Mr. Bones' Garden - COMPLETE!

Mr. Bones' Garden is finally complete! I originally posted about this project way back in July, 2013. But the project actually started back in August of 2012, when I ordered the Christmas Future (Death) miniature and other parts from Reaper. I was hyped on the Bones Kickstarter and when I found out that Mr. Bones was based on an existing miniature, I had to do it. But, I've already gone over this all in the previous post. So lets move on to the new hotness.
Originally I was going to use the Christmas Future miniature in place of the Mr Bones miniature and have the whole thing ready before the Kickstarter rewards even arrived. But I suck at sculpting and I couldn't get the shovel head to look good, so I scrapped that idea.

One of the other things that I hit a snag on was the tree. I wanted it to look dying or dead but wasn't sure on how to make it look right. But after I did the fur on the Minotaur for the Christmas project, I realized that I could use the same type of technique to make grain in the meat of the tree. The bark was painted brown and then dry/wet brushed with highlights. I then mixed in some gray to the browns and tans to make it look sickly.

Once the tree was done, I got to work on the headstones. I knew I wanted to them to be stained and or mossy. But like the wood I wasn't sure how to do it. So, thanks again the the Minotaur project I was able to make them work with the same technique I developed for the stonework walls in that project. I'm super pleased with them!

Once the headstones were done it was time to paint the owl. I don't have any close ups of him, but I decided to paint him up like Archimedes from The Sword in the Stone. Sure he ended up slightly cartoony in his coloration, but it's not a photorealistic project anyway.

After that, it was time to cover the ground with grass. I have two colors of Games Workshop Static Grass; Green Grass and Scorched Grass. Looking over the two, the Green Grass was too lively and green, while the Scorched Grass was too brown. So, I decided to mix up my own batch using a roughly 2:1 mix of Green and Scorched. Then working in sections I applied Elmer's Glue on the dirt and started adding in patches of grass.

With the base all complete, it was time to get to work on the skeleton of the hour himself, Mr. Bones! With the laptop in front of me and a copy of the Kickstater map in Photoshop I set to work painting him up as close to the official colors as possible. I base coated him in black and used a mix of GW and Reaper paints to bring him to life. I'm really happy with him and was even able to simulate bone segments with varying shades of paint, since his hands lack the texture.

And with that, he was glued into place and a project that was started around a year and a half ago was complete. I'm really pleased with the finish product and even surprised myself a few times. I honestly think that I couldn't have finished this one had I not done the Minotaur project. A few techniques I picked up on that one definitely helped me progress further on this one as well.

But wait! There's more! Thanks to the new rotating display unit I picked up I was able to make a 360 degree video if the entire thing. Mind, it's not the greatest video ever, and my camera doesn't shoot HD. But it will at least show off then entire thing in all it's three dimensional goodness! (while I was at it, I did ones for Silas and Do Not Pass Gandalf too and will be updating those posts shortly).