Kill-Zone Tomb World is an updated version of last edition's Gallowdark terrain set. With the addition of scatter terrain, teleporter pads, and breachable walls the "close quarters combat" kill zone is a vast improvement to its predecessor's rule-set. However I love the look of the Gallowdark terrain and was in no great rush to paint another large batch of terrain so it sat unpainted under my desk for the last 5 months. With the completion of my Wolf Scouts I was looking for another project and decided it was finally time to pull the trigger. 

I knew that I wanted to do a non-standard color scheme, and I knew I wanted to use a new gold paint I'd picked up (Vallejo Liquid Metal Gold). I also didn't really want to spend a TON of time on this terrain set, so decided that black should be one of my other primary colors...since it was already primed black. I ended up deciding that the crumbling-rock look should be jade since gold worked with both. I had a jadeish color on my rack (Citadel's Sybarite Green) and in an effort to use up my paints before buying more I went with it. Due to jagged nature of the crumbling rock it was effectively impossible to mask off the areas...which meant I couldn't cheat and use my airbrush. Turns out Sybarite Green has some problems with coverage and I ended up having to brush on 2-3 layers on every piece of the terrain before I had a consistency I was happy with. While it was mind-numbingly boring it did give me an opportunity to re-watch (mostly listen) Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood while working on it, which was a silver lining. 

The Liquid Metal gold was an easier application, but not without its own problems. The product line uses isopropyl alcohol (IPA) as its medium which gives it a nice finish, but it means it dries very quickly and requires special products to thin and clean brushes. I used mineral spirits which seemed to work fine, though Vallejo recommends using IPA. You'll definitely want a burner-brush for this product as well, the metal seeps up the ferrule VERY quickly and will quickly degrade whatever brush you're using, its also VERY runny, and might not be great for applying on trim unless you bleed off a lot of the paint ahead of time. That being said it quickly produces a quality result, the above picture was a single pass, and I barely reloaded my brush between panels, so on a smaller surface area that coverage would be even better. 

While working on the terrain I went ahead and assembled/primed the Canoptic Circle kill team and figured I might as well include them in the process since I'd always intended them to match the TW terrain. They're great models and among the least fiddly Necrons I've ever assembled. 

 

After getting the green and gold locked in I hit areas with a dark silver to break up the panels/lines and then drybrushed everything (light yellow/green for the jade) and gloss coated everything and gave it an oil wash made of a couple shades of green and a black. My final decision was the power source color, my initial idea had been purple but after doing a couple of test panels I decided I really didn't like it and after a bit of waffling landed on a fuschia/pink color that I'm pretty happy with.

There's so much of it I never got a good shot of it all together, but I'll be sure to take a photo the first time I get it on a table to play


When it came to basing I had originally planned on doing bases exactly like my deathwatch marines, but I ran out of greenstuff while making my wolf-scouts so I pivoted to imperial ruins because I had the bits on hand and was VERY ready to be done with this project.