Train Tuesday Part 79: A Skiff of a Different Color

Last week, we shared this amazing Dune Waste Catamaran by Aether Studios and revealed how Hovertrain innovations are spawning crazy new Steampunk innovations from Gnome Tinkerers throughout the Realm. Let’s see where the newfound tech is taking us next!

So, today, we’ll share an alternate sandy paint scheme for our nifty skiff and its tremendous impact on future builds and DnD posts here at 3DRPG. The Forgotten Rails certainly wants all the technology (and profits) for itself, but once a Gnome sniffs out new mechanical wonders, there’s no stopping what they’ll come up with next!

Initially, we 3D printed and posted two Dune Waste Catamarans. A natural one-shot would be dueling dune vehicles weaving their way through the Sword Coast. We envision running off even more of these beauties and giving each of them its own paint job personality.

Now, this particular STL definitely calls out a primary desert-style use, so a solid sand paint job is key. We always want our stuff to look cool, but there’s a Sultan’s elephant in the room here, as we’ve been putting off our next gameboard theme for some time now. There’s just something about creating a reproducible paint scheme that pumps those anxiety levels up to new heights, ya know?

Thankfully, our mighty core starting set of tiles has been 3D-printed and is ready for initial color testing. Aether Studios value-stuffed Patreon keeps releasing new tiles (not that we’re complaining), so it’s like we can never be truly caught up!

Longtime readers have seen several of our previous Egyptian posts, as we decided Aether Studios tomb tiles would be our terrain of choice for this childhood-favorite genre. So, behind the scenes, we’ve been 3D-printing and mapping out our starting series of rooms. The natural next step is to now start coloring all these amazing tiles! No pressure, right? 😉

So all this to stay, we’re on the verge of launching a new series called Tomb Thursday! Like previous featurettes such as The Forgotten Rails/Train Tuesdays and our Village Inn & Cavern series, we’ll share everything Egyptian from a variety of talented creators, including Aether Studios and EC3D Designs, so you can build with us!

Now, for a quick refresher on the first Dune Crawler piece we completed last week. We initially decided to try to get a junkyard vibe going the first time around. The paint scheme needed to convey a mishmashed, frantic assembly of parts and a Star Wars-esque, “What a piece of junk” reaction.

We then shared a magnificent desert paint scheme by Galladoria Games. We had nothing to lose by trying this out on our second Dune Waste Catamaran print. Besides, if we loved it, we could consider using it as our core paint steps for Aether Studios’ vast Egyptian tile offerings. It’s a win-win!

Following those elementary paint steps produced this sandy specimen! We even took two passes at this piece. The first time, we had more of the metal on the pontoons partially show through, making it too dark and musty for our liking. So, we bit the bullet and reprimed to get this cleaner desert effect — muuuuuuch better.

This one is so good to us, we needed to brush some of that loose sand out of your eyes when we were taking the product pics. 😉

Let’s recap our paint steps:

• Prime Flat White
• Apply a Reaper Light Sepia Wash sporadically
• Heavy intermittent drybrush of Reaper Polished Leather
• Finish with a drybrush of Reaper Bleached Linen
• Steel Rivots & Elements: ASP Enchanted Steel
• Cloth: Citadel Contrast Skeleton Horde
• Piping: ASP Hoard Bronze
• Lights: ASP Zealot Yellow
• Ropes: P3 Menoth White Highlight
• Hoses: Fanatic True Copper

In this second version, that darker ASP Hoard Bronze became more of an accent than a primary color.

In a rare turn of events, we’re considering using this scheme for all our Aether Studios Egyptian tiles! That’s against the grain for us, as this scheme requires a larger paint budget ($2.59 for a small bottle). If we go the Craft Paint route, we could use this suggested series of sandy steps shared by Jeremy Beecher on Facebook.

• Base Coat with Apple Barrel Brown
• Drybrush with Apple Barrel Brown Ochre Yellow
• Drybrush with Apple Barrel Cream White

See? There’s nothing too crazy here either, and it’s the more economical approach at $.58 per larger bottle. The paint pick is probably a $20-ish investment vs a $125-ish investment. A dealbreaker? Nah, but we try to be cost-efficient whenever humanly possible.

We’ll find some 3D prints to try this out (and share) before we make a final verdict. This conundrum is a great problem to have, knowing we have at least one slam-dunk paint choice at the ready.

The 3DRPG team is split on which Dune Waste Catamaran paint job they like better. Some prefer the junker Mad Max style, while others love the traditional desert look. DM Ben fell in love with the sand look and feel on the right. There’s no loss here as we ultimately want multiple looks on these Gnome Tinkerer transports, but we’re surprised how divided the crew is on which one is their fav.

Until next time!