Bonus Round Entry 4: Merlin and Pal

The fourth bonus round is now up. Check them all out here!

 This time the theme was Myth and I knew just what I wanted to do. I had purchased a set of Sub-Roman British Arthurian characters from Musketeer miniatures (now Footsore). These are for use in my dungeon delving set that I'm still in process of building. I don't have Arthur but I picked up all of the foot figures.As you might guess one of the influences of this project is the The Warlord Chronicles by Cornwell, so I tried to paint the pair of them up to fit with the books.

First up is Merlin. I wanted to keep him in black Druid robes so the rest of the colors went around that. I initially tried doing the feathers on the cloak like they came from various birds but it didn't read very well so went back to an off white. I also spent some extra time on the fur cloak. I guess it must of come from some giant bear based on the pattern I painted but if anyone could get one it would be Merlin.

The other figure in the pack was Lancelot. In the books Lancelot is not exactly hero but I do like this sculpt alot and I'm going to be using him as a more generic hero anyways. I decided to try my hand at freehanding the shield emblem and settled on a pair of fish. I've been considering how to work in the Christian/ Pagan conflict that is a big part of the books into my dungeon project, so I thought fish would be a good neutral symbol that could be used for either faction if I need too. Fish of course lend themselves to his colors being a sea blue.

I need to try to make some more of the dungeon pieces for the project next. I have a few started but they'll probably stay on the backburner till the Painting Challenge is over. Hopefully I can get a couple more of the figures done however.

Gateway Continued

My test piece hallway is pretty much finished up now. After the previous round of painting I added some work with weathering powders and some new details. The carved out niche got some old candles, and a discarded sword and a bronze urn were placed near the central pillar. The candles were made from pieces of plastic rod, liquid greenstuff added for melted wax and a piece of wire for the wick. The urn was carved from some modelling clay and is a little rough but works alright. The sword was snipped from the Gripping Beast Saxon Thegns plastic set and was hacked up a bit to give it some age.

  After the details were added I went to work with my weathering powders. I think the wall turned out alright but I put way too much on the floor. I then ended up going back in to tone the stones and dirt down more, which led to a bit of a downward spiral. Eventually I got it back to something I'm happy with again. After that I slapped some grayish dust on everything and moved on.

Flooring after lots of cursing and repainting. 

The larger gateway piece got some more work as well. I puzzled over how exactly to assemble the front so that the hillside blended into the piece but didn't make the interior part to hard to access. I finally settled on making the front part fixed and having a removable section over the corridor. After some carving and lots of test fitting I got a roof made. I tried to make it look like corbelled stone slabs and even though I don't think they'll be seen too much during play I still like them. After that I built up the hill by gluing on some loose pieces of foam to bulk it out. Then I mixed up a paste of glue, wood filler, water, and cut up scraps of foam. I used this to smooth out the shape. I'm hoping that it will work as a light weight filler which I'll apply the ground work over.

My wife thinks that it looks like a cat threw up all over the top of it. Hopefully the resemblance will fade in future stages. 

The underside of the roof section. 

Corridor with roof removed and a couple of Saxons. So far its not too bad moving them around we'll see if it stays that way when its all done. 

The whole thing together with a Saxon for scale. 

Gateway Under the Hill

This is going to be the start of one of my new tangents. With the release of the newest edition of D&D, Mantic's Dungeon Saga ( I didn't buy in as I just couldn't imagine trying to clean the mold lines off that many figures made out of that horrible resin/plastic stuff they use), and finding a great post on making dungeon terrain by DaggerandBrush my mind has turned to making my own dungeon delving set up.

The overarching idea is the adventurers going deep underground to confront the forces of the Fae lords. I'm holding off on who the adventurers are going to be until the miniatures arrive which might be a couple more weeks as they are being shipped across the Western Sea. But my initial set of pieces are going to be one of the entryways to Faerie through an ancient monolithic burial mound, like Newgrange or Maeshowe .

As this is going to be part of what might be an elaborate set of dungeon pieces so I figured I might as well start at the beginning and make the gateway first. Not sure how useful as a gaming piece it will be but it could be plopped down on the board to form a link between the interior sections and a more open set up outside.

The stones have all been carved out. Still need to work on the ground around it. 

 Since this is a big piece I also decided to make a few smaller ones to try things out on first. I figured hallway sections would be a perfect start. I'm not entirely sure how I'd like to make them at this point. So I'm gonna try out a couple of different styles and see which one I like the best. I think in the end it is gonna be a battle between playability ( not my first concern as I'm unsure I'll ever game with these) and looks. 

This one is a simple test piece and will be used a backdrop for taking pictures. First stage is carving the stonework out of the insulation foam and then sanding everything to knock off the rough edges.

Next a coating of wood-filler, a little more light sanding, and then a mix of sand and matte medium to fill in the dirt.

With basic paint job. I wanted to avoid the usual grey and liked the brownish color you see in a lot of pictures of sarsen stones. After this I need to add a bunch of little details.