02/10/2008

City fountain finished...

For a while ive been thinking about the idea of having a fountain in the middle of my city - sort of a devotional garden.. So after a while of thinking about it, i came up with the idea of a small walled fountain with grassy edges and a heroic guardsman statue in the middle.
The construction itself was simple - For the walls i used the small parapets from the GW COD box (I had some left over from another building). The tiled floor was simply cardstock cut in to sections.

For the statues base i cast the packet from a battery using basic plaster, then set the guardsman atop it (Its actually a model of a US Marine from a modern day combat skirmish game that i picked up at last years salute, and id been wondering what to do with it! - The scale was a bit big to use as an actual guardsman, but the pose was perfect for the statue). To form the fountain base i cut a piece of plastic piping to the right height and then topped it with a circle of card cut using compass cutters. Finally i packed out the inside edge of the fountain with more plaster.

Once I had finished the construction it was undercoated in GW black and then airbrushed with cold grey and then stonewall grey. The ground was given a coat of Vallejo "Earth" and the tiles with Vallejo "Gore Red" and "Charred Brown" mixed 50:50. The "water" in the fountain was painted with various Vallejo Blues and greens (I mixed up a big batch of different colours and then just dabbed them in place, letting the colours bleed in to each other whilst still wet). Once all the paint was dry i put a layer of "Summer grass" and "Blasted Turf" static grass on to some areas of the earth section. I wanted to give the impression of a lawn that was once well cared for but which was now dried out and burned.

Finally once everything else was dry i put a very thin layer of GW water effect in the fountain.
You can see the results below.

28/09/2008

New road sections complete

One of the main projects that ive been working on is a complete, modular, Cities of Death table for an upcoming 40K / Apocalypse game that me and a friend have planned. We are going to be playing on a 10'x5' table, so we decided that we needed to have a good amount of terrain, and for a long time ive wanted to do a fully modular table.

Unfortunately storage is a big factor for me as i only have a small amount of space that wargames can take up, so doing big 2'x2' boards was out of the question. In the end i went for the City boards produced by Miniature Scenery - Im using the Urban Grounds packs. These give you 9"x9" boards (roughly) and a whole load of road sections.

Having played games on "COD" tables, i've found it hardest to play on the tables where there is too much rubble, so ive gone for a slightly sparse look to my table - Although it doesnt look as good, it does make it easier to play the game - We usually count any areas of rubble as being difficult terrain meaning that we both know exactly what to expect from a piece of terrain.

Given that i have to cover a large amount of the table, ive decided to use a quick and efficient paint scheme, combined with plastic buildings (mainly the GW COD boxes and a few bits from Peggasus Hobbies and Antenociti's Workshop).

To paint i first put the models together, then undercoat using GW's choas black spray.


Then i airbrush the entire model (except road sections) using Vallejo Cold Grey (which is about the same as GW Codex Grey)... (On a seperate note, i plan to do a full post about airbrushing terrain in the future)


...followed by a lighter airbrush of Vallejo Stonewall grey (not sure what GW this is equivalent to) - Sorry about the quality of this photo, no matter how hard i tried it kept coming out ultra light...


Road sections are then painted by brush in pure Choas black.


And thats it! They look kinda basic but when put together they give quite a nice effect