FUEL PROCESSING PLANT
After
building the first refinery piece, I continued
to accumulate appropriate bits for refinery scenery-- until it started
taking over the garage! It was time to build another piece, this
time much larger and more vertical. I started with a nice looking
base from an old Macross Factory model kit, added elevated walkways, and
proceeded to glue various tank shaped bits wherever they looked good.
All the pipework is made of parts from fish tank filtration systems (thanks
again, Eric!), embellished with rivets made by cutting strips out of a
vacu-formed plastic tray that had a bumpy pattern in it (I really have
to find more of the stuff). The hardest part was deciding where NOT
to glue stuff- as a result, there are dozens of places miniatures can walk
on, climb into, or hide behind!
Here's a view
of the back. I wanted to get a more gothic look out of this refinery,
so I used lots of spikes and rivets. Unlike the other refinery piece
(which was primed in grey), I primed the whole thing in black and used
lots of heavy drybrushing to get most of the
color on the piece. To get more variety in the colors, I used a lot
of copper and brass drybrushing, with green washes for a nice, corroded
look. I even spattered the base with brown by flicking at it with
a wash-loaded brush! The brighter your base colors, the more effective
washes will be. If your washes are too contrasting, you can
always tone them down by drybrushing over them again lightly once they
have dried. Plenty of gothic and technical decals and stickers finish
off the piece nicely, giving a good sense of scale to it.
Here's the processor
before painting. When looking for parts,
imagine what they might look like upside down, with rivets on them, painted
in industrial colors. You'd be surprised what you can make use of.
For example, see if you can spot the following items! Distributor
cap (upside down), hair curlers (for ladder cages), aspirin bottles (for
most of the tanks), wheels from a tank kit (all over the place), a pencil
holder (upside down forming one of the tanks), HO scale train track (chopped
down and used for all the ladders), cross-stitch grid (along the gangways),
pop-up sprinkler parts (on the bottom of two tanks), PVC plumbing couplers
(all over the place).
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