Lava Rock Asteroids

Working with some of the inspiration from last week and my Nebula tip, I went to work on creating some additional space terrain for my Battlefleet Gothic battles. And what better place to start than Asteroids!

I thought a few times about trying to use regular foam, and even did a few quick tests with some pink foam and bead foam. Neither worked out for the speed I was looking for. And then working from the idea of using real rocks, I came up with the perfect starting point, Lava Rocks!


The transformation was as simple as a few coats of spray paint. Starting with black spray paint as a basecoat.


After the black spray was completely dried, I found some dark grey spray and heavily dusted them on all sides.


Again, letting the last coat completely dry, I broke out my white spray paint to finish off the job with a very light dusting. This last step was done by spraying from about twice the distance away from the rocks.


Don't mind the blueish hue from the rocks in the last photo, it's simply the reflected light from the natural light from the open garage door. Which brings up another point, always spray paint with good ventilation!

That's it! They're ready to play! I'm definitely planning to do a good chunk more of these, as well as a variety of other terrain to include planets. Now I just need a full fleet to use!

Friday Quick Tip: Nebulas

With the Babad War Campaign build up that went down in 2009 from Bell of Lost Souls, I was bitten by the Battlefleet Gothic bug. It started out by just buying and painting up my Sons of Medusa Battle Barge "The Might of Heracles". As I started reading the rules for BFG, I began to feel the pull of BFG terrain, and I just couldn't help myself. After a quick trip to the local Hobby Lobby craft store, I was ready to start my table.

I knew I didn't want some boring just stars type starfield to battle over. So I broke out the spray paint and got to work!

You'll need a black cloth for this technique, so if you want a hard table for BFG, you're kind of out of luck on this technique, sorry! But I think a cloth cover for normal tables is probably best because BFG is definitely a flavor of the week game, and as such having a dedicated table seems a bit much! For my cloth I purchased an approximately 4'x6' foot section of Black Jersey Knit cloth.

You're also going to need a small selection of spray paints. I did the first trial with reds, but for this I've used a single Rustoleum blue spray.

To start out, flatten out the cloth on a flat surface, and then take up a small knot worth and curl it up like so:


As you can see, these photos are somewhat bright, it's because I opened up the garage door since I'm working with spray paint! Have good ventilation when using sprays people!

When you have something similar to this, just spray the balled up area with whatever color or colors you want the nebula to end up being!


Next just flatten it all back out!


As you can see, the knotting/balling up of the cloth has created a lot of great variation in the paint that gives the nebula a really nice random and natural look!

The final step in nebula creation is to dust the entire thing lightly with an additional spray of blue to add some more glow to the already vibrant nebula.


Flick some stars on using a toothbrush and some white paint and you're good to go!

I hope this little technique was helpful, BFG is very niche, but it's a dedicated group that love the game! This will hopefully find those of you interested in the game well, and hopefully, we see more variation on those starfields for any space based gaming!