I've talked on this blog about making lots of 3D elements for Zombicide Green Horde to play on. What I haven't talked about is that it takes a lot of space to store. For a long time I used all the Zombicide boxes to store the elements inside. Not very practical since you never know exactly what's in which box. Sometimes I need certain terrain pieces for other RPG games. I found a better system: shelves with drawers. As you can see, I can store much more inside than in boxes.

Drawers for elements that are more rules-related rather than scenery. The top drawer has character sheets, dice, cards, all the tokens needed to play. The second drawer has all the different zombie types you might need. The third drawer has scenery elements like barricades, and small indicators for marking treasures.

A drawer for all stone tiles, including stairs that let you descend into water. You can't see them well because they're on their side, but the bottom right corner has the thinner water tiles.

Wood tiles for house interiors. Most rooms are one square, but some scenarios have rooms that are 2 or even 3 squares long, so I need tiles that size.

Same thing for stone tiles, all the outdoor squares that aren't on main streets. Again, some are 2 long, sometimes just 1x1.

All the hedges that block line of sight. Not nearly enough are provided in the base game, so I made my own.

All the walls you might need. I made different wall types: stone walls, wood walls, different styles. In the base game there's no difference, but it adds variety when playing.

The drawer I mentioned at the start with various elements like barricades, some hedges that didn't fit in the other drawer, and all the necessary doors. I went through every scenario in the game and counted the maximum number of doors needed for any given scenario, the maximum number of hedges, and made enough to play all scenarios.

This is a commemorative post to document the current state of my workshop in April 2026, before major renovations begin. This is where I've spent countless hours crafting and painting, and I want to remember what it looked like. You can see how it evolved from 2021 to 2026.

This is where I craft. The main workstation is built from Ikea kitchen furniture, with kitchen drawers and a large countertop, and then a bunch of my stuff on top of that.

Another angle of the room. Since we're going to do major renovations here soon, I had to do a big cleanup and organization job. I bought a lot of drawer units to organize everything: drawers for different crafting tools, for cardboard, for foam, for miniatures to paint, and so on. All of this will change once the renovations are done.

The other side of the room, where there's still a lot of stuff. The Zombicide boxes are almost all empty but I'm keeping them. There's still a lot to sort through, but it's cleaner than the mess it was before.

This cabinet is in the dining room, right next to the big table that serves as both our dining table and RPG gaming table. When I open it, I have two shelves just for storing all my RPG miniatures.

I have these four drawer units, and each drawer contains a different type of monster: cultists, bandits, guards, heroes, halflings, kobolds, snakes, skeletons, so it's easy to find what I need. I sorted all my miniatures by how much I want to paint them rather than by type. If I don't have what I need, I have two more units like this in the basement (visible in the previous photo), and I just swap the drawers if I know the players are going to encounter something soon. Similar to my Zombicide 3D storage system.

On the shelf above, I put larger miniatures that don't fit in the drawers, the ones with wider bases that I want to keep here for easy access. It's not the best location because it's hard to see the miniatures in the back and sometimes I forget about them, but it's still better than what I had before.

This is an organization I had in my workshop for a while. These shelves used to hold a lot of craft paint, the bigger bottles for making terrain. I kept only a few in a drawer now, because I'm painting more miniatures than terrain these days.

I've been really amazed by Speedpaint markers, which let me do what I already find incredible with Speedpaints but much more easily, without having to wash my brush each time. So I started testing things with regular markers and then with official AK markers, bought a lot of them in many different colors, and put them here. I colored the tops to more easily see what they are.

For the Speedpaint markers specifically, I glued a textured shirt button on top and painted it with the marker color to see what it will look like in real life, and that worked well.

Now this has evolved because it's so easy to paint with markers or Speedpaint markers that I don't have to be at my workshop to do it. I put everything in a small box that I can carry around the house and paint when I'm in the dining room or on the couch.

This workshop has served me well for years. It will be interesting to see what comes next after the renovations.

This is a quick post to show something I made recently.

I usually use an aluminium foil ball to create stone texture on foam, but after a while it hurts my hands from pressing. So I made my own tool.

