Thursday, March 15, 2012

One Painted Dungeon Room (and a short tutorial)

In the 24 hours since receiving my new 3D dungeon terrain, I have managed to paint up a whole room. I still have a long way to go, but I can see myself finishing about one room's worth of pieces a week, so it shouldn't take me too long to finish up. The results are simple enough to achieve and I must say they look amazing:
And so we can see the inside. The walls and floors of the pieces are completely bare and I wanted to give my dungeon a little life with a few tidbits, so I added a wall hanging and a couple scattered bones made of Games Workshop bitz. I also couldn't resist a couple blood spatters.
I think it looks pretty awesome, if I do say so myself. And in case anyone would like to know how it was achieved, here's a quick tutorial:
Start by basing your pieces black, watering down the paint so that it gets between all the nooks and crannies. The material is porous, so it will suck up the paint a bit. You may need a couple coats and make sure you do it over something like newspaper or a bowl because it will drip like mad. Once you have all the white of the original stone covered, leave it to dry for several hours. Since this project will take a lot of paint over time, I am actually using Behr interior flat house paint on it and it works just fine. I also used a small house paint brush on this step as well.
Next, heavy drybrush a medium grey-green color over the stone. You want to cover the black, leaving it only in the recesses. This particular color is called Inland from Behr. I chose the grey green to give it a sort of damp mossy appearance, but most of this color ends up covered by the last step. It is really only there to give an extra tinge of color, which I wouldn't have gotten if I'd gone straight medium grey.
When those pieces are dry (which is almost immediately), use a light grey to drybrush over the grey-green. Do this lightly, doing several passes instead of one heavy pass. You want to build up the color so the grey-green shows through but it is still bright. This color is Behr's Subtle Touch.
Finally, paint up any details you may have added to your pieces appropriately. I do highly recommend adding things to the basic pieces, just because painting stone walls gets boring after a while and these little touches give it character, plus something to look forward to in the last step.
And that's it, folks. Its really very simple and the most time consuming part is waiting for the undercoat to dry. Hopefully I will have another set painted up for next week! Thanks for reading!

5 comments:

  1. I'm shocked at how quickly you've turned yesterday's white plaster into a room that looks so good.

    I'm probably going to go the Hirst Arts route myself as one of my friends already already uses them so it's easier if we want to pool resources. I have to say if it weren't for that I'd be tempted to buy the same set as you.

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    1. Honestly, the most time consuming part is the base coat process, and that's drying time. I'm very happy with how it turned out.

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  2. I like the results you are getting.

    Had you thought to put the odd orange / yellow spots to represent lichen?

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    1. My plan was to add all sorts of little details, like broken/discarded weapons, bones, chains, molds/slimes and such throughout the dungeon. Each detail will be relegated to a single piece so they can be easily mixed/matched to create different looks.

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