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Not all worlds are entirely controlled by the Corporation... Some are too rugged, unruly yet filled with necessary resources. In these situations, The Corporation establishes outposts, havens in the wastes where business can be conducted.

This is the tale of one of these Outposts. On the Desert World of Turam, it is simply known as:

Checkpoint.





The world of Turam is going to be my Deadzone setting... I went heavy into the Kickstarter, purchasing well, almost everything... The terrain I have at the moment is the Strike Team Core Wolrds Battlezone, Fortification battlezone and Landing Pad BattleZone. - Scarily, I have another 2 Ruined Battlezones still to come!

Truth is... I have no idea how playable this will end up being. I think if I push the outer walls right up to the board edge, then the Keep to the back, I can fit a couple of the 2-3 sized buildings inside, then it should just be scatter cover to taste...

What it looked like beforehand, along with my other bits: - Don't look if you're faint of heart!
Another alternative, and one that might help every side that isn't enforcers stand half a chance of moving across the terrain, is attaching the wall back round to the keep some way.



Before I head off, after a long night terrain building, I'll start off showing some minis! This will be the colour Scheme for my Enforcers, with one of my Warpath Corporation models.



No prizes for guessing what they're based on.

Well the corporation marine looks vaguely storm trooper ish, with some kind of disease? Interesting eyes. The enforcer has me lost, no idea.

I think if you do what you said with a couple of small buildings and some scatter terrain for cover, you should be alright. You've got accessory sprues right? Maybe pop a few ladders at strategic locations along the walkways and you won't need proper walls? I do like the look of deadzone tiles creating an actual structure and not just the paintball field from hell

Keep posting, and I'll keep bugging you with my annoying comments

They're inspired by Mass Effect.



This inspired the face, I won't say it went perfectly...

Cool scenery, and I really like how the enforcer turned out.

I thought it was robocop.

My fingertips are sore and quite possibly swollen... However...

Checkpoint Station is now completed! Checkpoint has been made up of 1 Landing Pad Battlezone, 1 Fortification Battlezone and 2 Core Battlezones. Coming in Shipment 2, I'll have another 2 Ruined Battlezones to add to all the blank area at the front, outside the main gate.

The outpost was the first piece I worked on and this was the original incarnation.



As you'll see... It changed a great deal.


First, we have the updated Entrance to Checkpoint Station.



Moving around the main Gatehouse, we see what will possibly become one the standard deployment zone for the area. There's little cover on the ground, however, they have the height advantage...



Passing the Gatehouse, we come to some Vendor Stalls. I imagine this is where the traders coming in from the desert purchase overly expensive bottles of water and souveniers while waiting for processing from the Outpost.



Zooming out, we come to see the full Station. This is made on 2 Mats, the Deluxe mat in the background and the paper kickstarter mat in the foreground.



As I said, this is 4 battlezones worth of terrain.




The back section of Checkpoint Station is made up of 3 key buildings.



The Comms Bunker. One of the interesting things about this one, is that I've made a skylight, that I imagine would retract to open up and allow small craft, like recon drones to fly in and out. Another cool wee thing is those satellite dishes can actually be used to go on the same stands as the Gun emplacements. - So if you think the guns themselves look a bit 'toyish' - just use the satellite dishes instead!



The Maintenance Garage. - Funnily enough, this was pretty much entirely made out of random bits left over when I had run out of things I actually wanted to make. I found that split bulkhead thing *really* difficult to use properly, as it only has a single connector spot on it. I think I made it work though.



And, finally, we have the completed Checkpoint Outpost itself. - This has gone through various iterations and I'm pretty sure that I've taken it apart and put it back again umpteen times. A perfect example of Triggers Broom.





The best part about the terrain and the connector concept is, even though I won't be taking it apart entirely anytime soon, it's perfectly possible for me to unhook some of the smaller buildings from the walkway and take THEM to my gaming club, along with my Comms Bunker and the Garage.

It's been a long week, but I'm really proud of what I've made and I like that I've managed to make every part of it *functional* and not just random corner pieces.

Now... It's time to move on to assembling the actual models!

Very awesome work overall. I like that you've got a them and you're running with it, great stuff. Can't wait to see you get some models together and battling over it. Any idea which colors you intend to paint the tiles?

I've been having a real difficulty working out paint schemes for my board and scenery for years.

