| Irrational Number Line Games, LLCSci Fi Landing Pad
 This is a Bey Blade arena.  I kind of know what it is because I have
seen snippits of the cartoon on TV.  It's some kind of spinny top
battle game.  And this looks like a decent kind of thing to fight them in. 
To SWMBO, it looked like something I would use to make something else. At
$.04 it was a bargain.  At "just grab some stuff from the bargain bin because
you bought a bunch of stuff from us" it was a better bargain.
 
 After a little staring and thinking, I realized it would work better for me
upside down as a maintenance well deck.  I flipped it and wrapped the outside
with cardboard. 
Since it is up high, I made a little ramp and cut a left-over piece of gutter
guard to intustrial the ramp up a bit.
 
 Since I am going to go with concrete and steel, a good grey primer was a
good start.  I will be using my paint/sand/wood glue mix for the concrete
texture, so I went ahead and painted the metal parts with metallic paint
first. 
As well as some light grey drybrushing to bring out the texture, I
did some lighter grey "scraping" with a heavy dry brush.  The important
thing for this is to pick a direction, and stick with it.  My direction 
was vertically down. Here's what we get with the concrete and a bit of detailing. 
Since the top of the ramp is a metal texture, I scraped down it
it a mix of metallic silver and brown paint to give a rust/smudge/patina
kind of industrial filth. Likewise for the ramp. 
 Speaking of industrial filth, I filled the bottoms of the wells with
black paint, then went in and smudged them up with light shots of metallic
blue, gold, and red (as well as mixed secondary colors from those) to
make a prismatic oily sheen. 
This pic also highlights a mounting tube like the one I used on the bases
for my flying saucers and
giant flying saucers.
 
 The next bit of detailing is taking some el (electro luminescent) wire
and adding some piping.  I used the above auger bit by hand to put the
holes in the base, then threaded it through, gluing it to the base
at "critical points". 
 Putting it together, this is what we ended up with. 
Without an animated GIF, trust me that the controller does 
off, on, slow pulse, and anime seizure flash rate. And since the el wire (at $6) costs more than the sum total of
all the other parts of this, we need a good pic of it lit up. 
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