Building Tau scenery

In one sense, Tau scnery is extraordinarilly easy to make. In another sense, it's hard as hell.

Let's start with the easy: do you have any frisbees, tupperware, empty containers of sour cream or yogurt, flower pots, washers, and dry wall anchors lieing around? Then you have a Tau city and you just don't know it. I like to take two such things, cut up one and lay it on a complete model of the other so as to make panneling or removable sides so you can look into the Tau structures, but whatever. Seriusly, this is beyond easy and should take you little time at all to get it all going.

Of course, Hirst arts will help you immeasurably with the interior of the building, but that's something else.

Hard? Well, yes, if you listen to anyone who makes Tau scenery. What the hell are those directions? Cut shit out of foam, cover it with spackle, and carefully, over a series of a hundred weeks, sand it down so that it's smooth like plastic? Why not just use plastic? I've now tried the spackle way and here's what I found. It chips. It's uneven. It has the consistency of a birthday cake's frosting, and then when you sand it down, it sands down to nothing before it looks right. I add spackle to syrofoam to give it texture, precisely the opposite affect I want on my Tau structures--which raises the obvious question: why not just leave the styrofoam unspackled and paint that?

If you're out there, and you make Tau scenery, could you let me know? I'd really like someone to fill in the blanks here.

Here are some pictures of two of the buildings on my most recent job. You'll notice that I didn't use spackling for the buildings, but I did for the ground if that's any help.

Pictures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8