Scratchbuilding a Space Dust terrain piece for starship games

 Today I'm making a simple, yet effective piece of terrain for my space game battles, in te form of a space dust cloud piece.

 

Now, google space dust, and it comes in a lot of forms and clouds in our universe, so there is no right or wrong way to go about this thing.

 

So I settles on wanting to make a spiral formed piece of cloud, that can be treated as impassable or hazardous "terrain" on the tabletop.  And you need next to nothing to create it.

 

So apart from paints, what did I use? 

 

An old CD, which you often find at the end of garage sales in the "free" boxes.  Doesn't matter who is on it, but a small tip, put the shiny side downwards, the imprinted label takes paints better.

 

PVA glue and a paperclip: because you need to stick sand to the cd

 

Sand and a teaspoon: to sprinkle the sand on the CD

 

The process

 

As I said, it is a really simple piece of terrain to make.  You put down the CD flat, with the label up as mentioned before.

Then, using the PVA, I drew a spiral, "flattening" the thicker layered glue parts with the paperclip.

 

Next up, I sprinkled sand with the teaspoon over the glue, before tapping off any excess not stuck in the PVA. 

 

And that is it for the actual building of the piece, so leave it all to dry for 24 to 48 hours, and then move on to...

 

The painting

 

 It is space, so of course it needs to be against a black backdrop.  For that, and as I don't want to use my expensive wargame paints, I used hobbycrafts Acryll paints, in my case from the Talens "Amsterdam" range.  These cost about 3 euro for such a big tube, and lasts you a lot of terrain pieces to undercoat.

Once all that is dry, I wanted to make my spiralling dust a mixture of pinkish purples and light blues.  Now this is done with hobby paints, and a first layer of three was painted on the sandy parts.

 

After those, a heavy (be carefull not to rub the sand off) drybrush was done on the whole spiral, and as it's floating around dust, don't worry if some overlaps.  Heck, it makes it even look better.

 

A final, light and heavily contrasting drybrush was done, to give a good sense of deepness to the whole dust spiral.

 

So that's the spiral done, now to work a bit on the black to prevent it from being dull and boring.  This was done by adding some small patches of a very dark blue on it, and then some white dots to represent the stars out there.

 

All that was left was a coat of varnish, again using a relatively cheap hobbycraft satin varnish, to give it a bit of shine, and the whole terrain piece was finished.

 

Not counting the drytime of the glue and the varnish, this is a fun little project that can be undertaken in about half a day of work, and it gives some nice detail to your spacetable...

 

Hope you liked this little tutorial!