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Island Jungle and Storage
This is a pretty simple CD terrain project. I've glued some aquarium terrain plants
and a few other pieces of crappy terrain that come with jungle animal toy sets to
some CDs.
My hope is that the nice aquairum terrain will offset the look of the toy animal pieces just by being close to them. I want the less desireable pieces to be like Waldo hidden at a University of Wisconsin football crowd as opposed to hidden in an Amish barn raising.
My normal ground terrain painting uses brown paint (Craft Art nutmeg is my go to),
wood glue, and ballast. The ballast give the ground some texture and the glue
holds it all together.
Resulting in some good old cd terrain pieces.
To get rid of the monotone in the ground and the plant surfaces, I have a
spray bottle with a little black paint and mostly water (about 1:5 ratio).
Using this is the equivalent of doing a black wash, except over a really
large, complex area fairly quickly.
Here is the environment for the jungle. A tropical island base made of one
large piece of blue felt with lots of small brown and green felt leftovers.
Fox coffee cup optional.
Here they are in their natural habitat, augmented by
carnivorous plants
and
a tiki god.
I think the mix of parts came out alright and the shading from the spray wash gives a good varigation. I won't have to chuck any of them in the bin.
Now to the hardest part of CD Terrain ... Where do I put it?
Oh, I know ... a box!
But not just a regular box. I cut off the bottom, inverted it and inserted
it into the lid as a "platform".
Now, I just go mark little lines, shorter than a cd diameter, spaced apart
by the height of the terrain.
And get a series of slot marks. Based on the size and shape of this box
(from shoes, maybe?) I got two columns and a few in the middle. It was a good
idea to work the columns from the outer edges, leaving max room in the middle.
Now, the X-Acto lets me cut flaps, and push them down into the platform
And store the terrain bits in the slots. I ended up with a pretty tight packing
so this large area of terrain won't take up a lot of space in my mini storage room.