You don’t need many miniatures to play Infinity, but you do need quite a few terrain elements. With these couple of pieces I’ve finished begins my own Infinity Urban table project.
I know it’s the most common table style for Infinity, but I don’t want to be original with this project. I’ve always loved urban tables. I think it looks awesome in sci-fi and modern games.
For this project I want to theme it around the Japanese slums of a Yu Jing city. The board itself should be generic, as I’ll use it for other games too, but I want the buildings to have an asian feel. I’ll go for a clean white with orange accents as the Yu Jing colour scheme as a base. But these being the Japanese slums they’ll be quite weathered (it’s fun!) and they’ll have plenty of rebellious graffiti.
I’d love for it to be as close as possible to the Blade Runner imagery. But that might be too busy to be playable, and looks come second to playability.
The first piece I’ve painted was designed for another game, Deadzone, but it works just fine for Infinity… kind of.
Quite some time ago I talked about Secret Weapon’s Tablescapes, and I finally gotten around to painting… one single tile.
It was a test tile, after all. The Deadzone tiles have the exact same height as the Urban city tiles, so they can be mixed without problems. And that’s exactly what I’m doing for this table. The urban set has too many roads for my taste, as it creates plenty of open spaces with straight fire lanes. Mixing the Deadzone tiles I can make more space to place buildings and such for cover.
Guessing if you’re on your good range band or if you can catch an enemy with a template is part of the fun in Infinity, as you can’t pre-measure. The main problem with using the Tablescapes tiles for Infinity, or any other tiled table, is that it makes it easier to calculate distances. Specially with the Deadzone tiles, as they have a grid pattern. So keep that in mind if you are or play against very competitive players. I don’t care too much about it as it just looks awesome.
Anyway, as this was a test piece it was painted in a non optimal way. I hope to improve that for the rest of the tiles. I first airbrushed some shades of grey and then painted the metallic pieces. But I wasn’t happy with how the concrete looked, so I decided to stipple with a sponge to give it a more grainy feel.
It took me a while to find the right balance of colours so I went back and forth covering the areas. For the next pieces I won’t bother airbrushing modulation on the greys as it’ll be mostly covered. And even if I was carefull, some of the grey ended on the metallic areas, which I had to retouch. Better to leave them for last in the other tiles (at least on the ones that I haven’t already done those steps).
As another first time, I decided to try an oil wash on the tile. So, once I was happy with the overall look, I varnished the whole tile and left it to dry. It is recommended to varnish the piece before applying an oil wash. And if it’s with gloss varnish, even better. It’s uses are twofold. First, it helps break surface tension, allowing the wash to stay on the lower cavities of the model. And once it’s dry (or mostly dry, as oil paints take a really long time to dry) you’ll use mineral spirits to remove the oil wash from the raised areas, and the varnish helps protect your paintjob at this step.
As I was still learning some of the areas turned out darker than I wanted. My first try had too much paint on it. Also works better if you apply it on the areas that you want shades instead of on the whole model, as it reduces the amount of areas you have to clean. Once you’ve done cleaning the wash, you should varnish the model once again. This time with mate or satin varnish, to seal the wash in place and kill the shininess of the previous varnish.
I’m really happy I went with the oil wash, it really darkens all the cracks and makes the tile pop.
While I was finishing the tile I received my stencils from the Anarchy Models Kickstarter, so why not give them a try? I decided to use the simple, but always cool hazard stripes. After masking the surrounding areas, I airbrushed some chipping medium. Once it was dry, I painted the whole area yellow and later used the stencil to paint the black stripes. Easy! Once it was dry, I brushed some water onto it to reactivate the chipping medium and started damaging it.
The other piece I finished comes also from a Kickstarter. It’s one of the simplest buildings from the Wargame-Model-Mods Kickstarter. They’re MDF buildings with gimmicks. Most have LED lights, some have moving parts.
This one is really simple, that’s why I choose to build it first. The other are more complex and way nicer looking. Anyway, I decided tu build it into two separate pieces, the interior and the roof with the cage.
After painting the interior, I glued the LEDS inside. I wasn’t sure how to do it. My first try was with PVA, but it takes too much time to dry, and the wires don’t stay in place. So I went with superglue and masking tape to fix them in place while it dries. If you look at the insides, it’s not pretty at all. But you shouldn’t be looking at the insides anyway.
I then painted the cage with whitish colours and once it was dry glued the two pieces together. Masking the holes on the walls I airbrushed the bottom and roof to blend the joints of the two pieces. With this I had a really clean looking piece. Then I went to town weathering it.
At least in this piece, the lightning from the LEDs isn’t very obvious with regular lights. And it doesn’t help that I used blue lights on a building painted in light colours with blue interiors. You need to take out some lights for the effect to become more noticeable.
Anyway, I’m really happy with how these couple of scenery pieces turned out, and I hope to get some time to continue painting the Tablescapes tiles… but then I have a lot of miniature projects already open (and more to come). Oh well, it’s a nice problem to have at least.
With some of the lights out, the LEDs become more noticeable.