Friday, August 3, 2012

Building Better Scenery

Last time I showed off the beginnings of my Breech Portal, and I figured it's long past due for an updated look.




The final look isn't as awesome as I'd hoped it would be, but it's a far cry from being ordinary too!  You'll notice that the ground around the base is nicely done, and that's because I decided to hit it with a wash.  When I painted all the scenery pieces up the ground looked exactly the same as the piece. 

 

Normally this wouldn't be a big deal, but it seemed so flat and boring that it kept bugging me.  Well I spent a few hours going over the gravely bits with some Sewer Water (Secret Weapon Paints), and the final result is well worth it.




When I put the first bit of wash down I wasn't sure if the ground would be brown enough.  I wanted the ground to be distinct enough to contrast the scenery in order to get the whole thing to, "Pop."  So I tried out my Sepia Wash (Vallejo 72091).

 

While the two shades (Sewer water on the left, Vallejo on the right) are pretty close in the picture, the brown from the Sepia wash was a lot darker.  For some reason this didn't feel right to me, so I decided to forgo it in favor of the sewer water for the rest of the pieces.

 

I recently talked about making sure you have a good seal when working with the Envirotex Lite polymer, and it goes to show that no matter how good you think your seal is it will find a way.



It didn't show up right away.  It took about 5-10 minutes before I noticed it seeping through.  Since this stuff is slower than molasses I whipped up some 5-min epoxy to cover the opening after I soaked up what had leaked out.  I ended up overdoing it a bit, and had a grandiose idea of making a slime monster to paint as another part to the scenery.



So maybe that idea wasn't the greatest thing to do on the fly.  I'll wait till the polymer is fully set and then see if I can't chip away at it, and instead cover the area up with some foliage (which happens to be the next, and possibly last step, for these scenery pieces).

2 comments:

  1. I actually sort of like the slimy stuff... if you had a dead body oozing right there, it'd be aces!

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  2. I could possibly dig up a corpse-like miniature and turn it into a pool of blood, but the original idea I had for this fountain was to have the fountain draw the attention. I'll have to give it some thought, maybe leave it as an ooze.

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