World Building: Part 9 - The Path of the Martyr (terrain progress)

It seems I've been reasonably busy on the quiet working away at the terrain for the Path of the Martyr. What has been a bit of a hot summer in "Croydon, yo", particularly in the furnace-like area of the house I'd got set aside for a painting area made for a bit of a nightmare climate. Paint seemed to dry on the brush even while using thinned paint on a wet palette.

In order to solve the problem, or avoid it, more to the point, I bought a pack of cheapo paint brushes from a discount book store by the name of 'The Works' for 3 English quids. I moved my painting shit to the dining table and did some rough and ready paint jobs with some jumbo brushes on the terrain, which seems to have turned out pretty well, even if a little basic.

It also seems I have enough terrain ready (or near enough ready) to pretty much fill a 4x4 table. Which was a surprise discovery earlier this evening when I decided to put it all on the gaming table...

The wood in the foreground is unfinished

An overview. Please ignore the miscellaneous crap in the background

Please ignore the frankly awful duvet cover that is protecting the dining table

28mm dudes eye view

World building part 7 - rubble paste

It had been a while since I'd worked on the terrain I'd put together, so seeing as it's been far too hot for painting round these parts, I decided to try out a cool technique that I'd spotted on Bell of Lost Souls recently.

The technique is basically making quick and easy rubble that can be applied to the bases of models and terrain pieces and so forth.  There's a video some dude made up on You Tube that will also prove to be a useful reference point. Some of the "ingredients" that he used, I've changed either for convenience, or because it isn't readily available in the UK.

Anyway, here's a list of what I used, the pictures below are a rough reference guide:
Corroded iron flakes from an old metal plant pot
Crushed snail shells (no snails harmed by me, I just used what the local birds left behind)
Some small ready made bricks (available from Ebay or most model shops)
Chopped up straight bits of sprue (get rid of any with writing on, or those round bits)
Cork chunks (available from Ebay or most model shops)
Sand (use about an equal proportion to the total volume of everything else)
Mix all the above together in a plastic pot or whatever else you have laying around. I'd advise against using your best china for obvious reasons.

To this, then add a decent spoonful of PVA glue. Paint should now be mixed in until the mixture is fully paste-like (the video reckoned to use black, but I ran out so I threw in some grey).

And the pictures:

Mix of crushed snail shell and metal flakes

bricks

Chopped up sprue

Cork chunks

All mixed in a pot. With sand.

Add PVA, and then add paint to point of saturation.

Apply with the spoon. Don't use your best spoon.

You used your best spoon didn't you?

Scatter more bits of sprue on top and press in if you want.

Once you've sprayed this lot, and drybrushed it, in theory it will look proper good, according to the internet.

Plague Toads work in progress part 1

Just before Christmas I picked myself up a set of Plague Toads from Warhammer World when I went there for the CoreHammer meet up. Uncharacteristically, I've managed to go just less than 3 months before beginning work on them, rather than the much more typical 18 months - 2 years...

I love these models. So unpleasant. Loads of really nice subtle (and not so subtle) touches in these sculpts.  A personal favourite touch is the strange inclusion of an outsized human shaped leg which occurs in the form of a front leg on a couple of the toads. It's gruesome.

I decided quite some time ago that I would like to use these chaps as chaos spawn in my Death Guard army. I think they will fit in nicely.

I've mounted these on trimmed down spare flooring sections from the Cities of Death building kits, and in turn these floor sections have been mounted on 40mm round bases.  I needed to do this to make the models look a bit more convincing. Putting them directly on to the bases just looked weird, because of the amount of overhang.  The tiles added a bit more support from below without increasing the footprint of the bases appreciably.  These lads need to be tabletop legal, after all.

The majority of colouring here has been done with the airbrush. Vallejo black primer and grey primer mixed to undercoat.  This was then oversprayed with Vallejo Russian Green primer. Duck egg was then carefully sprayed on to any areas that I considered to be the underside / underbelly. A rough murky mix of P3 Thrall Flesh, Vallejo medium grey and some unspecified green that I can't remember was lightly drybrushed on to the raised areas.

I layed down a base on the raw exposed flesh areas with a rich, burgundy colour from the P3 range (Sanguine base if memory serves - the label got peeled off!).  The teeth, claws and horns were given a thin coat of GW Calthan Brown. Over all this, I used my "murk wash" to add a bit more depth.

Anyway, below are some pictures of the little I've done so far.

World building part 6

World building part 3

Moving on from what I was saying yesterday about Cadia and the laws of decipherability and such like, I think that I would like to try an represent this, and other memorial themes on the table top.

Here are some pics I cribbed off Google...  The snowy one next to the bottom looks incredibly sad.