Hanley’s Hope Office set by Combatzone Scenery for Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps

I recently enjoyed painting (most of) my Hanley’s Hope office set. This resin scenery is absolutely superb, with some lovely details including coffee cups and sheets of paper on desks to the paper sticking up out of a printer. It’ll really enhance my games of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps and I’ll get just as much, if not more use out of the scenery in games of Deadzone.

When I finished painting the set, I realised I’d missed out the monitor display table (that Hudson uses to locate the missing colonists in the movie Aliens) so I’ll need to paint that another day. Here’s a look at everything else I got done.

First up, my favourite piece of the the office set – this corner desk complete with a printer that has paper sticking up from its loader. Lovely detail! With this scenery being for aliens and Aliens the movie having been released in 1986, some 37 years ago at the time of writing (anybody else feeling old, now too…?) the tech on display here looks delightfully retro, with cassette spools, deep monitors, desktop CPUs. So I decided to try and accentuate this f act with my painting, by using what i like to think of as a ‘Commodore 64’ style colour for the computers – a sort of light brown/yellowing plastic. It helps to break up the otherwise largely grey/white colour scheme and adds more warmth and interest to the finished pieces.

I suppose I’d better explain my general ‘recipe’ for this this paint scheme before I go on any further. I decided to try and keep the painting techniques quick and simple, as with all the detail in this set I could see myself going down a rabbit hole of intricate airbrushing and spending far too much time on them if I wasn’t careful. With hobby time being very rare for me these last few years since the birth of my lovely (now 3 three year old) daughter I need to get the most bang for my buck out of my hobby time, so I’m now accepting of cutting a few corners that I otherwise wouldn’t have been back when I had a lot more free time.

So I undercoated everything in black, basecoated with a heavy zenithal coat of grey from a rattle can and a lighter zenithal coat of white. Chairs were pained black and then drybrushed with a blue grey to add more warmth, computers given a coat of Army Painter Skeleton Bone and a wash of Soft Tone ink to bring out details like grilles on their sides.

I added a light wash of Citadel Nuln Oil to the rows of buttons and cassette spools to help bring out the detail and did some rough n’ ready line work with Nuln Oil to make sheets of paper and coffee cups etc on the desks stand out, as well as creating rough pools of shadow under the chairs and adding some definition to the gaps between cabinets.

I edge highlighted the computers with a mix of Skeleton Bone and pure White and the edges of the desks and cabinets etc in pure white too. A few dots of colour here and there; bright green ‘power’ lights on the bottom right of monitor screens, some random red lights on the computer banks (looking at these photos I see that I need to add a few more of these, maybe some blue and green too for a bit more colour) and then I got to have some fun. I had downloaded some Aliens-themed computer screen graphics well over a year ago, (so I can’t recall from where, but most likely the ‘Aliens Another Glorious Day in the Corps’ Facebook group) so printed those off, cut out the ones I liked most and used PVA glue to add them to the various monitors. Really simple but very effective. I couldn’t resist adding a few coffee rings here n’ there by dipping the end of a plastic protective tube from a paintbrush into some brown paint, removing most of the excess on a piece of kitchen roll and then dabbing the protector onto the desk tops. You’ll see a coffee ring on the left of the desk below, just below the cup. Okay, so the coffee rings are a little bigger than the actual cups, but I’m calling rule of cool here 😉

With all the fun details present in the sculpts themselves, like the open drawer, coffee cup, papers and in tray on the desk below, The monitor screens and coffee rings add more interest and colour and for me, help to make the pieces ‘pop’.

I think these data banks below might benefit from having some screen effects added to the blank squares and rectangles below the cassette spools. Amazing how many little things you note that can be amended when you’re looking at photos of your work instead of the actual pieces themselves.

I’m looking forward to getting a lot of use in more than one games system from these in the near future and must get that missing map table finished too.

This set is great value at £14 (at the time of writing, January 2023) and you can find it at Combatzone Scenery’s website here.

As always, thanks for reading! 🙂

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