LIVE! LIVE, MY CREATION! LIVE!
I have been working on greenery, vegetation stands, and such.
So going back a page or two, you might want to consult this post for the last known condition of my swampland/heavy grasslands:
http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=28517.msg441815#msg441815Been working on those as well as smaller pieces.
First, I cut out some smaller bases out of 3mm MDF in interesting shapes to use as small vegetation stands, trimming the edges down with my knife.
At this point I epoxied on a couple of interesting stumps to build around on a couple (I already have a couple dozen proper trees... not bothering with pictures, because all I did was base them since they were premade). Then wall compound splodged on for the ground.
Haha, I'm an idiot. I wanted rocks too! I got out my dremel and ground out holes which would accommodate each rock, which I should have done before applying wall compound (after this I filled in the cut sections around each rock with more wall compound).
They say you can't use rocks as rocks for miniatures, that you have to paint them. Not true! But you have to select them very carefully in order to find ones with a good effect. What you want, ideally:
- Some broken-up shapes and some rounding/weathering - nothing too sharp and nothing too smooth.
- A good variation in colour
- Some changes in tone and contrast, especially a nice speckled surface
Season to taste. When in doubt, simply place a mini next to the rock and see if it looks good to you! In addition to the grey-brown ones I used here, I have some lovely reddish gravel that will hopefully find a use later on.
Painted ground, using an acrylic wash. My first go didn't match my terrain mat - it had too much contrast and was too saturated in colour and slightly too yellow. I solved this by applying a second, thinner wash that was duller, redder and whiter (this is after that second wash).
My old swamp stands get the same treatment!
Three of the swamp stands have water features. I decided to paint these with a very gradual succession of greenish-greyish washes made with a blend of colours which darken towards the middle of the water. Here I am halfway through one of the washes (they're shiny because they're still wet. The ground texture I applied way back when actually works very well for helping me paint these washes in a way that will look good as water.
Here I also glued a sprinkling flock to the green doughnut band, which will hopefully look good under the clear gel I'm going to cover this thing in.
A close up. Note that I also painted the "rocks" (small lumps of plaster used as water-washed stones in the pond) and stuffed flock around the very edge of the pond to help blend the grass further into the base.
And that's all for now. My tub of self-levelling acrylic clear gel is several years old, so I poured some out into an old lid to test it and make sure it's still alright. In the meantime I will probably flock the ground on all these bits and maybe start in on the vegetation clumps on the smaller stands.
10 October 2015, 04:47:47 PM