More terrain! I figured my little town could use a wagon…or two.
There are no assembly instructions for these guys, so it’s a guessing game of figuring out what goes where. It’s ok for the most part, except when you think the yoke is an axel.
I figure it out eventually. 😛
I decided to do some test painting on some of the scatter terrain before I got to any of the big pieces. I picked up some water-based stain product at Canadian Tire that I hoped would do part of the process for me.
I’m not certain about this stuff. Not because it isn’t effective, but because it kind of just looks like brown acrylic paint put into a bottle labelled “stain”. I have “Dark Walnut” and “Cognac” colours, because I wanted a variety to try.
The directions recommend applying with a sponge, then wiping off the excess – as with our paints, they are formulated to dry as-is, so if you don’t wipe off the excess you’ll get chunky bits left over. Here are 4 different test processes:
From left to right:
So far #4, the far right, is winning in both looks and in ease of process. I sent this photo to some local friends and they preferred the ones done with the Cognac, so I’ve painted my entire scatter set in Cognac and now just have to drybrush the Vomit all over.
When it comes to the bigger buildings, I might try a variety of processes. Also, because these are water-based I may be able to mix with my acrylics anyway – maybe get some greyer wood, or redder wood etc.
My table didn’t have enough (any…) scatter terrain so I picked some up. This is a lot of stuff, and it was an overwhelming pile of wood.
Some more of the Burn in Designs stuff. This was the first item I built, but posted the Windmill because I wanted help with it. 😛 I definitely needed more “little things” to go in the middle of my table – lots of buildings and such, but something you just need a little thing to walk around.
I looked at my Arcane Effigy and decided I didn’t want to finish him, and so I started basing my Children of December translucent crew.
Good times. 🙂
I sold my terraclips and my Ork stompa to make room for some terrain that I loved.
More companies should send stuff to James Wappel, because I bought this stuff because I watched him assemble the train station and then I bought it, and a bunch of other cool stuff!
I’ve built a couple things so far, but am posting this one ahead of schedule to ask a question…does anyone have any idea how the rest of this goes together? Here’s a page that has a photo of the final build.
The panel at the bottom goes on top, then the little box on the right is on that. Maybe it swivels? The fan goes on the little box…maybe it swivels? There are holes in the box to allow it, but I’d need to find some good sized tubing or something.
Then the photo has a little rectangular thing sticking up, but I can’t see where that goes! It’s on an angle in the photo, but there’s no where for it to attach to that’s on an angle – it’s perpendicular all over.
Other than this confusion, I’ve built a gallows and two wagons successfully (photos to come after I finish the ring making, maybe interwoven with some final model photos), so this isn’t indicative of how the builds go – this stuff is solid, with good and well thought out attachments.
No time for big photography setup, but here’s Kaeris and Ramos on a box of Hanged. 😛
The fire was a pain, and I hate painting faces. I started with Sunburst Yellow and went up with some Blazing Orange, which I mixed with Flesh Wash over successive layers to get a more brownish red, then I mixed that with Codex Grey to cool it off and then with Black for the final cool layer. It looked super messy when I was done, but I think I’ve fixed it by going back over with the Orange and some watered down Yellow in places. Also, adding the OSL brought some focus away from the bright yellow pillars, and towards the ground and her clothing.
Faces, I hate faces. Painted with the P3 Ryn Flesh, then with Game Ink Skin Wash, which I tried out. It’s hard to tell if it was better than the Secret Weapon Flesh Wash. I mixed it with the Ryn Flesh up and got to a tone that wasn’t horrible. Then the eyes. White in the eyes, which gets everywhere. Then desperately try to get a spot of black in there that doesn’t look cross eyed. I got the right eye with little trouble, but as usual the other eye wouldn’t cooperate. I painted back over it 5 times before I got something that wasn’t horrible, but then I had to repaint most of the left side of her face. Faaaaah…
Ramos is less interesting, just a lot of greys. Also, the skin again. Stupid humans. And I mostly finished him off about 3-4 weeks ago, so forget what I did. I don’t think I’ve posted any photos of him!
I was brave and glued the back on the model.
This was kind of scary, since I don’t get to touch the wiring ever again and hopefully it’s solid.
I sculpted a icicle on his arm where a particularly nasty white section was from where the sprue attached, and a few more icicles on his butt where I drilled into it to get the wires through. I painted these with a Vallejo white primer that I picked up a few days ago, as opposed to the Imperial Primer that I used for the Nothing Beast.
Got the LED wired up inside the golems torso today!
This was also the hardest part of this project.
Holy hell, there have been a lot of hardest parts.
The problem here is that I’m trying to do really small detail work inside of a narrow area. I have both needlenose pliers and good tweezers and I used both, switching tools whenever I needed something strong or something agile, because you can’t have both! At one point I feared that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I ended up pulling the LED out and using the tweezers to pull loops into the inside wires. Then I turned those loops so they were face up, and dropped the LED into the two loops. Then, I carefully tightened the loops around the LED leads.
Once I got the LED wired up, I tested it again.
Then I soldered it in. Also the hardest part. Here the challenge is to get the solder onto the wires with a hot iron, without letting the hot iron touch anything plastic. Inside of a plastic box. A narrow, plastic box.
After I got it soldered, I worried that the metal bits were to close together. I’m about to glue this thing inside, and I never get to touch it again. If the wires ever touch, I’ve created a short and I don’t get light anymore. So I went back and adjusted the solder and pulled the leads further apart and…
Now I have a light inside of a torso. 🙂 From here, it gets real simple – glue the rest of the golem together.
And don’t fuck up the paint job. >.< I have to sculpt icicles to cover the holes I made while drilling for wires, and paint those icicles. A fellow on A Wyrd Place used washes to provide contrast in the recesses of the transparent model and I think I might do that. Then I’m going to use the Secret Weapon snow mix on parts that might have snow.
Still a long way to go!
As with the Arcane Effigy (which I didn’t end up using…), I wanted to put some colour onto Kaeris before my game.
Instead of creating my own colour scheme, I’ve been using Google Image search…here’s my inspiration this time. I want her cloak to be a little more grey to link up with my gunsmiths, but it’ll be a little more blue by the time I’m done.
It’s codex grey on her cloak, snakebite leather as the brown, burnished gold (that’s important – there are a few golds in the GW line) wings, runefang steel for the metallic grey, and the P3 skin paint and I bought something called moon yellow from Vallejo because I was in a hobby shop and was out of yellow. We’ll see how the Vallejo paint works out for me.
I didn’t write anything about it at the time, and have long since forgotten what I did, but I’m pretty stoked about the base. It’s using my new plan of using a variety of glazes on top of a base colour, and then going back again with a top layer (in this case, a brown) to unify the colours. As well, I made sure to pay attention to where her shadows would fall from above, so there is a much darker section under her.
First time playing with Kaeris this weekend, hoping she’s amazing!