Enjoy a photo collection of buildings for the Venice table.
For the construction I mainly used foamcore for the walls. Mounted all buildings on 3mm PVC sheet. Roof is Plastruct Spanish tile roofing. Stir sticks for most the flooring. Some Mantic Town Crate furniture. Most pieces are multi storied with stairs or ladders up. I incorporated some artwork into the pieces in the form of posters and hung paintings.
Did you say secret underground?
Yes, I did!
I love adding little easter eggs to the things I build. For the raised platforms, I added secret underground rooms to four of the larger 12 x 12 inch platforms. Besides being fun to build, these could be incorporated into a game. Perhaps there is a treasure in two of them and monsters in the other! It could add a fun surprise element.
Each room is themed differently. They all have a rusted metal grate entrance that lead down. The actual cover is magnitized to the platform to keep in place.
The most vanilla of the rooms. This is a simple stone basement. Nothing special, other than being secret.
Welcome to the murky depths of a natural cave under your city. Stalagmites and creepy standing water pools greet visitors as they descend down. In this picture series you can see the cover in place and how it is removed to reveal the cavern. Used green tinted resin for the liquids.
Gotta have a sewer. Featuring yucky green water and multiple rusty pipes. A good place to find a rat or two.
My favorite of the batch. This room features a candle flanked blood pool filled by a bleeding skull. Also some chains to hold.... guests. If you are a local cultist in town, you probably already know this place exists....
Big victory! All the raised platforms are now built and full painted! What a project! The payoff was well worth it.
All of them laid out for assembly line painting. This made it easier to get consistent results across the whole set.
Here is the painting style I went for. Grey stone with highlighted edges. I used various thin washes of blue, green, brown and red over the stones. Grey is complimented by reddish brown wood and rusted metal bits. I added a bit of green/brown wash to the bottom of the platforms to simulate grime at the bottom. Should work well over water, as well as just dirty walls. Added a little bit of green flocking here and there to break up the grey and add some life.
A collection of detail shots for your enjoyment. I tried to apply various patterns for the stonework to make it more interesting. Along the side walls there are arches, broken bits, ladders, metal rings for tying up boats, drainage pipes, wall pockets with knick knacks. When assembling a board layout to play on, there ends up being lots of options for the look and feel.
Filling in the misc pieces of the Venice board. Scatter terrain and bridges/docks to add some passages over the water.
Here are have two completed bridges painted up. Both are designed to allow passage over a 6-8 inch gap.
Finished docks painted.
Crates, barrels, straw bails, and food ready for scatter terrain. The crates are mostly all made of stir sticks. Straw bails and food piles are from a Kickstarter of Mantic's Town Crate.
Statues are from the Harry Potter wizard chess set I picked up cheap on eBay. Applied some damage and wear to them. One is broken in half. Plus a Cthulhu model I picked up at Kublacon from a vendor. All are painted up in metallics, then a series of washes and Citadel's Nihilakh Oxide.
