How to make a display board in 7 days

Or alternate title:

How to not freak out when your brother asks you to make him a display board at the last week before the event!

As the alternate title suggests, my brother and I are getting ready for this weekend's Harvester of Souls 40k tournament in Spokane Valley, WA. I already have my display board and army prepared.  My brother, however, is running a little behind on getting his army ready. So about a week before the event, he calls me up and asks me to make him a display board, nothing too fancy, but something to center his army. I agreed because his birthday is coming up soon, and this can be part of it.

I thought about it a little. Jarom's ork army is pretty much 100% vehicles and bikes. Going for a Mad Max Fury Road theme. So I wanted to tribute a little to that movie (being one of my favorites), and rather than just doing a flat board with desert, I figured the mountain pass scene would be a cool scene to base it off of, especially since that scene employs bikes. I sketched it out and this is what I sent to him:

He liked the idea, so I began working on it. I had just recently watched this excellent video by one of my favorite YouTubers, and I was anxious to try the method out, so this gave me an excuse to do so. From here on out I pretty much just followed the video's instructions.

I start off by building up the layers using broken 1/4" insulation foam. It's thicker than the video, but it works for a board this size, which is about 18"x36". Much larger than I normally do a display board, but it makes sense considering the next step...

Before I continued, I wanted to make sure everything would fit on it, so he came over with his army and did a test fit. I found I had a little extra room to put some stuff on the ground level to break up the transition from the cliff to the ground. But this is a big army that needs a big board.

After adding some rock and debris, I sanded off the rough edges and blended the levels a little bit.

Next with a new tub of spackle, I got my hands dirty and filled in all the gaps, being sure to keep the striations visible in the rock face, but blend the top levels and rocks into the ground. This took a lot of spackle.

After the spackle dried, I went on to apply the sand, using a common construction sand. I did my usual procedure with this. First all purpose elmer's glue, then sand. Let it dry. Then did the coat of watered down glue over top to seal the sand in.

Now on to the coloring, because I am almost done. I am using cheap craft paints for this (Apple Barrel brand that you get at your common Walmart). I did the base coat in Burnt Umber which was tricky because the sand and rocks had a lot of nooks and crannies. I found the best way of doing it was taking a mug filled with the paint, add some water and some sort of flow aid (I just used a dishwasher rinse agent), this allowed the paint to flow easier into the tight spots the brushes have a hard time getting into while keeping most of the opacity of the paints. I was careful to not make a wash, though, I just wanted to thin the paint some and improve its flow.

Next I did a couple heavy drybrush coats of Golden Sunset. It took a few coats because I didn't want it to be too brown, but liked keeping the brown underneath and in all the cracks.

 

Finally I did a selective highlight drybrush of Lite Mocha to knock down some of the yellow and give it a final sandy look.

And that's it! A lot simpler and quicker than I feared, and I now love this construction method to make high cliffs. Today I'm prepping for the tourney this weekend so unfortunately I wont have a chance to show you the final board with Jarom's army on it until I take some photos at the event, so I look forward to that.

On another note, I realized I forgot to do a post on my army and display! So you will see that too at the event.

Forthammer Clan Throng - Unforged (Painted)

The decision to make my Unforged's hair blonde was not tied to anything. Nowhere are the new Unforged mentioned to be orange hair only like the Slayers of old, so I felt I had some more liberty with them. I like the idea of a crazed deadly blonde fighting duardin.

If you may notice, I also shortened the axes he was holding, because I found them a little too comically long from my WIP shot here. I think the overall balance of the figure is better for it.

Age of Sigmar Duardin - Unforged mini

The Unforged is the new name for the old Slayer hero model. It is part of the Dispossessed faction in Age of Sigmar. The Dispossessed are more accurately duardin who seeked refuge in Azyr right before Sigmar shut off the mortal realms as Chaos took hold of them. The Duardin within built up their strength and helped prepare the factions of Order for the coming war. Within the Dispossessed is what is known as the Unforged. We know little about the Unforged, but we do know they were changed by their encounter with Choas, and not in a mutation/conversion way, but in a crazed vengeful way. They are still deadly and suicidal, but instead of trying to atone for their sins, they now seek to end their life bringing Chaos down with them.

I was perusing Ebay (this is something I need to stop doing, seriously) and found the Silver Tower Fyreslayer Doomseeker hero model going for about $5 ($8 with shipping) and could not resist. I wanted to make an Unforged for my Duardin army, but instead of paying $21 for the real one, I was able to make this:

The stone pedestal he is standing on is a leftover from my Talos project. I had to cut off his feet, repose them, and greenstuff some better ankles so it appeared like he was naturally standing on it. Otherwise it would have looked like he was on an invisible plank. Also I cut off any little icons and doodads that looked too fyreslayer-ish. And his weapon heads were replaced by Longbeard great axe heads. I think I successfully converted him to look more like a traditional dwarf slayer-type. The fyreslayer models have metallic runes embedded into their flesh. While it's a cool idea for fyreslayers, that's not the way of the traditional duardin. So when I paint him up I am going to do all those fleshrunes in regular flesh colors so they look more like tissue scarring.