Kill Team Terrain

View from above

A little while ago now my wife and I finished painting the terrain for our kill team table. This was a really interesting project and I want to show off a few pictures and also talk a little bit about the philosophy in play here.

I've had this terrain sitting around my house for a good long while - unpainted. Why? Because it's massive. It's a massive undertaking. I was at the Kill Team weekender at Warhammer World not that long ago and I was lamenting the massive undertaking that is painting terrain, when I received some welcome tips.

First thing is to spray your terrain black, and apply your main colour with a heavy drybrush. Make sure you use the correct tools, in this case the medium scenery brush from GW. But any reasonably large round brush from a hardware store will do.  

Choose Wisely

Once you have your base colour dry brushed on, you can paint on any other bits of colour you fancy as normal. And then here is the real magic trick. Give everything a light drybrush of screaming skull. Instant highlight. The last tip I picked up was to create a basic filth wash by adding about two or three brushfulls of Mournfang brown to a pot of Lahmian Medium.

Filth Wash

You can then wash this just about anyplace you want a bit of dirt. Any seam or fold, around the bottoms of buildings. Around metal screws and bolts. Go mad with it. As it dries it will shrink back into the cracks and crevices.

That's it. That's how we painted all that sector mechanicus terrain in about a day. Yes, I did go back after all the steps I have just mentioned and paint the plasma glow 'properly' although there was still a lot of dry brushing involved.

The biggest thing here is giving yourself permission to not do your best work. The cult of excellence looms large in hobby games at the moment A fantastic video by Tabletop Minions about that here. Not everything you do has to be your very best, and sometimes it's important to give yourself permission to do a mediocre job. If you decide everything has to be your very best, you will not start a lot of projects; and you will get less done. We only have so many hours of leisure time and I really value having painted terrain.

Have a look at the pictures? Are they good enough? Are they better than grey plastic? I'm not saying I want to slack off with painting totally, I'm working on another project now (Harry Potter miniatures got delivered by Knight Models) which I'm doing one at a time and I think painting some of the best faces I have ever painted. But change it up. Terrain is allowed to be good enough.

I also painted the doors and things from Rogue Trader, in exactly the same way. I did paint the treasure chests 'properly' to help them stand out.

Oh, and if you want a closer look, I have a small youtube channel were I have been messing around with doing some video content.