Not to take anything away from KMBs nicely made vehicle explodes blast markers, I wanted something a little more 3D for gaming. My first attempt was to make a crater on a cd base.
You can see from the photo that it has a little bit of wear and tear on it. I wasn't really pleased with it because it chipped easily and it wasn't very 'playable' for infantry models.
I thought that there might be other gamers in the same spot so I thought I'd make some new markers and do up a tutorial article while I was about it.
I still liked the idea of using old cds for the base because they were the right size. It represents the footprint of a rhino fairly well.
I also wanted to make the markers out of readily available materials (available on both sides of the pond!) and keep it simple. So the materials I used were;
An old cd
Joint compound or spackle(I believe it's Pollyfilla in the UK-thanks Matt!)
Base coat paint (I use cheap artist acrylics)
Black wash (I use a product called Didi's Magic Black from Thewarstore in the US but Badab Black would work just as well)
Vallejo game color Khaki for highlighting
GW static grass green
I started with an old cd and put a piece of tape over the center hole.
Then I smothed a coat of joint compound over the surface. I am just looking for a fairly smooth coat here to cover the surface.
After this dried overnight, I added more joint compound. I pulled up a small ridge around the edge but kept it very low. Into this I scribed a bunch of lines radiating out from the center to represent blast marks.
Since I usually field a few vehicles and my regular opponent usually destroyes more than one a game, I figured I'd do up 3 more at this time.
After drying overnight, I took a scotchbrite pad (a nylon scrubber) and gave the surfaces a light scrub to smooth the high points down a bit and to remove any loose debris. This smoothed the surface out nicely while still leaving quite a lot of detail.
Then they were base coated with a medium brown. I mix together artist acrylic colors burnt umber and titanium white (2/3 to 1/3 mix) and water them down to the right consistancy. These are paints come in tubes and are fairly inexpensive and I use this mix to base coat all my terrain pieces!
There were a few spots where I missed with the paint but I wasn't worried about that because the next step was to apply a good heavy black wash.
After that had dried I gave it a good heavy drybrushing of the Khaki paint which really brought out the detailing.
All that was left was to add some static grass around the edges. This added some detail and broke up the plain brown of the marker.
This marker is very playable and is game friendly to infantry units making "wobbly model syndrome" actions unnecessary.
It only took me 2 days to knock out all 4 of these markers, and most of that was taken up by the drying steps.
This is my first attempt at a tutorial, so I thought I'd start small and simple.
C&C most welcome and I hope this might be of some use.
Cheers! TW
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