After the plaster cloth dried on the Styrofoam for topographical features, I began to paint it. I didn't have many art supplies at all, so I bought a bunch of arcrylic paints, and borrowed brushes from friends. I chose an earthy brown for the hilly sections, and gave the lake bed a nice beachy blue gradient. The gradient was very gradienty, by the way. It was important to make the terrerium looking as much like a paradise as possible, because that's how the sprite looks. Anyway, when the paint dried, I sprayed it with the modeling equivalent of Elmer's glue, and pinched on some lime-green flocking. It was looking great, but it needed some texture. I added patches of artificial foliage along hillsides and where paths might be. I glued the trees I had made earlier into "artistically strategic" positions and added various Styrofoam rocks to the platform. I had bought some "EZ-Water" from a modeling store, to be used for the lake. All I had to do was to heat it up in an aluminum skillet and it dried in minutes. Unfortunately, it set with a glaring yellow hue. This, when combined with my blue paint job, turned my lake green. Son of a bitch!
I carved out a hole in one of the northern hillsides to make space for the access elevator. The culverts I had bought earlier were used for the main doorway, and were painted cement gray. I stuffed the interior with black fun foam to give the illusion of a continuous underground tunnel, because it is very non-reflective. The doorway was to fit about 3-4 people shoulder-to-shoulder for the approximate scale I had in mind. Eventually, I realized that the more objects I placed on the landscape, the more fully in control of scale I could be. Using a small funnel and more modeling glue, I created some large sand paths that could be used for rovers of some kind. The smaller paths again controlled the scale a bit more. By painting little greeblies, we came up with some great futuristic building ideas that might exist in this world. The idea was to have sightseeing/tourism structures as well as some practical maintenance areas as well. I don't have too many pictures of the different construction phases, but here are some shots of the finished product. Note the lunar rover toy which we temporarily used for scale reference. :)
The dome was destined to live on top of the main body of the arcology, so we had to make some kind of mount for it. From the beginning, I wanted everything to be easily disassembled for transport and convenience, and so we opted to have the dome simply lift off the top, with a snug fit. My friend Dan did the lion's share of the work on the outer ring that would hold it in place. He built it around the dome platform so it would fit perfectly. It was mainly composed of curved railroad tracks, plastic canvas, fun foam, and ungodly amounts of hot glue.
Dan is a self-proclaimed "Trekky", so there was plenty of "Borg" influence in the design. We wanted things as glowy and blinky as possible, so I obtained some LED christmas lights to line the inside of the ring. It was AC powered, but that was fine because I had a power strip mounted in the cylinder. Using scraps of old lighting gels, we were able to make the LEDs cast multi-colored hues on different sections of the terrarium. LANs usually have dimmed lights anyway, so this was sure to look awesome. The lights even had several different blinking modes, depending on what mood I was in at the time. Covering up cords (at least on the outside) was important to me, so the fun foam hid most of the christmas light evidence. Of course, some light leaked through, but that was cool in its own right. More updates to come later.
