Western Seas – Armada Scenery Set

I am an Armada fanatic and am not ashamed of it. In the last few years I have created a few scenery sets for Armada/Man o’war, both personal and commissioned. There’s something awesome about making your own little world of tiny scenery and I do love the experience.

In recent years I’ve been organizing Armada events in Poland and taking the game into a more competitive-fun hybrid territory. For this reason I have been making more balanced scenery sets to cover multiple gaming boards and selling out older generation terrain to make space for the new one. (I hate for the stuff to just be sitting there, gathering dust and not being played with properly). Either way, here’s where the Western Seas story begins. I have completely sold out of the old scenery and started working on a new set…

I already had a classic fantasy, Eastern seas and Northern seas sets. This left space for a few more themes to explore. I’ve decided to tackle Western Seas next. Wasn’t sure of the type of common detail the set should get until I figured there already are two fancy islands in my collection, that would fit perfectly…

That was it!

Main theme was: Cawboy’ish browns, Steampunk’ish gears and a bit mysterious Crayon rock formations. The latter only to link the existing two islands with the complete set.

I have prepared the necessary resources, including tree bark of which I make most of the rocks for wargaming scenery. Then started to build…

Oh boy. I’ve wrote an extensive how and why entry that got bombed by server error on the upload. Got lost in the warp. Sorry folks, you’ll have to do with a short version instead…

‘Sad Panda’ aside, I got to work on the set. First I’ve covered bases for each individual piece with AK Interactive Water texture and let them dry. In the meantime I built rock formations with cheap mass produced decorative gears I got online and two remaining Islands with tree bark, crayons and a few of the gears. I used the Gear/Bark/Crayone isnalds to make a link between the theme of the previously made islands and the new gear based rocks.

I then created a set of ‘sandbanks’ by mixing the Army Painter Dark Red wash with droplets of sandy/orange Vallejo paints. Stirred a little with a synthetic brush and let it dry.

Painted everything with a mix of airbrushing, drybrushing, washes and textures. Finally added a few Gamers Grass brown tufts and wrapped thins up with AK Interactive Water texture, following this simple Water Bases Tutorial.

The finished project consists of four Islands, eight Sandbanks and eight Rock, marking another Armada gaming board ready to join my local events.

I invite you to visit the full Western Seas gallery at my page. There’s also a hobby blog and lots of tutorials, some of which Armada related. And if you’re on the fence about Armada I wholeheartedly recommend the game – it is great! Fun, simple, very rewarding. Hook me up on Facebook under any Armada related post if you have questions about it, I’ll gladly respond.

Cheers!