Foamcore Webway Portals

Last night, the wife was out and I had our daughter and despite the fact that I was solely responsible for making sure she was fed, clean and generally still alive when my wife got home, I managed to do something!

I've done a lot with foamcore. About three years ago, I played a game against a friend of mine's Necrons at his house. Up to this point, I'd pretty much played in local game stores. I'd played a few friends who had terrain at home, but that wasn't many games. Neither my friend or I had terrain and that day I decided I should start acquiring/making some. A lot of foamcore and graph paper later, I have more than enough terrain to choke a small horse. Ruins and basic buildings are easy (which is why I have a ton of them) but things not involving straight lines are a little harder. But I've been wanting to make something like these for quite some time and since I had painted the resin ones just a little before, I figured this was as good a time as any. You've probably seen similar ones on the Intar-Webs before. I used a template that I downloaded somewhere (I think GW was hosting it for a while). These aren't as big, though. The template as created would result in huge gates and, if I actually decide to make a little Eldar terrain one day, I might make some for an Eldar world table or something. For my purposes, though these will do fine for artifacts left over on other worlds or something similar. Hopefully, I'll be able to whip up a few more in the next few days but we'll play it by ear and see what happens.

Some of you will probably want to comment that they're far too angular and blocky for Eldar technology. Well, that's fine with me because I don't see a need for them to be museum quality or anything. Some people like to feel like they're playing in a historical diorama and want buildings as photo realistic as possible. Not me. I find that simple buildings are easier to infuse with imagination. By representing them more simply, I create the feeling of a building or a village than the reality of a building or a village. That and, ultimately, a hut is a hut is a hut no matter where you go in "civilized" or industrialized places, whether it's adobe, concrete, plasteel or whatever they make them out of in forty thousand plus years. My point here is that these are shaped like webway gates and they're good enough to represent even if they don't look like wraithbone or super organic. Once I paint them, they'll look better. I am thinking of hitting a craft store for some jewel like baubles to decorate them a little more but we'll see how that works out.

What's next, you might ask? Well, after whipping up a few more Webway portals, I think I'm going to start painting a Manufactorum that I've had based for quite a while but haven't gotten around to painting yet. Surprised that I have actually bought buildings instead of making them? I actually like the GW buildings and they're not that terrible expensive. I've amassed quite a few of them and, when combined with the old 3rd Ed. Ruins that came in the box set (I've got a dozen or so of them), the look pretty awesome out there on the board. Of course, the biggest project is to get a bigger table so I can start hosting games at my house, but that's for later. Between the Manufactorum and the stuff I have sitting around unpainted (Tac squads, both regular and Black Reach, Rhinos, Whirlwinds, Speeders, a Predator I recently got cheap), I have more than enough stuff to paint and talk about for quite a while.