I took a piece of plastic with a handle and put lots of glue on it, then pressed it into a container full of gravel. I added more glue on top, pressed it into the gravel container again, applied fixative over it, and now I have a tool with a handle with real stones glued to it.

When I press it on foam, it impacts it inside, which lets me work much faster because the surface I'm pressing with is much larger. It's very solid and makes real stone impacts rather than aluminium texture.

If I had to do it again though, I'd choose something even more comfortable to hold in my hand, but the point is that when you do things many times, you might as well craft your own tools to make better craft.

Table dressing are scenery elements you place on top of other scenery, like small trays you put on tables.

In another post I made market stalls, and I didn't want to glue what each stall was selling directly onto them since it could change between scenarios. Instead I made small removable elements. I gathered lots of small pieces from various sources and made trays that can be placed anywhere.

Before painting. The trays at the bottom are made with small plastic circles (tokens from board games) or squares (bases from Dungeons & Dragons board game miniatures). I cut those miniatures off to rebase them on rounds like all my others, but kept the square bases for trays.

The white thing in back is from a game, probably Sylvanian Families. I "borrowed" it from my daughter. Some pieces are already painted (the bottles, the purse) because I'd painted those in a painting frenzy when I received my Mantic Terrain Crate kickstarter pledge, then realized they were too small to use individually on the table. So I kept them aside to glue together onto trays.

The kiwi and tomato pieces came from some craft store. I thought they might show what people are eating, but I ended up painting them as gold coins later. Good way to get small round objects easily.

My idea was to fill trays with things that make sense individually in a medieval fantasy setting, even if they don't make sense together. That's fine. It shows the table is full of clutter with stuff players can search through. On the far right, those small ochre things are the ends of glass medicine ampules. I kept them thinking they'd make good candles.

Finished painting. They're in my tray ready for varnishing outdoors along with other pieces. I painted them with bright colors and I'm happy with how they turned out. Small things, nothing much, but little details that improve a game board easily.

Besides the trays, there are other small elements that don't sit on tables. The stall filled with tomatoes and the one with what looks like bread or potatoes came from some toy I can't remember. Simple scenery to make since it's already sculpted. The big purple piece will be a luxury statue or fountain. It's actually a drawer handle placed vertically, and the rest comes from various sources.

I have these miniatures, probably Reaper models though I'm not sure. I really liked the sculpts with their somewhat cartoonish style.

The parts to assemble didn't fit together perfectly, so I added some baking soda and super glue to create the connections between parts. Since that gave them a rocky texture anyway, it wasn't a problem.

I thought those would be a good way to test my green Speedpaints, similar to my other speedpaint tests. I have tons of greens and was struggling to know which was which.

For example, Ghoul Green sounds like it should be something morbid but it's actually quite bright. Orc Skin sounds dark but looks like an emerald. The names don't match what they actually look like. I figured this could be a good way to create a unit of stone elementals with cohesion, all green but with different shades.

Here's a focus on Shamrock Green, Forest Sprite, and Ghillie Dew. Shamrock Green is one I kept because it's very vibrant, great for really punchy green. Forest Sprite remains one of my standard choices for camouflage. Ghillie Dew I stopped using.

Here we have Orc Skin, Ghoul Green, and Charming Chartreuse. I find that Charming Chartreuse and Ghillie Dew look too similar, so I only kept one and use it rarely. Orc Skin could potentially swap with Shamrock Green as a darker shade. Ghoul Green has a precious stone look and doesn't look ghoul at all.

In the end, these miniatures weren't fun to paint...

The sculpts were excellent but I wasn't inspired at all when painting them. It was too much green.

I tried applying a darker wash later to give them more of a stone appearance but messed up the paint job and it looks ugly. If I had to do it over, I would have done most of the golem in stone gray and just made the teeth, eyes, nails, and certain extremities in more powerful colors. At least this allowed me to see which greens I liked.

You might recognize this spider color scheme. It's the one from the spider boss beneath the abandoned village in Baldur's Gate 3. I like this fight because it involves a lot of vertical gameplay, stealth mechanics, and avoiding aggro on the smaller spiders and Ettercaps. I wanted anyone who played the game to immediately recognize the color scheme.

