Saturday, July 6, 2013

Welcome to Mr. Bones' Garden!

This is a project I had started back when Reaper's Kickstarter was running and was working on it all throughout it's duration. It's all based around the graveyard scene used during the campaign, in which Mr. Bones walks from tombstone to tombstone digging up all the stretch goals.


KS Graveyard
The original plan was to complete it before Reaper Con, and then take it with me for the mini contest. I had orderd up the Christmas Carol Reaper (whom Mr. Bones is based on) and worked on converting his scythe into a shovel, just like the one depided in the Kickstarter. But I am no sculptor and failed horribly at it. I also ended up not being able to afford to go to Reaper Con anyway, so not finishing it turned out not to be a huge problem.

My attempt at Mr. Bones before putty.
I thought my plan was completely foiled, that was until Reaper announced a stretch goal to unlock Mr. Bones himself! This was great news. Thought I still continued trying to get my Metal version to work, before finally calling it.

The graveyard scene itself is being build on top of a wooden base. This base is actually a clock face I bought at Micheal's and it works perfectly, without the need to have a router to make my own. The actual ground is made up of pink insulation foam.

This was crazy easy!
I liked the idea of having Mr. Bones standing at his next grave, having already opened the previous one. So I needed to build up the foam for the hole to be viable. Also to make the whole thing feel as creepy and gloomy as possible. I decided I needed a dead tree.

The tree was made of green floral wire and drywall filler compound. I twisted the wire into shape, following the example in Games Workshop's How to Build Wargaming Terrain book. Then I covered it with the filler compound and let it sit. The end result was really impressive! Once I got it test fit, I decided I needed something else. And after digging around in the bits bin I found and old owl familiar. I cut that baby off it's base and stuck it on the outstretched limb.

The open grave was dug out of the foam in sections. I wanted to keep the walls of it as ragged and imperfect as possible. Then I also covered them with filler compound to help with the roughness. In the bottom of the grave is a wooden coffin. The lid of the coffin is made up of small wooden hobby sticks. Which I then weathered to make it look rotten and scared from Mr. Bones' shovel hitting it.

Grave dug, with filler on sides.
Coffin Lid
Once the coffin lid and hole were complete. I started base coating the scene. I went to the craft store and picked up some black, a couple greys and a few browns. Then I got to work covering the whole thing with paint and silica sand, which is a total mess. But the effect will be great.


First. I painted the whole thing black as a base coat. Then I painted the sides of the grave again, after the whole thing had dried for a bit. and filled the hole with sand, in order to get the walls nice and covered. It worked out nicely too!

Adding Sand to the grave pit.
Grave lined with sand.
Next up, I need to base coat the rest of the mini and cover it with sand too. Also, I decided the Tombstones are too dark and need to be repainted. Plus the actual Mr. Bones miniature came in with the Kickstarter rewards, so I can get him painted. There's a lot of work left to do, expect another progress update soon!