Crossing the Bridge (Mygeeto Build Part Three)

July 09, 2022

Crossing the Bridge (Mygeeto Build Part Three)

As I've been procrastinating building and painting more of the Mygeetian structures, I suddenly found an urge to tackle the biggest and most important piece of my Mygeeto terrain build: the bridge. In Revenge of the Sith, the long bridges spanning over endless caverns are the only real piece of Mygeeto that we see. It's on one of these bridges that Bacara receives Order 66 and guns down Ki-Adi-Mundi. So, any board trying to replicate Mygeeto better have at least one of these bridges.

As we see in ROTS, the scale of these bridges are massive. They are wide enough for at least two heavy vehicles to pass through. If we were scaling them to Legion accurately, they would certainly be longer than the 6' length of the table, and probably about half of the 3' width. I want my table to have much more going on than just the bridge, so I knew we were going to have to shrink things down a bit.

That said, I still wanted the piece to be a significant part of the board, so I picked up some thin sheets of basswood, and laid them out wide enough that my Saber tank fit comfortably on it. This would ensure that vehicles would be able to use this terrain piece as well as infantry.

Then, I penciled in where I was going to cut out damaged parts of the bridge. I cut the pieces out with a hobby knife, being as careful as possible not to damage the rest of the basswood (you can see where I was not as successful). The plan was for the bridge to have a dual layer to show more detail, so I cut out slightly smaller pieces for the bottom layer.

Now came the fun part. After using PVA glue and a healthy supply of craft sticks to brace the two lower pieces together, I used miniature sprues to create the impression of exposed beams coming out of the bridge. This is the creative part of crafting that I love, cutting out bits and gluing them to a piece.

I glued the top pieces of the bridge to the craft sticks, and attached angled balsa wood as bridge siding. As the balsa wood was not holding well, I used hobby painter's table to support the pieces while they dried.

At this point, I realized that the damaged parts of the bridge were looking pretty sparse, so I cut up some steel wire and hot glued bits around the sprues. This did a lot to make it look like chunks of the bridge had been blown out, leaving the supports visible. In addition, I brushed modge podge onto parts of the bridge and sprinkled small stones onto the top of the bridge. To add a little more contrast, I attached a few pieces of corrugated paper onto the piece as well.

After this, it was time to get painting.

I sealed the entire piece in modge podge overnight, and sprayed the whole piece black. Once dry, I went over most of the bridge with a flat gray, spraying unevenly to give a bit of contrast with the black.

After this, it was time to experiment. After trying to dry brush some different colors, I realized I still need more contrast, so I covered the entire piece in a black wash. I was pretty messy with the application, as I knew I was going to cover a lot of this with more paint, but I also wanted some areas to look like pooled soot, oil, etc.

After this, I went crazy with my dry brush. Metallics on the exposed beams, blacks around the damaged area to simulate explosive damage, and a mixture of black, metallic, and white over pretty much the whole piece. I added some rust effects with a watered down brown paint on some of the exposed beams as well. Finally, I applied some Vallejo snow texture effects over the board. I didn't want the whole piece to be white, but I did want snow to be visible, so I tried placing piles of snow around the bridge. I was worried it would look a little unrealistic, but I'm pretty pleased with the final result.