A trash can on Mars

Martian ground

Of course the Doomguy-themed UrbanMech needed a Doom-themed hex base. I wasn't any kind of a terrain maker, so I didn't have much to use. The crackling ground -type technical paint by Citadel that I have used twice already was hard as a rock so I didn't even need to consider that as an option.

Some folks had said that my Archer's base was neat, and all it had was just some Woodland Scenics' ballast painted with a couple of oil washes. I thought I could do that, but for variety I felt like gluing a piece of rock or two. Had I been more enthusiastic, I could've built a bit of a non-flat ground shape with acrylic muds or consecutive layers of white glue.

Gravel piece

There was a ridiculous amount of gravel that got carried home in the shoes during the slippery winter. A couple of those pieces had hidden into the corner of the airlock, and why would I go outside to look for stones if I didn't actually need to go outside for stones? I tried out three pieces, and I superglued the smallest of the lot just below the UrbanMech's proverbial nose.

Yes, the gravel piece was enormous!

Glue and ballast

This was a simple approach for a simple person: I covered the hex base with white glue. Then I poured a healthy amount of ballast over the wet glue. Excesses were shaken back into the weathering box (IIRC it was a Basilisk's box, based on the size and the Imperial Aquila). A good while later I brushed off the excess crap from the Urbie's feet, the rest waited for the glue to cure.

Instead of individual pics I just gimped my doings into a non-moving montage.

That was that, I left the miniature in its box overnight so it had time to think of what it had done. The next evening I was looking for red paints, thought that maybe I could do this with oil washes like the last time. The main colour could be the brick red, then one or two other paints blended in. I didn't want to make this too complicated or colourful, that was a recipe for bleeding eyes.

Marsification with paints

Before starting I spent even more time thinking of my paints. Ultimately I settled with the "not too many" and took my three unused oil paints to be tested. The rusts I was going to skip now, maybe completely.

For the ground painting I made a thinnish wash with each of these paints. Like planned, I started with the Dark Brick Red (ABT220) that was a bit darker than I expected, at least when wet. See the first frame of the tetraptych below.

Without wasting time I added the new rustlike paint (ABT260 Oxide Patina) to highlight some of the more light-touched parts like the edge areas of the hex base and the top parts of the rock. This was, obviously, visible in the second frame.

Then I almost changed my mind with the earthy one (ABT090 Industrial Earth) but ended up using it mostly for making up shadows, under the edges of the rock and generally under the UrbanMech itself. Finally I spread some of my oil washes onto the Urbie's feet with the blending brush. The still wet result was shown in the last two frames.

The next day I checked the look between some meetings. The sun was shining, so the lighting conditions were noticeably different compared to the previous evening's.

It was quite red, this Mars ground of mine, but not flat, so I fel that there was some method to my madness. Perhaps the rock itself could benefit from some other kind of red-ish tone, so I was thinking of digging out the rust paint. Maybe the light rust, so the rock would look clearly different.

Rust rust rust rust

Well, I didn't think long, I just doublechecked the Marsiness feeling from my partner and their judment was "too red" as well. I applied a few spots of Dark Rust (ABT070) to shadowed areas, and light rust (ABT060) to the better-lit areas. I blended them around with my round brush and left the setup to dry once again.

It felt better this way. The ground-dirtied effect on the feet might require some bringing down, or I'd just look from further afar the next day to decide if that was needed.

It worked just fine.

And the sides of the hex base

To wrap the basing business up I painted the edges with German Dark Grey. The front edge, marked by where the Center Torso was looking, I decided to mark with caution stripes. Had I got some actual skills in me, I'd tried to implement something from Doom's textures, but as I wasn't skilled, I wasn't going to try anything that mad.

The caution stripes (or hazard stripes) I painted by first covering the full edge with yellow ochre, and when that had dried, I painted the angled stripes with dark grey. This way I guaranteed that the caution stripe existed only in the front sector.

While I remembered, I covered a couple of the bits showing hull red in front of the AC/10's targeting laser with yellow ochre, as those only showed in the photos and I truly had difficulties in spotting them with my own eyes from the mini itself. And as I was fixing the last things that annoyed me in the photos, I also mixed a bit of red-tinted stonewall grey and painted over some blue overflow from the double viewport in the front of the Urbie's head. The new mix wasn't an exact match with the previous highlight tone, but it worked better than the electric blue.

Finally I needed some gloss varnish (Vallejo 70510) on the lenses and the viewports. On the laser lenses I used two drops with a day of curing time between layers, the viewports only got a single coating because they wouldn't have benefited from a convex surface.

Ultimately I decided to pull down the Marsiness of the feet a bit. Now it was good enough for my liking.

Now the UrbanMech felt like it was completed, at long last. This had taken a surprisingly long time, especially if you compared the project time to the Archer. This was a much smaller miniature, a lot weirded painting scheme (and my own weird layering ideas) and a couple of silly mistakes like the colour temperatures between cold and warm tones.