Tabletop Thursday: Armies on Parade Terrain Board (Part 3)

Hopefully you’ve seen parts one and two of my AoP Terrain board already. The final quarter of my AOP board would need to be something a bit more snazzy, since it would be where Cawl would be perched from. My first design was it to be built from a half buried monolith or some other necron structure, with the Ad Mech/Dark Mech bits bolted on, like scavengers appropriating a piece of tech they didn’t completely understand. I even decided to buy a Haemotrope reactor just for this purpose. I also wanted it to be usable as terrain, which is why you see I even have ladders, elevators, consoles, and a flat area on top of the structure in which to situate everything.

I had a much grander design with LEDs and the like, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep everything operational and still have it seamlessly integrated into the terrain, so I decided to play it safer and not go with internal lighting. The trapezoidal structure was also going to be a bitch to carve and design properly, so I searched online for other suitable Necron structures.

As luck would have it, the Dawn of War Necron summoning core was a very simple (and easy to manufacture) design. Even the recesses in which the glow emanated from were straight lines, so I was much more confident in getting it cut juuuust right, as opposed with the original Necron sigil idea.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any mid-construction progress shots, but you can see below the detail shots after construction and priming. The bits of detailing came from random pieces of stuff from my bits box (A huge hits box is ESSENTIAL).

I used the same washing tube as I did in my other boards to represent the power cables, because I wanted the pieces of the board to match in some way.

One of the things that I’m more proud of though is the monitor/control panel I have on the structure. Kitbashed from the icarus lascannon terrain piece and a bit from the ork mek gun kit, it looks like something Belisarius Cawl would actually use.

Plus I magnetized the control panel, so I actually have the option of replacing the panel with a lascannon if I wanted to.

Here it is with the Dark Mechanicus summoning core with some paint on it. I airbrushed just the base colours; light brown and off white for the skull, and the silver on some easy to airbrush bits. The rest would be drybrushed.

Tune in next week as I finish all the detailed paint work!