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Hi all,

I'm putting together a Martian table, using this mat as a base.

I've picked up a set each of these, these, these, and these, but I want to add some craters to the mix.

The craters I have are the old Citadel Moonscape, and I'm not 100% certain on where to start. I've found a lot of tutorials online for doing sand and regular rocks, but Martian features seem to be few and far between.

Any help with the colours would be greatly appreciated.

for craters, the best things to use are packing foam, or cork boards. you want to dig a rough hole in whatever your material is. once youve done this, then build up the lips of your craters using broken chunks of corkboard, and a random mix of stones, sand and rubble. you can use filler too, depending on how smooth you want your crater lips to be.

Paint like normal, then heavy weathering it, typhus corrosion, and watered down Martian iron earth, FW dry powder rust at the end.

If you watch any of the mars movies or read anything about mars, it’s that it no longer have a atmosphere, so all kinds of debris come in contact making it craters galore, lots of weathering due to the sandy surface.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Any help with the colours would be greatly appreciated.

These Reaper colors are good for the classic 'red' Martian terrain colors:

Oh yeah I forgot colours. Browns and reds, obviously. GW make Martian ironcrust which is nice, but won't go far for terrain. Get a rust powder and use that for a nice dusty red effect

This coudl also help...

https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

If you like the cracked earth effect you can get crackle paint to use over larger surfaces. I would not use Martian IronEarth for anything more than miniature bases.

Also do you want a red Mars or an orange-yellow Mars. I think you need to start by looking at pictures of Mars and select the Mrs you want. Ironically as colour needs to be interpreted earlier Mars pictures such as from the Viking probes were coloured from a swatch and were NASA's interpreation of the colours seen, not the actual colours. This can help a a preconceived Martian colour is as valueable to you as an actual Martian colour.

Let me help by adding some piccies for you from Mars. Some are photos others artistic renditions:

I guess my best advice would be to not go too red or orange... more brown and gray with a foot in the red end of the spectrum. Your board and terrain are a massive amount of surface area... anything that looks good on a small scale might be visually dominating on the scale of a a whole 4x6 table.

Also, buy your mat first, then work to match it, or base your models first and go from there. Your terrain is probably where you have the most control over color palette, so there's no reason they shouldn't be a good match for some other component.

Finally, if you're going for quick and easy, buy some earth tone permanent markers like Sharpies, spray your terrain in some flat neutral beige, draw roughly parallel circumferential lines around the slabby parts, then dry brush with something light and wash with something dark. I've fiddled with some recipies for bulk knockoffs of Agrax and Nuln if you want them... good for big projects like this.

Edit: found a photo of the Sharpie trick... look at the big pieces upper right, lower right, and center. Just quick, cheap styrofoam with no wash, but you can see the strata effect.