This was the original version, a plastic prank toy meant to scare people. It's fairly large and the plastic is quite flexible, with legs that bend easily. Honestly, it was already pretty scary as is and I could have used it in a game session without any modifications, but I felt it didn't look fantastical enough.

To paint it easily, I made a small hole underneath and inserted a nail, which I held throughout the entire painting process. I also scraped off all the markings that were on it: CE markings, serial numbers, things like that.

The more I paint, the more I realize that I used to try to replicate reality as closely as possible. But in reality, spiders have dozens or even hundreds of different shades of gray and brown, and I can't paint that properly. More importantly, it's not very interesting.

Now, I keep things simple: two main colors, three at most. Here there's blue, red, black, and that's it. I try to use the main colors where the eye naturally goes. That's why I didn't paint all the legs blue, only the tips, and primarily the body. But I left the abdomen red. I try to be tactical with color choices: elements that aren't important get more neutral colors, while elements where I want to draw attention get much stronger colors. Similar to how I repainted the Dark Young's tongue in a bright color. Years ago, I would never have painted a spider this color. Even if I hadn't played Baldur's Gate, I would have painted it in very brown tones.

The bold color scheme makes it instantly recognizable and much more interesting than a realistic spider would be.

This post is about Qadira guards, from the fictional nation in the Pathfinder universe where my players currently are.

This is what I used as base miniatures. They come from the A Song of Ice and Fire battle game, technically the Martell Spearmen.

Here's what the miniatures look like. I didn't use all the miniatures from the box, there are even more than this, but I figured having 10 was enough. No point painting too many if I wasn't going to use them.

Here's what it looks like once the painting is done. What I did on these was go really fast, using Speedpaint markers like with my devils. I used strong colors since they're kind of the good guys in my campaign. Since they're quite connected to Sarenrae in the universe, I used her colors: blue and yellow. I used a Speedpaint marker for the blue, for all the leather, for the weapon handles, and to do black initially everywhere I was going to paint metal.

For all the yellow parts, I started by highlighting with a yellow AK marker for flat color, then added Ancient Honey Speedpaint on top, which gives that slightly orange tone and settles nicely into the recesses. Then I used metallic Speedpaint for their armor, and a metallic pen for details on their armor elements.

Only at the end did I apply Nuln Oil on all the metal pieces. I think it took me two evenings to paint all this, maybe even just one. This Speedpaint and markers technique works really well. It's not an extraordinary paint job, I wouldn't win any competitions with this, but on the game table, I think it looks good. At least, teenage me would have been proud to have an army with miniatures painted this well.

This is a recap of various small projects from 2025 that didn't warrant their own dedicated posts, similar to last year's misc post. Some terrain pieces got donated, some new scatter terrain was built, and I tracked my painting progress over the years.

I got rid of a lot of old terrain pieces I made years ago. What they had in common was that I was discovering techniques and practicing, and in a frenzy of being able to transform foam into stone, I made tons of them. But in reality they're not very practical in a game session because they lack versatility or they're way too imposing and take up a lot of storage space. So I ended up putting them on my windowsill by the street. People helped themselves and believe it or not, everything went except the plaque with the Baldur's Gate symbol. That's the only one that stayed. Everything else was taken.

This is a good example of what I consider my favorite terrain pieces: they have a lot of versatility and you can use them in many different places.

Plus, these particular ones are very solid and cost almost nothing. The walls are Lego or Megablocks bricks stacked on top of each other with a bit of spackle added. I cut the top of the studs and glued them onto a cardboard plate. Since it's Lego, it interlocks very well, won't break, and does exactly what you ask of it.

The columns are Heroclix bases stacked on top of each other, slightly offset, with a round piece on top. Once painted, they're also super solid. Columns are needed all the time, so these terrain pieces check all my boxes: very simple to make, inexpensive, solid, and highly versatile.

This is something similar. It's outdoor scatter terrain with rocks I made from Playmobil blocks. They're literally rocks as they exist in Playmobil, but I glued them onto cardboard. To avoid recognizing the somewhat rough Playmobil edges too much, I added spackle on top to give a bit of texture. On the one on the right, I added some gravel as well so you can see less of the very straight version of the steps that were on it. But again, very solid, very easy to make, and very useful.

