In the darkness, silent predators stalk across sticky webbing, watching with unseen eyes. The hairs on the back of your neck rise and dread creeps through your body. You thought you were hunting them, but now you are the prey, your torch revealing nothing but webs, yet marking you like a beacon. Your senses heighten, catching the slightest vibration in the web, and following it to a creature of nightmare. Torchlight flickers in its cluster of eyes and glints of its cruel mandibles. The fight is on.

The last of the rooms in my Dungeons and Lasers: Caves pledge is the Spider Nest (available at Wayland Games). A quick look at the sprues and I knew this would be a tough paint job. It’s still a great looking room, but I have to admit I didn’t much enjoy the painting. There was nothing complicated about it, but it needed a lot of fixing where I’d overstepped, working around the web strands, and since I’d gone with white for the webs, that meant it took a few coats to get the initial colour down, then a few more whenever I had to fix anything. Which was a lot. To keep the motivation up, I painted something else after each sprue. All that said, I’m more than happy with how it all turned out, and it’s going to look awesome once I do a test build of the full dungeon. Here’s how the painting went:

The stone and wooden struts follow the same recipe and process I used for the core set (tutorial here). There’s nothing complicated about the webs themselves either. They’re just Vallejo Deck Tan washed all over with GW Agrax Earthshade, but it did need 3 coats to cover the grey primer. Once the white was down, that’s when all the fixing happened. It’s worth having a close look after doing the webs because there are bones and skulls and wood and rock which are easily missed in the blocks of white. I also kept the eggs the same colour as the webs – after looking up some photos of spider eggs, most seemed to be white, but I did see some orange in my search so that could be an interesting alternative. Bones and skulls were just a quick coat of GW Contrast Skeleton Horde. Nothing fancy, but does the job nicely.

The rusty metal was a quick win which turned out great. That’s just base coated with Vallejo Gunmetal Grey then washed with GW Agrax Earthshade. I’d wanted to try out the Dirty Down Rust Effect for a while since I’d had good results with their moss, and this seemed the ideal place. It turns out, just like the moss effect, this is a little bottle of magic. I just slapped it on, slightly heavier in some places than others, and let it dry. I can’t complain at the results.

That’s about all there is to painting the Spider Nest. For me, it wasn’t as fun to paint as the other rooms in this set, but looks great when it’s done. Now it’s all painted, I’ll get some photos of the full caves build, and maybe a video, to see what a full dungeon might look like.

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