Hobby Project - Crystal Canyons - Part 1

Crystal Canyons is my Neverborn board, a small piece of the badlands life brought together using the following:

- 2 x gale force 9 crystal sets
- 2 x gale force 9 badlands rocks set
- 1 x gale force 9 badlands bluff
- 1 x gale force 9 badlands rocky outcrop
- 1 x Desert settlement from CNC Miniature Scenery
- 9 x MDF coasters from any hobby craft store

Crystal canyons really shaped itself in my mind when I spent an afternoon clearing up my gaming room and then spent some time on flipboard looking at what's new in the hobby. Maybe subconsciously I was thinking about my next project, maybe I just had an urge to add to my pile of shame, maybe the Neverborn seed was sown because suddenly there were the new badlands sets staring me in the face. Before I knew it they'd found their way in to a shopping cart and were mine! More for my pile of shame, well I guess that depends on if the pre painted scheme grabs me...




I wanted to re-paint the crystals to a more Neverborn colour scheme but I really didn't appreciate how much hard work the GF9 crystals were going to be. They are resin so I went at them with a particularly thick undercoat, knowing they'd soak up the paint. This was after filling back the resin and giving them a good soak and scrub in warm soapy water to get rid of any leftover injection mould chemicals.

The crystal bases are made from MDF coasters I found in a craft store. I applied basing sand to these before gluing on the crystals using a hot glue gun and then undercoated all with a thick black undercoat.

Working up from black undercoat each crystal got the following:
- base coat of warlock purple
- first coat of liche purple
- second coat using a 75/25 mix of liche purple and bleached bone

As the first couple of layers went on, the paint continued to soak in, and worse still, taking the crystal back to black exposed lots of previously hidden air holes. It also looked really streaky, so I thinking may have to dig out my airbrush and go at these crystals that way.

I'm hesitant to do anything with bases until my badlands terrain turns up. That should be here next week giving me the opportunity to check it over and work out a paint scheme for the board and the crystal bases.

I also want to find something to represent tumbleweed and cactus on this board. Time to get my Google-Foo on!