Terrain - light up cooking grill!

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**insaniak**

From the Comm Guild Blog:

- by Iain Wilson

I've had a bunch of battery-powered 'tealights' sitting in my 'cut this up for something interesting' pile for some time now. They're cheap and dodgy, and would be absolutely useless as an actual light source, but I thought they might be useful for making some illuminated explosion markers, or something similarly unnecessary but pretty. Being Australian, the thought of standing outside, cremating anything within reach on a hot barbeque is always present in my mind, and so it occurred to me that a lit up grill would be a fun modeling project.

The tealights in question are a plastic shell with an extremely convincing and lifelike 'flame' on top, containing an orange LED hooked up to a large button cell and a basic switch that just moves a wire on and off the side of the battery. The first step was to extract the useful parts from the outer shell.

Rather than pulling all of the parts out and rewiring everything, I decided to leave the interior of the candle mostly intact, just trimming away as much as possible of the protruding parts to slim it down. Then I build a platform using parts from the Maelstrom's Edge Terrain Sprue #2 to make a platform, under which the battery compartment would be concealed.

For the grill, I used an assortment of parts taken from the terrain sprue. A generator piece with a hole cut in the middle for the LED to poke through formed the main section of the grill. This left the LED a fraction too tall, so I used a razor saw to trim the top off the clear outer casing, being careful to leave the working parts of the LED intact.

I cut a matching hole in the platform's floor, and painted the candle parts black, so that they would hide more-or-less invisibly underneath the platform.

The LED isn't particularly bright, so to give it a helping hand I lined the inside of the generator with some aluminium foil to serve as a reflector. My hope was that with another small piece of foil glued on top of the LED, this would bounce the light around enough to spread the glow down the length of the grill interior. To go over the top, I took a piece of clear plastic, painted it with transparent red paint, and glued some gravel sprinkled across one side.

With some more transparent red on the outside of the LED, it was time to get some colour on the parts before gluing everything together. I also added a little putty around the LED, to close up any gaps where the light could shine back down where it doesn't belong.

With the top glued on, and the final rust effect layer in place, the platform wound up looking like this:

The glow doesn't show up particularly well under the photographic lights, but less bright, ambient light, it looks something like this:

The next step will be to see what else I can add to the platform to bring it to life a little. Stay tuned!

To build your own cookplate of charcoaled doom, you can pick up the terrain sprue along with the rest of the Maelstrom's Edge model range from the webstore here.

For other building ideas, modeling tutorials, army spotlights and conversion walkthroughs, check out the Hobby section of the Maelstrom's Edge website here.

What are you working on? We would love to see your models and terrain in the Comm Guild Facebook group!

**Soul Samurai**

It's a nice idea and quite well executed. However the orange-brown rust of the entire piece drowns out the orange flames/glow. I think it would have been far more striking if it had been painted the metal in darker, cooler colours. Dark steel, or maybe dark bronze with a healthy coating of a slightly dark green verdigris?

Also, the grill surface is too similar to the rest of the piece, and feels like it should be grill rathar than a mesh. As in, have the bars in only one direction, which should stand out a bit more from the surrounding surfaces and also let more light through. Also the grill surface being rust brown makes me a little uncomfortable (and blends too much with the rest of the piece); a different colour from everything else would go a long way to helping it work as the focal point of the piece. A brighter steel perhaps?

**insaniak**

Mostly fair.

The rust is a little overpowering at the moment, but that's the style I'm using for my terrain at the moment, so it had to match. It will be tuned down slightly once I add some other accessories to it.

So far as the grill being the same as the flooring - far was the whole point. It's supposed to be cobbled together, rather than a manufactured cooking device. It is painted differently, though - less rust, and more matte black, which is more apparent in the unlit pics. I might go back over it and kill off the rust on the grill though, as it did come out a little more strong than I had originally intended.

**Soul Samurai**

insaniak wrote:

So far as the grill being the same as the flooring - far was the whole point. It's supposed to be cobbled together, rather than a manufactured cooking device.

Fair enough. I think you can take off the rust without losing that though; it's reasonable that the act of cobbling it together would involve cleaning off the rust.

**Malika2**

SWeeeeeeet

**spiralingcadaver**

Actually, for both realism and visual effect, it makes a lot of sense that the grill (gridded part) would be solidly black because of whatever's burnt on to it. Unless you're cleaning regularly (in which case it would be metallic, not rusted), it's going to be pretty uniformly dark.

**skchsan**

spiralingcadaver wrote:
Actually, for both realism and visual effect, it makes a lot of sense that the grill (gridded part) would be solidly black because of whatever's burnt on to it. Unless you're cleaning regularly (in which case it would be metallic, not rusted), it's going to be pretty uniformly dark.

Actually, unless you clean it with oil & heat, the grill is going to be rusted color. Even the blackish build up on the grill is actually really dark brown from the rust if you look carefully enough.

**spiralingcadaver**

skchsan wrote:
spiralingcadaver wrote:
Actually, for both realism and visual effect, it makes a lot of sense that the grill (gridded part) would be solidly black because of whatever's burnt on to it. Unless you're cleaning regularly (in which case it would be metallic, not rusted), it's going to be pretty uniformly dark.
Actually, unless you clean it with oil & heat, the grill is going to be rusted color. Even the blackish build up on the grill is actually really dark brown from the rust if you look carefully enough.

Today, I learned...

Umm, those orks always look kind of snarky to me. That's meant without irony.

**Dukeofstuff**

Note that a partly scrubbed clean and partly dirty grill with food on it, a keg nearby, a bunch of cadians in their camp outfits, a couple stacked lasguns, and its got a very apocolypse now back vietnam barbeque feel. Conversely, put their heads on the same grill, and give the party over to some daemonettes or some cultists, and its got a very grim dark feel....

**insaniak**

skchsan wrote:
spiralingcadaver wrote:
Actually, for both realism and visual effect, it makes a lot of sense that the grill (gridded part) would be solidly black because of whatever's burnt on to it. Unless you're cleaning regularly (in which case it would be metallic, not rusted), it's going to be pretty uniformly dark.
Actually, unless you clean it with oil & heat, the grill is going to be rusted color. Even the blackish build up on the grill is actually really dark brown from the rust if you look carefully enough.

Particularly if it's been sitting disused for a while.