The main thing I know, is that it's a desert board, so I was originally planning to do something Mos Eisley-ish for the paint scheme. However, I'm not sure natural type colours, like Sandstone would really work for the Deadzone scenery. So, quite frankly, I've got no idea.

I may need to boot up something like Borderlands to go have a look round in the game for inspiration for colours.

According to the Fluff, the Corp drop these standard hab blocks on every planet, so I don't see why they wouldn't work on a Desert board. I like how you set up your scenery Compel

Cheers for the compliment. - I've actually broken the main parts of it apart now to take to my gaming club tonight. It's in subsections though, so it should, in theory, be quite easy to put back together.

I was more talking about whether the paint scheme would work, as opposed to the actual hab blocks. Natural colours just won't look right, I think.

I'm partway through testing out my Rebs colour scheme. I've got sort of mixed results with it.





I like the green jacket / coat and I think the dark red bodysuit is pretty neat.

However, the light red armour plates are completely horrible, like aaargh horrible and I have no idea what colour to paint them instead. - Any suggestions?

I also screwed up with picking the basecoat for her hair, it seems a good colour for the final product but far too light for a blonde basecoat. - Though, I'm not exactly knowledgeable enough of painting to make any real judgement...

Yeah, it does look like it'll be hard to highlight the hair. I also agree on the red/pink, but what to do. Tan?

I'd just about have to try some stuff out myself to make much of a suggestion. Maybe a bone/tan, or even something like grey/black. Well no, you've got black straps... hrm.

Tan/bone or brown or possibly leather. Unless you want something that really sticks out and then maybe purple

Well, the black straps are more because I haven't painted them yet.

Bone/tan is sounding pretty intriguing though...

Some good work here, Compel. I started messing around with my Deadzone scenery this weekend. I definitley had some connectors I had to sand down to get them to fit but they worked. That being said, I have nothing like this though, as I only had one battlezone to work with. I will have to get some more so I can make my own outpost.

And to throw in my two cents, I think tan would work better than bone for the armor plates. Keep up the Deadzone love!

Ahh. It'll be a much more earthy scheme then if you go with brown/leather for the straps and boots, and tan/bone for the armor. Might be pretty nice.

Agrax Earthshade ended up saving the day a bit. - I was too cowardly to completely repaint her armour.

I've mostly finished the model now, just got the datapad to do and decide on the colour scheme for my rebs guns. Plus, I suppose some highlighting here and there.





The colours:

Cloak: Caliban Green > Coelia Greenshade > Incubii Darkness in the shaded bits (should have started with that...) > Catachan Green highlights > Catachan green / camo green edging.

The bodysuit: Khorne Red > Carroburg Crimson > Vallejo Gory red > Wazdakka Red highlights
The Armour: Mephiston Red (BAD decision) > Carroburg Crimson > Wazdakka Red (BAD decision) > Agrax Earthshade (Saved the day) > Squig Orange highlights > Bloodletter Glaze (don't think it did anything....)

The hair: Zandri Dust (far too light) > Agrax Earthshade (Saved the day, again) > Bubonic Brown drybrush > GW Desert Yellow highlight

Agrax Earthshade / Devlan Mud pretty much fixes everything. Its the Duct Tape of the hobby world

Yep, that did the trick, looks like a keeper now.

Well, despite it being 2am, I decided to take some pictures of my finished Rebel humans and blog them as I am too busy coughing to sleep - Darn winter colds!

I think I've got a bit of a handle on the colour scheme now and they're looking alright. Though the black eyes look rather spooky in photos. I think they look happily shadowed in real life though (there's no way I'm ever going to attempt painting eyes).

And nope, still not decided on their gun colours...




And here they are beside my commander.

Nice. I especially like how the black cloaks and capes go with the red.

And winter colds suck. I had some kind of flu or something, seemed like I had a different illness a day for almost a week.

Wow, it's been a long time since I've updated this blog. Although, to be honest, I've not actually done any more Deadzone painting until this week. - It's mostly been Dreadball and Dropzone Commander.

However, I've now started working on my Plague. I've gone for a pretty typical 'baddy' colour scheme - brownish grey carapace and well, reddish muscle.

However, I'm currently looking for some help.





I'm actually stuck now on where to proceed with the model. I'm at the point where I'm thinking of extra layers and highlighting, however I just don't know where to go.

