Hello! And Welcome back to Friday Night X-Wing! Today, we will be looking at how you can pimp out your next game with 3D asteroid props! We all use asteroids and debris clouds in our games, but sometimes seeing those 2D tokens is simply not enough… you crave a little more! Hopefully, this tutorial will satisfy that craving! Anyway, let the tutorial begin!

Materials Needed

Blue/Pink Styrofoam or Polystyrene

Wood Skewers/Wooden Dowels

Scalpel or Exacto-Knife

School Glue or Wood Glue

Toothpick

32 mm Wargaming Miniatures bases

Black Spray Paint

Acrylic Paints

1. Setting Up Your Foam

Pre-measure your asteroid sizes, you can make them as big or as small as you want them to be (A good idea would be to use your asteroid tokens in order to determine their size). After you have determined a basic size for your asteroids, add a few centimetres/inches to your measurements and cut out a bunch of cubes out of your foam. Once you have your pieces, stick some toothpicks in them and add your glue to it and stack them. Let the glue set for about 24 hours. I would not recommend using hot glue since it will make cutting and sculpting a little tougher.

2. Cutting and Sculpting Your Foam

Now that the glue has settled, it is time to make your asteroids! This is where you guys go crazy with creativity! Using the scalpel/knife, you should cut away at the edges and try to build a rough shape for your asteroid. Once you are satisfied, I highly recommend digging away at your foam with your fingers and finger nails. By tearing off tiny chunks, it gives you rough, non-uniform tears in your foam, which gives you a lot more of a natural look. If you have sculpting tools, that is even better! You can even use other house hold items to help you sculpt! For example, I used a pencil in order to make holes and draw in some lines for “sculpting”.

In terms of texture, you can use rolled up aluminium foil, rocks from the outside, etc. and just rub em up against the asteroid so that you get a rocky texture on it. It will stand out a lot more when you paint!

Once you are done, stick them onto some bamboo skewers or wooden dowels as they are ready to paint!

3. Painting Your Asteroids

Painting your asteroids is quite simple. First, you will want to prime your asteroids first with black spray paint. Using black spray paint is key because the paint that is used tends to eat away a little at the asteroids and it gives it a very rough/rock texture. The black is also good as a base since it will help your other colors stand out a lot better.

For the asteroid colors, you can use pretty much any color you want. Typically, asteroids are brown or grey (I went for a blue/grey mixture). In the end, they are your asteroids, paint them like you seem fit! When painting, you will want to dry brush on the details since the rough texture from the eaten foam as well as your previous texturing will pop out a lot more.

4. Decorating your Asteroids!

In this step, you will want to add the final touches to your asteroids. What I did was use smaller chunks of foam as small pieces of debris or rocks that “float” around the asteroids. I also took Star Wars Micro Machine ships, cut em up and used them as crashed debris. I even used small metal wires that I found in the garage and painted them red to represent wiring from the detached bits! Here, you can get creative and add what you think is necessary from ship debris to space worms!

Using Micro Machines is great since most of their ships are only slightly smaller than their FFG Counter parts.

5. Basing Your Asteroids

On the internet, you can see that many people used acrylic rods and bases for their own asteroid builds. If you are like me, you don’t really have the money for these sort of things. This is where I got creative and used some wooden dowels and Warhammer 40k miniatures bases for my asteroids.

What you will want to do is first cut your stands to their perfect sizes and paint them black. Once that is done, you must add some glue to the top and stick it into the foam and glue the bottom and stick it onto the miniatures base. Hold it in place for a few minutes to ensure that it is balanced correctly and glues on straightly. After that, your asteroids are pretty much done and ready to play!

Another solution would be to magnetize

If you are looking for more inspiration and ideas, I used these tutorials when building my asteroids! They are extremely useful and I highly recommend that you check them out!

If you guys make any asteroids, send some photos our way and we’ll display them on the site! Until then, Fly Casual!

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Before we end, we would like to apologize for the lack of content these past couple of months. A lot has been going on in our lives and the announcement of X-Wing 2.0 has thrown a wrench into our plans, but once X-Wing 2.0 releases and things sort themselves out, we will be pumping out a lot more content! Now here’s where things get interesting, we are looking to expand the Friday Night X-Wing team! If you would like to write for us, contact us through the contact page or send us an email at: fridaynightxwingblog@gmail.com and let us know what type of content you wish to post, it can be paint tutorials, scratch build tutorials, list building, etc! If you are able to provide an example of an article, and examples of your work, that would be great! Thank You!!