Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Silas WIP - Scenic Base Work

I came home and started working on a layout for the SDE contest, but ended up frustrating myself with it for a bit. I'm sure I'll be able to come up with something for it soonish, but for now I'm taking a minor break from it while I attempt to wrap my head around a major terrain project. Instead, after dinner I continued work on the display mini for my Pathfinder character Silas.



As I said before he's a Thief/ Fighter and he's an archer. So I picked up Reaper Miniatures' Mason Thornwarden to use for him. I've always liked this mini and thought it would work great for an archer rogue, even though he's "supposed" to be a ranger. The look of the mini is really cool and different from the rest of the archer figures out there that are always in the draw back pose.

Silas is the scout of the party, he focuses on ranged attacks and stealth. So I felt this figure was a natural fit for him. He's crouching, ready for a sneak attack and cloaked, to cover his bastard heritage. I did notice one minor issue though, he has a goatee. Silas is a half-elf, well half-drow, and I figured that since elves never have facial hair naturally a half-elf wouldn't. Of course it's a fantasy game, so I can decide whatever I felt like and it'd be fine. So I decided to run with it. (I later was reading up on half-elves somewhere (I think a Forgotten Realms database) and they mentioned that half-elves do occasionally grow facial hair, so problem solved)

Now normally, we play our RPGs in person on the weekends and I am in charge of painting up new figures for the PCs with each new campaign. But, thanks to life curveballs we've had to start playing online via the new Roll20 system. Still I couldn't help but work up a mini for my character and this fig fits the bill nicely. Of course, when I make up models for our RPGing I am generally limited to what I can do with the bases. BUT, since we are playing online, I can go full-on display piece this time!

I decided that I wanted to set up Silas in a swamp/outdoors environment and since I can go all out, I'm ditching the small base and putting him on a 60mm GW base. I've always wanted to do a swamp base, but never have had a real chance to attempt it, and now is as good a time as any. As mentioned last night, I started work on it and this is what I've gotten completed as of today.

So after running to the hobby store last night to buy a new razor saw to help cut through the new mini's base. I went to town and cut away part of the 60mm GW base away with my hobby knife. I then super glued it to the plastic blister from the last batch of paint pots I bought. I used some wood sticks to support the plastic to the underside of the base. Once it was dry I cut it away and cleaned up the edges as best I could, for now.



Next up, I took some pink insulation foam and cut/ broke/ tore it to resemble rocks and cut the larger one to fit along the shore line. While I used a few smaller pieces for a rock out in the water.

Once the large rock was glued in place and solid, I took out the green stuff and made a transition to go from the upper section of base down onto the clear plastic to act as a "beach" of sorts. I let the green stuff set up for a bit and then glued a smaller piece of foam into the water area.

Finally I took some resin pebbles I had from the Warhammer 40k basing kit and silica sand. I mixed them all up and then covered the base with glue. I took a toothpick and spread the glue around and then dumped the sand mix over it. the mix of fine sand and the "pebbles" should give it a nice varied look when I finally paint it.



But for now, that's as far as I've gotten tonight. While I've been waiting for the glue to dry I've been touching up the primer coat of black paint on the dragons for Super Dungeon Explore. I'll be starting on those soon. At the moment the plan is to paint them and the boss Starfire like black dragons. I'm currently leaning toward the look of Dark Whelplings from World of Warcraft, I've always liked the way those looked.