I think this is a McDonald's Happy Meal toy, Grandmother Willow from Pocahontas. I just added a bit of texture to it and it'll make a nice interesting tree.

This is interesting because I managed to find a pack of miniatures that come from the Dungeons & Dragons board game. I had already gotten a pack like this a long time ago when I got back into painting after not doing it since my teenage years. I wanted to paint them now with my current painting level to compare how I painted several years ago to what I'm capable of doing today. Painting exactly the same miniatures felt like a good way to measure the progress.

This is a photo I wanted to take at one point because I had to tidy up my workshop to make space and sort things out. I had miniatures to paint, what's called the pile of shame, in lots of different places, so I decided I'd sort them once and for all.

I managed to create a sort of system. I sorted my miniatures not by type, but by whether I want to paint them or not. I have a drawer of miniatures I call high quality, meaning I really want to paint them. Most of these come from A Song of Ice and Fire, which makes really good stuff, or certain Reaper Bones that are very cool. I have another drawer that's explicitly for monsters and another drawer for large monsters. These are monsters I want to paint but in different sizes, because if I put all the large monsters with the regular monsters in one drawer, I won't have enough space.

Then I have other drawers in descending order of quality. Basically I have one that I called worst quality, like I don't even want to paint them. These are miniatures that might come from really ugly board games or things I got a long time ago. It pains me to throw them away because I know I can always try to salvage heads, arms, things like that, but clearly, I know these are miniatures I'll be able to cut up to recover pieces if I need them, but not miniatures I'll want to paint directly.

And then I have a few other levels. There are miniatures I know I'll never use because they're science fiction miniatures, or miniatures that have sentimental value because I painted them when I was 15 and they're very ugly but I don't want to touch them anyway.

I also took the opportunity to remove the bases from all the miniatures. If I have miniatures in drawers, they don't have bases because otherwise I have bases of different sizes, different shapes all over the place. I removed them all from the bases and I have boxes full of bases if I ever need them.

In the drawers I have baseless miniatures which makes them much easier to identify. And basically, from the moment I put them on a base, it means I want to paint them and they start entering my painting pipeline. If they're not on a base, they're loose and that doesn't bother me, but it allowed me to keep a bit of logic among all the miniatures I have.

I made this project because my players were about to reach a decisive moment in their journey through the Feywild. They needed to rescue the Warlock's patron, an archfey who had taken refuge in a strange place and was being attacked by one of the BBEG's minions, a soldier in black armor with his demon army. The encounter would take place on a half-destroyed bridge over the void in space, with a portal at the far end. The players arrive at one end while the villain is already in the middle and their objective is at the other end.

The pieces come from a Pirates of the Caribbean toy, probably the second movie. It's designed for G.I. Joe or Action Man scale miniatures and normally represents a ruined tower. I bought it at a flea market, but the plastic was very old and broke easily.

The scale would never be right vertically for TTRPG, but the textures were great. Positioned flat, though, it could make decent ruined platforms. The one on the far right was already thick enough, but the others were much thinner, so I glued them onto foam boards to even out the thickness. I added spackle on the edges and top to create more texture and hide the plastic look. I also filled in what was obviously a window at the very top with foam stones to make it look like debris instead.

Another viewpoint shows how I used spackle to smooth out the seams where the plastic meets the foam.

I covered them completely with Mod Podge without priming, creating a glue and paint mix to hold all the small pieces in place. Here I'm doing a test fit on my mat to figure out how to arrange the bridge sections.

After one or two layers of green drybrushing, the pieces started to take shape. Green is a bold choice, but for visually striking terrain pieces, it worked well.

I painted individual stones with a darker green, a light green that's almost diluted gray, and a brown. Just three colors to add variety to the bricks. A dark green wash unified everything, then a very light yellow drybrush highlighted the edges. The process wasn't complicated, and it worked perfectly for the encounter. We even reused these pieces a year later for a desert canyon scenario. Our imagination filled in the gaps even though the canyon definitely wasn't green.

The biggest downside is storage. These large pieces take up a lot of space. If I were to do it again, I'd focus more on modularity and replayability, making pieces that stack or work in different contexts. This project was more opportunistic, like the Hello Kitty house, taking something I'd bought years ago at a flea market and finally putting it to use.