Royal Mail strikes in the UK meant they took longer to arrive than normal so I thought I’d better come up with something else (hopefully a post on the drones here won’t be too long in coming though)!

And here it is, a cut-up natural sweetener tub Martian invasion cylinder that’s just crashed on Earth! This must be the simplest piece of scenery I’ve ever made, duly inspired by the guys over at Skinflint Games and Matt’s Space Station Zero scenery. It really is a natural sweetener tub, cut through diagonally, glued onto a bit of foamcard which was then glued onto a piece of mounting board!

I slapped some Vallejo natural stone texture onto the base followed by white pumice texture (the latter takes ages to dry in thick sections, so the quick drying stone was put on first to fill in big gaps and then followed by a thinner layer of pumice). I carefully cut out a ring of card for the rear surface and then made a couple of ying-yang shapes to put under the ring to give the impression of a door/airlock, maybe opening, maybe not!

I didn’t want it to look steampunky so I left it as a plain surface with no rivets or any other embellishments. I painted it in Humbrol acrylic Rust and then put a thinned coat of black/brown on it, with some of the latter being removed with a damp brush to give it a streaky appearance.

Some of the black/brown leaked across the earth base on one side (you can just make it our in the picture above) so I just drybrushed that in a darker shade to make it look like either the grass had caught fire and burnt away on that side or there’d been a nasty chemical spill of some sort! Then it was just a case of drybrushing some highlights on the cylinder itself and adding some grass to the base.

And that was it! My Squids now have somewhere to start their invasion of Earth from!

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