Tomb Thursday P1: Paint Scheme

Today is the first official post for our new ongoing series, coming at you each Thursday! Let the Egyptian Tombs begin, baby!

We couldn’t be more excited to showcase a brand new gameboard environment: Egyptian! We teased our desert dive last week, and after a successful paint-test weekend, we’re finally ready to move to weekly updates. Let’s have some sandy fun!

3DRPG has selected Aether Studios as its 3D-print terrain tiles of choice for this new initiative. They offer an extensive range of Egyptian-themed set options, and they print beautifully in FDM. We’re really looking forward to sharing a wide variety of STLs with you along the way.

And, of course, we’ll feature a slew of complimentary creators for additional pieces, including talented teams such as EC3D Designs and Iain Lovecraft.

For us, the most challenging part of any new DnD environment is the paint scheme. It requires a lot of research, testing, and nerves of steel. Last week, we shared a fab paint scheme used on Aether Studios’ Dune Waste Catamaran, and it was such a confidence boost on this once-stalled project.

Thankfully, Galladoria Games shared their desert color steps on Instagram for their amazing Seeing Eye Pillars, and we just fell in love with them. The steps were so easy that we just had to try them out for ourselves (and compare them to another scheme we found on Facebook). We’re going to share both of these with you today.

Let’s start with our runner-up, by Jeremy Beecher on Facebook. It’s definitely a more affordable craft paint option, but it was just a little too dark for our liking.

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

One teammate said it best: this scheme is just in the wrong context – too dark for Egyptian sands, but perfect for an Aztec jungle. He’s right! And now we know just where to use this paint effect in the future!

Here’s the thing, though! The black primer and dark brown basecoat drive that scheme. So, when we tried it again, first basing it in white and then utilizing all three colors via drybrushing, we achieved a solid result! We plan to use this alternative for any above-ground buildings and larger scatter terrain pieces.

Cool piece, right? This is the Granary by Iain Lovecraft and is from his amazing Desert Adventures Kickstarter.com. We’re jazzed to share more pieces from that collection as this new DnD blog series progresses.

Next, we took a few deep breaths and tried these same three Aether Studios STLs in the Galladoria Games Egyptian paint scheme.

• Prime Flat White (critical)
• Apply a Reaper Light Sepia Wash sporadically
• Do a heavy intermittent drybrush of Reaper Polished Leather
• Finish with a drybrush of Reaper Bleached Linen

Now, DM Ben has a June birthday this month, so he just asked his fam to get him as many bottles of the Reaper paints as they could. Problem solved. 😉

We know, we know! We’re breaking one of our cardinal rules here by using tiny premium paint bottles for a mass-scale 3D-printed gameboard. Sometimes the effect rules the land, and one has to go with their fav, even if it means an extra Saturday of pizza deliveries.

If you’re hobby budget is tight, try our Granary scatter terrain steps above as you’ll get quite close to the same effect. We’ll probably do a few tiles in that cheaper craft paint scheme so that we can truly compare them side by side. We’re also going to do a couple of jungle stone monuments in that darker scheme, so you can see what that looks like, too!

Until next time!