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©1999-2003. All rights reserved.
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Craters

Materials

Modelling

Fold pie dish into crater shape
Put the dish on a flat surface upside-down and push the center down with your thumbs to give the shape shown below. This example is a larger one from the one above - about 3 inches in diameter.

Remember to wash the dish out first with detergent, as grease will stop the paint and filler adhering properly.

Cut the edges off the dish
The rim forms an obvious and unrealistic circle, so whip this off with a pair of scissors.


Fill the underside with filler

The dish is now the right shape to be a crater, but is very fragile. To deal with this turn it over again and fill the underside with interior filler.

Glue to a mounting board base
Glue the crater to a irregularly cut piece of mounting board, slightly larger than the crater.

Use filler to smooth edges
There will be a sharp corner between the dish and the base, so round this off with some more filler. Larger dishes often have some kind of pattern stamped in the bottom, but you can cover this with a thin layer of filler at this stage.

Apply texture to base
Paint on PVA around the edges and the odd patch in the middle. Sprinkle the PVA with sand.

If you want to add any bits of debris (balsa wood, wire, guns etc.), then do it at this stage, so it looks realistically embedded rather than stuck on.

Paint the crater mid-brown
The emulsion I used for this has been decanted into a plastic film pot as the lids from paint tins are difficult to take off and even harder to reseal.

Wash the crater with dark brown
The dark paint will tend to collect in the sandy bits, which will highlight the crater itself.

Drybrush the crater
First give it a fairly damp drybrush with the original mid brown. Next mix the brown with a cream colour, roughly half and half, and do another drybrush. You shouldn't have to wait for it to dry, because drybrushing coats are virtually already dry when they go on.

Finally do a coat with just the cream colour ( very lightly). After this you could add patches of flock.




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©2000. All rights reserved.
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