Greetings! If you're a first time visitor or someone who's been following the series, thank you for reading. My apologies to anyone who came looking on Sunday for the latest scenery post and found none. It was a busy and stressful weekend so I fell off schedule. That being said, we're back on track with our Sun/Wed schedule, so here it goes. As might be expected, this one is very picture heavy.    This is where we left off with the freight elevator car in Making Mine Scenery X . As promised, I worked on detailing it out. Today we'll add some additional rails/bumpers, signage, and the elevator control box which is where we are going to start.   The sunlight was so strong you can't see the hole I drilled, but I had cut a piece of StripeStyrene tube about 3/16" (about the width of 3 pieces of 1/16" rod, pictured next to it. The idea was to create a lever by gluing the rod in the hole I drilled. Here's a shot of the rod gluing in ...

Greetings terrain builders! On this Valentine's Day weekend I'm going with a quick and simple project: rock piles. Rock piles are a thematic addition to the mine setting and can be extremely useful for game play as barriers and cover to hide behind. Plus, they're a great way to reduce your terrain making "waste." First I began with some offcuts, a few 25mm round bases, and my breakaway blade. Personally, I hate waste. I try to get the most out of everything I can. Our hobby isn't exactly the most environmentally sound hobby out there so I try to reduce my impact by using most of my off cuts for other projects. I maintain a bin of off cuts of various sizes and most of the terrain made in this series has all been made from pieces in that bin saved from previous scenery projects. I cut up and shaped the offcuts into rocks of various sizes and shapes using the same techniques I did for the mine walls detailed in Making Mine Scenery Part II . I...

The chasm taking shape. Today we're going to focus a bit more on the chasm board section. Last week I posted the above picture showing the pieces I was going to use for the incline. I actually opted to split the small connector piece in half and shape the "chasm end" some. The middle piece was split in two so they could be spread apart. The other half is sitting all the way to the left of the picture, on top of the black cardstock. The other weird offcut was to be used as well. Cardstock spread across the pink foam to create the incline. I spread the 3 pieces of foam out to create a more gradual transition, and then I glued down a piece of black cardstock across the 3 pieces. This created a nice shallow smooth incline. I had some offcut foam suitable for making some larger rocks so I shaped and glued those down as well. Finally, I laid down the two pieces of I-beam/girder, traced them with a pencil in the spot I wanted them, and then I cut insets into th...

Abandoned iron mine pic I stole off of Google Images. Today I jumped around between 3 different projects relating to the iron mine scenery I'm working on. The afternoon began with some quick shaping of the other half of the chasm I was working on in Making Mine Scenery Part II . Since I already discuss the shaping process in detail, I'll just show you two quick shots, one of the pieces after shaping and then another of pieces being left to glue. Pretty dramatic stuff (actually its really not). Thanks to Edgar Allen Poe for the assist. More shaped pink foam waiting for glue. Luckily for my project Edgar Allan Poe was a prolific writer. I'm not sure where my bricks are. Which begs the question.. "How do you lose a brick?" So with the chasm section left to dry it was time to work on something else, so I dragged out the three original board sections from Making Mine Scenery Part I for some rough detailing. In the photo I started the article with yo...

Behold! Our project begins with a meticulously detailed sketch. For the second part of this series I wanted to backtrack a little and show some of the steps I glossed over in Making Mine Scenery Part I . Its a little backwards, I know, but I'm a constant re-writer and often find myself wanting to expand on an idea I merely touched on. What can you do? A little solo play testing shot of what should play out as a 15 minute demo. Breakers must hop a barricade, cross the chasm, and then move a boulder blocking a secret passage to win the scenario, all while a Prod is in hot pursuit. To discourage the Breakers from just beating the crap out of the Prod, those green counters after the barricade are where they hid their weapons, so they start the scenario unarmed. All of that aside, we're going to start with a piece of 8"x10" masonite, just like the other board sections I've shown thus far. I very quickly sketched the essential details of the layout. This boar...