Older Builds or The Bad, the Bad and the Ugly

I travel a lot for work. Like, a lot. More than I'd like sometimes.


When I'm home I like to do family things for the most part but when my wife and kids aren't interested in doing said family things with me I sometimes hide away in my furnace room/closet/workshop and attempt to build & paint stuff.

I'm not much of a miniature painter yet. Haven't tried a whole lot yet either so maybe it's more of a lack of trying and experience issue. Either way, I'm not a great terrain painter either but I do find it easier. One thing I've been finding is I'd like to get an airbrush setup sometime to play with and expand my options. So far I'm learning with what I've got. Which is brushes.



Now, the first terrain I've made since my teenage years was this crappy little WFB-ish tudor style house. You can see it in a pic further down the page. It was small. Like, really, really small. It taught me things though... (a) measurements, even super basic ones, are worth doing, (b) there's definitely such a thing as bad drybrush jobs, and (c) I had a lot to learn.



So I started learning. I discovered a variety of super-knowledgeable YouTube personalities trying to pass on their pearls of wisdom. The ones most notable for me thus far: the Terrain Tutor, TerranScapes, 3T Terrain, Tinker Terrain, Boulder Creek Railroad, Kathy Millatt and Tabletop Minions & Colour of the Gods (though they are mini-painting focused).

These people have years (decades?) of combined experience between them and TONS of knowledge to share on everything from super simple, fast to make terrain, to commercial pieces to museum diorama quality work - so please Google them if you're interested and have never done so before!

So I took the plunge and started trying to build stuff again. There's still no greater teacher than experience (& failure... can't forget about failure!).

With no further ado, here's some crappy things I made early on:

This was my second ever piece of terrain. It's huge. I went from way too small to WAY too big. But at least minis fit on and around it! Just sits on my shelf taking up space as I occasionally think about completing the paint job...

And this is my third ever piece of terrain. It isn't terrible but the MDF base shape is horrid and it was my first attempt at both a crater, water effects (with 2 part epoxy Gorilla glue, lol) and just generally as something in the sci-fi/40K genre.

Here's a group shot of most of my older stuff (and a couple of newer - and hopefully better - builds). On this shelf can be seen my first ever build - the tiny house in the bottom left (and the shitty rock wall beside it which I forgot about).

Gotta start somewhere, right?