What I've done so far is:

Muscle

1) Basecoat Mephiston Red
2) Shade with Nuln Oil (Though I'm wondering if something else would have been better, Seraphim Sepia?)
3) Drybrush Wazdakka Red
4) Drybrush Army Painter (Pure?) Red

Carapace

1) Basecoat Skavenblight Dinge
2) Drybrush White (Was trying out Beasts of War Romain's prebrushing technique)
3) Shade with Agrax Earthshade
4) Layer with watered down Skavenblight Dinge again

The idea was I was wanting a greyish-brown look to the Carapace/armour (which is what Skavenblight Dinge is). However I just don't know how to proceed from here. - I could use a Grey highlight (or should I be going for something layerish?) or should I be looking at the browns? What would look best?


What I could do with the Muscle was try a light drybrush of GW's "Kindleflame" paint, however that's probably far too orange for muscle. Any ideas, folks?

Maybe something just a little pinker for the muscle, instead of heading towards brown?

Well, that just looks plain awesome. I was trying to avoid going too close to the charcoal look though, as that's my Enforcers colour scheme.

I don't know why, but I seem to always be picking the exact same colours for my Deadzone factions.

No doubt at this rate, I'll end up having my Orx skin be the exact same shade as my Reb's jackets.

Haha, I've been trying not to do both of my rebs and marauders glossy black. I think I've shunted the marauders to red clothes and black belts, where the rebs will have black and grey for the same, so not *quite* the same. My plague and enforcers share the charcoal color, but they have different primary/secondary colors.

I wonder what else you could highlight that grey with but lighter grey, which will draw it up like you said you don't want. You could highlight with light grey/white and wash with a dark wash or ink, like blue or red, like a glossy bug chitin maybe?

What I ended up going with was a general drybrush of Rhinox Hide over all the Carapace, plush a lighter drbrush of some points of the old Graveyard Earth paint. Perhaps not what I was originally intending, however it ended up achieving the goal of distinguishing the model more from my Enforcers colour scheme. Though I imagine I may do a little more tinkering with the scheme on other models. - One of the good things about painting plague is that they don't have to look entirely uniform with their colour scheme.

Looks pretty solid to me! I'm kind of dreading working with that particular model, the angle of the vault (and preferring him to not be vaulting at all) are going to give me fits

Yeah, it's why I did him first. Like ripping off a bandage.

I have been painting like a demon... Or should that be devil?

Last week, having decided on my colour scheme, I got to work on actually a fully functional Plague Strike Force together for Deadzone in preparation for my planned Nexus Psi 2 Player Campaign over the May Bank Holiday.

I had decided to try for painting this not so small group in about 2 and a half weeks.



However, come last Thursday I had realised that this was... perhaps a little overambitious and instead chose to focus on a standard 70 Point Strike Team.

This was made up of:

1 Plague Stage 2A - Who I had already painted!
1 Plague Stage 1A 'Plague Lord'
1 Plague Stage 3A Heavy Machine Gunner
4 Plague Stage 3A Troopers
2 Plague Stage 3D 'Hellhounds'

Come the weekend, I pretty much locked myself in my flat and got to work. By Sunday night... Well, technically Monday Morning, I was 90% done with only some extra details and a bit of highlighting to do.

I split my Plague into a number of groups, just for entertainment purposes mostly.

First we have the Civilians.

I'm pretty sure there's a rule someplace that at least 1 Plague model must be painted with purple trousers.



Then I had the local Militia with their pet Guard Dogs. I wanted to have a go at painting a military green vest... Then realised that pretty much my entire terrain collection is desert themed, so went with sandy trousers.





Then we come to The Plague Lord. This is truly an awesome model and at the end of the day, I'm pretty pleased with how he came out. However, a lesson I did learn from doing this guy was that it seemed that when I 'prebrushed' a light grey over the armour plates before I did my wash on my Stage 2 was actually incredibly useful. Skipping this stage ended up making my Plague Lords carapace looking much more brown than I originally intended. However, I'm still pretty happy with him.









And here's a family photo of my Strike Team after my weekend painting blitz.





Tonight, I got the chance to do that last 10% of 'highlighting and details and bits (like the hair!)' which for some reason, ended up still taking 3 hours.

However, they're all complete now and I have my first 100% finished Mantic Games force, a 70 Point Deadzone Strike Team.

Those look great, nice work!

Really nice paint scheme there Compel . Liking the red flesh plague. I keep putting off painting the Stage 1 in my DZ stuff.