Painting Great Looking Planets

CorSec Engineering make great kits for making planets for tabletop gaming or science fair project. They can be found here. This planet was painted in less the 30 minutes and is really easy to do.

Theme:

This planet has an abundance of water but it is a little cold and most of it is frozen. Very little vegetation grows and it would not be a very pleasant place to visit.

What you need:

What you need:

2.5" Acrylic Planet Kit

Sandy Paste by Vallejo

Burnt Sienna, White, and Tan craft acrylic paints.

Magic Wash

Epoxy

Acrylic Glue (ProWeld)

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Step 1: Assembly

The kit is easy to put together. Mix a bit of epoxy and liberally apply it to one end of the rod. Then insert that all the way to the top of the sphere. Center the sphere and hold it together till the epoxy gets a good hold. You need a lot to fill the gap between the top of the sphere and the rod. After that cures it will be a really strong joint.

It is best to put the base on after you paint it. Sometimes it gets in the way. However assembling it is easy. Insert the rod into the hole and apply some ProWeld or other glue that will work on acrylic. Do not use super glue as it has a tenancy to cloud acrylic. If your epoxy dies clear you can use that.

mnpazan says: Sep 10, 2011. 5:09 PM

Skip this step if you want your planets to look real. Even the tallest mountains and deepest crags are only a fraction of a sheet of paper's thickness at that scale. Use 2d shading and specularity tricks instead.

Texturing your planets gives them a full-on "Duck Dodgers" level of cartoony-ness. Which is certainly appropriate for some games (like maybe BFG, or the Edger Rice Burroughs and other early pulp adventure inspired stuff), but for stuff like SFB, Full Thrust, Traveler, or any of the Bab5, ST, SW, Yamato, BSG, etc. inspired stuff it's out of character.