Spiders and trees

It's been a long time since I've posted anything to this blog, thanks to a whole lot of Real Life Events over the past year and change. I'll spare you the details, as they're really not germane to the blog, nor are they particularly interesting of themselves. Suffice to say things are finally settling down, I'm in a much better place (mentally, emotionally and geographically) than I was, and I'm finally able to get back into doing some hobby-stuff.

These Reaper Bones spiders are the first figures I've painted in quite a while, so they're a get-back-into-it sort of project. My original plans involved finding reference photos of real-life spiders and painting them to match, but I realized that if I went that route I'd probably never paint them, so I just went for grubby dungeon monster instead of realistic animal look.

These guys got a basecoat of Reaper walnut brown, then a heavy drybrushing of old Citadel Colour bilious brown. The eyes were dotted in with old scorpion green and the fangs are Reaper nightmare black, which is more of a deep blue, with a glaze of old Citadel Expert blue ink. They're varnished with Liquitex matte brush-on, and Citadel 'ardcoat on the fangs. I usually use Future for gloss varnish, but the Citadel was handy and the Future was still packed away.

They are what they are – Not gonna win any awards, but they work well enough for the game table. Now I just have to get a game scheduled...

Next up are some trees, made out of toy plastic trunks from some unknown kid's toy, so I'll gloss over making the trunks. After fixing them to scrap wood bases, I made roots out of epoxy putty and let them dry, then went over the whole thing with a thick mixture of Durham's water putty, stippling it onto the trunks to get a rough bark finish.

I painted them with craft paints, sticking to the grey tones, washed with black and brown paint, then glazed liberally with thin green ink. The foliage is a mix of Woodland Scenics clump foliage, lichen, and various grades of flock, crushed herbs and dried tobacco, finished off with ridiculous amounts of Krylon matte spray varnish. The bases were detailed with the same scatter plus static grass in clumps, with some putty fungi on one tree and a strip of lichen creeper on another.

I'll be making more trees soon, I think, without the crutch of toy trunks, so I'll probably do a more in-depth tutorial then. Halfway through making these, I got a copy of Osprey's “Terrain Modeling” from the library, so I was torn between going overboard detailing the trees and keeping them simple for gaming purposes... I highly recommend the book; it's full of useful techniques and inspiring photographs. Just bear in mind that it's geared towards display dioramas, not wargame terrain. Gamers need to keep things simpler in the interest of both durability and usefulness. I'll do an in-depth review of the book soon.

So, I'm back, and hopefully I'll be posting regularly again. Hope you get a kick out of it!

Well Drakken Completed

Well, here he is, in all his glory. The base was started with wall spackle, as shown in the last post, with the broken cork rocks glued on. I followed that with a coat of white glue and brown paint mixed together, then dipped the base into a box of sand. Various shades of brown were applied once the sand dried, then patches of watered down glue and flock. 

The cork "rocks" got a streaky, thin wash of gray paint, which allows the various shades of the cork to show through and made for easy, realistic rocks. Glue and flock (a different shade this time, to make it look slightly different than the ground cover) took care of the moss on the rocks, and small patches of static grass help break up the look of the ground.

The pool of water was scraped out of the spackle right at the beginning, and I painted the bottom and sides in various dark browns and greens. The reeds are model railroad tall grass, trimmed, the ends dipped in white glue and allowed to dry to a tacky state before sticking them to the bottom of the pool. The water is 5 minute epoxy, mixed carefully to avoid bubbles and dripped in one drop at a time using a toothpick.

And that's pretty much it for the old guy. In spite of what I said in my last post, I have a feeling this model's gaming days are over. There's too much scenery on the base for him to look right on the table, at least in my opinion. He'd be dragging a couple of boulders and a pool of water around with him wherever he went, and that strikes me as a little silly...

I'm happy to have him looking this good, though. Like I said, I really love the sculpt, and if I decide I want one of these for the game table, there's always eBay.

Ral Partha Well Drakken 1983

A few pics of a current work in progress, Ral Partha's "Well Drakken" from 1983. I've had this model for years, and for most of those years it wore an unflattering dark blue paint job. Here it is stripped and repainted, with some work started on a scenic base for the old boy. I just love this sculpt; reminds me of Brian Froud's artwork...

The base is a slab of wood built up with wall spackling compound, with bits of cork glued on for rocks and a couple spots gouged out to create pools of stagnant, brackish water. My plan is to go for a swamp look for the base, with lots of vegetation and wet areas. I may even try my hand at sculpting some water plants similar to those draped over the figure itself to place over one or two of the rocks and tie the base in with the model... We'll see.

The base might, at first glance, seem a little large for gaming purposes, but I figure with arms that long this guy has to have a hell of a reach.I'm particularly pleased with the look of the vegetation on the figure... It looks appropriately filthy and nasty...