Following on from his alien forest, Phil 'px166bajaj' Arkell entered an alien encampment to one of our later competitions that makes ingenious use of fizzy drinks bottles. The photo to the right shows one such bottle and the base, the part used, from another.
The picture below shows Phil's encampment in its early stages with the 'tents' fixed to a hardboard base using adhesive mastic. Two of the tents have had door openings cut into them while the third (far right) has been 'melted' with a heat gun. The idea is that these tents are inflatable and that the one on the right, the communications tent, is still in the process of being inflated.
The picture below also shows a couple of alien picnic mats (made from squares of embossed wallpaper), an alien barbeque (items from the bits box) and a couple of termite mounds (modelling clay).
The next picture shows the encampment after an initial spraying of silver and already the tents are starting to look very sci-fi. Notice also the use of the brass nuts (that were standing around in the previous picture) and pieces of bendy drinking straws to represent the tents' air conditioning/inflation systems.
Look closely at the tents and you will also see that each has a screw cover on the top to cover the mark left from when the bottle was moulded. A 'spare' screw cover can be seen in the foreground.
In the picture above we see the encampment with the tents having received a coat of what will be their base colour, and the picnic mats after the rainbow bunny has thrown up all over them.
Finally (below) we have the tents with 'alien camouflage'. In Alan Dean Foster's books, the historical enemies of the AAnn (lizard men) are the insectoid Thranx. The theory behind the camo style is that insects will have trouble seeing right angles, their vision being based on hexagonal, multi-faceted eyes. Hence the patterns are all right angles.
Presumably that explains the picnic mats too but there is no denying that Phil has come up with something here that would be ideal for use with Tau, Eldar, and many other alien races.
Incidentally, if you make some of these and find yourself wondering what to do with the top end of the fizzy drinks bottles, you might like to check out LuMi's Alien Polyps.