Caverns Paint Guide P1

With two dandy paint guides now under our belt (Inn & Dungeon Ruins), we’re excited to announce our next color installment – Caverns! Once again, our goal is to provide you with a very easy-to-follow, affordable paint tutorial for all your underground 3D-printed tiles. So, grab a torch, and let’s start exploring!

Our goal has always been to start with the most popular game environments in one’s campaign. Meaning that we began this palette journey by showing you how to paint the inside of a traditional house or inn. Next, we shared what that same building might look like if it were suddenly turned into rocky ruins. And now we want to provide a helpful paint scheme for traversing underneath those ruins.

Once this subterranean paint guide is complete, only the classic dungeon crawl schema will remain. Then, we’ll have hit the big four “tent poles” that typically reside in any DnD game. Exciting!

Milestone Heroes is our cavern tile theme of choice because their in-depth series of print offerings is so darn impressive! They’ve released a robust core cavern set, three in-depth expansion packs (sets 12, 17, 31), and even four specialty sets (sets 20, 36, 41 & 45). You will probably get the most paint mileage out of this scheme over any other because you just have sooooo many tiles to choose from.

We’ll also be highlighting a series of different Cavern STLs as Milestone Heroes tiles are stuffed with all sorts of fun little details that need their own splashes of color. We’re especially jazzed to highlight some of their Treacherous Paths tiles!

We try out all sorts of schemes until we’re finally comfortable enough to share one with y’all. Our goal is never to create a paint scheme from scratch. Many of us here at 3D RPG are novice painters. Instead, we try to find the one that any beginner can handle and that can be replicated over a large number of tiles. Then, we add a few of our personal touches and include very specific details/WIP photos on many of the individual steps so there’s no stress come painting time.

That led us to the marvelous standard Cavern paint scheme by Dwarven Forge. We love it for so many reasons:

• They made a great video of it!
• You can follow their PDF guide as well.
• There’s a water guide too.
• They have affordable paints in larger 4-ounce bottles.
• You can intermix Dwarven Forge with 3D-printed tiles.

So our guide here will only enhance and highlight Stefan Pokorny’s excellent foundational work for painting caverns. Yes, it’s tailored to their proprietary Dwarven Forge pieces (which come painted and unpainted) but we’re here to share the good news that you can apply these same steps to 3D-printed tiles and marvel at the final results.

Plus, if you’re an avid collector of Dwarven Forge tiles (like we are), their brilliant factory paint scheme and our 3D-printed tiles will be reasonably close to one another. Meaning that you can mix and match both types of tiles with ease (the middle one above is our painted 3D-printed tile piece). That end result has made us quite giddy to share this Cavern Paint Guide with you.

Do you need an extra 6×6 floor tile for tonight’s session? No worries. Print it off on your printer, follow this paint guide, and slip it into your next game with time to spare!

More so, Dwarven Forge is in red-hot demand these days so they could be temporarily sold out of a particular Cavern set. Or, maybe they aren’t currently offering the same type of unique Cavern piece that a different 3D modeler has already released. Lastly, your gaming budget could also simply be out of gas at the moment, so it’s pretty awesome that you can still print out a couple of tiles at a very reasonable cost whenever you’re in a financial pinch.

Next week, we’ll share the overall outline and then get into the nitty-gritty details of the first few Cavern paint guide steps! So, fasten your seatbelts and brushes, fellow crafters, because here we go again!!