Plinths and WIPs

This is a quick post as I spent most of last night dealing with an angry little one who felt it should be a weekend instead of a weekday night. So not much completed in the land of miniatures here.

So what I did want to show was my plinth base that I had worked on over the weekend for one of my Massive Voodoo contest entries.

Problem is, after getting some critique on it, it seems that it is too large for the model that I had planned for it. So back to square one on that, but then again, whatever doesn't kill you, just makes you angry enough to take it out cause it failed! :)

So a couple shots of it here.

Most of it is made from Cork Board ( or Mushroom Board in Turkish!?!? ). From there, I then dug out chunks of it. To give it an uneven look. I also added some Vallejo Liquid Paste to the seams to try to hide them ( unsuccessfully it seems ) before adding some Gravel/Dirt/Sand to the sides to further hide the pieces.

Painting of it was pretty straightforward. Base of black, then progressively lighter greys added to the airbrush and layered on top.

After the main colors were added to the rock sections, I then began to just add brown and red pigments to different areas. Sprayed it with Satin Varnish to wash away the excess, and seal in the deeper recesses. Was fairly quick to do all this thankfully.

Last points was to add some Vallejo Black Lave to the sides, and then spray it Red/Orange/Yellow before adding the Tamiya Clear Orange to give the lava the glow effect I like so much.

And voila! Finished a plinth that will now sit on the side waiting for an appropriate model to sit on top of it. At the very least, it was a good exercise on learning something new, and what not to do in the future. Also what points I need to improve upon in order to make them better.

As you can see, the model that I wanted to use for this ( which needs more work still ) was too small on the overall base.. so expect some updates on that soon..

Aside from that, I did do a bit of airbrush work after the little one finally succumbed to slumber. So the busts got a little bit of attention as well though only a little. Mostly base colors, and some highlighting to show where the shadows are. Then the Sloot Gunner got the base of skin tones laid down with airbrush before I head in on it with the regular brush.

I have plans to use some of the speed painting techniques I saw on a Miniature Mentor video which uses the airbrush undercoat to provide shadows, but then washes/glazes/thinned paint to just color over it without thinking of shadows as they are already created for you. Will see how it turns out.

I had a lot of fun painting up this Sloot Gunner here. The skin came out great. Just need to work on the shadows a bit more, and then go to town on the details. Just hope I do not wreck it since the airbrush did such a nice job on the skin so far. I might attempt to do the shadows with it also, but am not sure yet. Time will tell I guess!

Cheers, was a long post for a quick update, but sometimes that is how it is!