A Griffon under Glass

Greetings all, today I can combine a couple of elements into something deeply nifty. The groundwork I showed last time is the foundation for this:

This is a diorama commission intended for display (although I have also made a more normal base so that the Griffon can be used by the client). Quite a lot of the elements have been seen before - the Griffon for example - so I shall focus on the newer elements of the paint job.

One of the questions some may have is why has this taken so long? It was started in February. Truthfully it is this: Two house moves, sourcing the cover (see below) for a sensible price and then solving the logistical problems of fitting the Griffon into the cover using the base. The house moves were the biggest problem as everything has to go in boxes and the Griffon always seemed to be the last to be unpacked. Thankfully it is finished now and ready to go! My client has been very patient and for that I thank him warmly! Now, painting! Check out the wings, these were almost my undoing! The pattern is a modification of the natural Peregrine Falcon colouring and was achieved with an excellent brush, a magnifier and steady hands. Take lots of breaks when doing long duration, close work as the eye and brain get very tired and there is a temptation to rush.

The colours of the rider - he's a roleplay character - were a dark blue and black with a unicorn as his sigil. Try as I might I could not get a unicorn on the cloak so the pennant got a pair of them instead. The very bright silver is made by painting pure Mithril Silver - I still keep a pot - and then shading with very thin blue and black inks mixed with thinner medium.

I toyed with adding another colour with the gemstones, perhaps a red? But I was worried that the sheer size of the gems and their placement would make them a dominant colour. Instead I decided that a nice blue surrounded by pale gold would do just nicely.

And there you have it! A lovely display piece and hopefully an appreciated present for its ultimate recipient. If anyone is curious the cover is a classic cloche, a sort of mini-greenhouse. They can often be a little easier to get hold of - unless American, you guys have all the covers ever! - and have that pretty handle to pick them up by. Well, until next time folks, oh and next time is my 200th post. Good lord, I'll have to think of something nifty for it.

TTFN

Workbench: Basic Groundwork

Greetings one and all and welcome to another one of my workbench articles. Today the theme is groundwork. Groundwork is essentially basing writ large for dioramas or terrain bases and needs a litte more effort than normal basing. First though, I ought to mention that this was something that I spontaneously decided to turn into a workbench article later in the process than normal. As a result we start in media res so to speak. I'll try to explain the early stages as best as I can!

Righto, to give a sense of scale this base is 15cm across and that is one of GW's plastic trees in the middle. Firstly - as this diorama is going under glass and is really a complicated way of suspending a Griffon - I needed to position the tree so that the model would fit in the dome. This done I started supergluing some slabs of slate around the tree to give the groundwork a bit of height and interest. Incidently we use slate a lot in modelling because it is "scale ambiguous". It looks the same whether it is massive or tiny, same layers and texture. As a result we can paint a small lump of slate and make it appear massive in scale. Not all rocks do this and you can really kill the look of a diorama with a rock that looks out of scale. I also glued a dried root to the base - a roughly circular disc of thick plasticard - to help the tree look more in place. Then it was sand time. Lots of it.

I have a trick for sanding large areas like this that helps to build up layers and height quickly: Use cheap pound-store superglue. The reason for this is that it is simultaneously dirt cheap (2 10g bottles for £1) and thin as water. Useless for glueing figures together but awesome for flowing around a base. I worked in patches, pouring superglue on then sanding the pool. This stuff is so thin that you can even just dump dry sand where you want it and then use capillary action to draw the superglue through the pile of sand. I finished the whole thing off with a wash of diluted PVA to help seal the surface as otherwise you might strip the sand off with drybrushing. With the groundwork solid as concrete (as let's face it, that's what we've made) I moved on to painting. It's all fairly basic so instead of taking you through each individual colour I'll tell you some principles. First, make the top highlight of your soil and rocks the same colour. Soil is made of the broken up local rocks mixed with organic matter and thus looks better if there is some of the rock colour in it. Trees are more grey than brown so use greys as your highlight colours and then give it a very thin wash of Athonian Camoshade - khaki/brown/green - to give it a mossy feel. It was around this point I decided to turn this into a workbench so... picture!

Glue isn't dry in any of these shots so ignore any white bits.

Though the tree is autmnal it won't be completely dead. I used canopy glue (a very thick, clear-drying PVA) to attach strands of ivy basing material up one side of the tree.

Even the rocks aren't dead, these are little moss tufts, essentially very, very short cropped static grass blobs that I PVA'd onto the stone to be lichen/moss.

Next came grass, now normally I would recommend only about 1/3 of a miniature's base to be covered in static grass. When doing groundwork it is pretty much the other way around! The base is the model and needs to have impact. Care needs to be taken with placement. If you just do blobs of grass it will look like a fresian cow. Think about where the grass will be growing most healthily and apply your glue there. Also, when flocking (I said flock) a larger area work in smaller patches - I worked on about a sixth at a time - and overload it with grass. Really tip it on, press it down and leave it a while before you tip it off and blow off the excess. This gives the grass time to adhere and create that clumpiness (totally a word) that we are after.

We could have left it there, it looked fine, but like most jobs in modelling it can be taken another step forward. In this case I used tufts of clump foliage (check out Tooltime - part III for a roundup of these products) to create... a shrubbery! Sorry, couldn't help it! When using this stuff, it helps to soak some dilute PVA into it (I use a glass eye-dropper) and squeeze it through the material. This stops it from falling apart. Now, this is almost finished but looks a little neat and tidy. Is there a gardener that is raking this forest?

Ding! There you go. Leaf litter simply glued down with dilute PVA. Now, there will be some of you who are currently yelling "BASIC groundwork?" at the screen. Let me assure you, none of this is difficult. It's just involved and needs some practice and reference (oh no, don't make me walk out in the countryside where the pretty scenery is...) to get right. Believe me, the groundwork experts are astonishing. I have seen dioramas where I had to be convinced that it wasn't a 1:1 photograph. Stunning. I'm happy with this sort of level though! Well, next time you see this it will have a griffon mounted on that tree and under glass so until then.

TTFN

What a Difference a Base Makes...

A few days ago I showed you all a 54mm Pegaso Ninja I painted, check it out now:

When models are intended purely for display it helps to make a presentation base for them to increase the visual impact of the work. Recently I had been getting curious about the Voodooworx range of resin display bases. Decent spread of sizes and acceptable prices. I got a 40mm round and a 40mm cube to check out.

The plinths (and isn't "plinth" a word that wants to be dirty but isn't?) come in a beautifully cast grey resin. There aren't any bubbles, voids or casting blocks. You can even see where Voodooworx sand down the bases to make them ready for instant usage.

I wanted to use a plain black base with the Kanji for Ninja. I used the computer to create a perfect 40mm square and then fit the Kanji into the centre of it. Printing out the design allowed me to flip it over and block in the design in graphite (pencil). The block was primed black and then the design masking taped to the block.

A quick rub with pencil over the top transferred the design to the block in a faint graphite shadow.

Once the design was transferred, the paper was removed and the design carefully painted in with Mithril Silver. Annoyingly the camera saw more of the black through the silver than is actually there, the design is solid silver.

Before I primed the block I laid down a masking tape shape of where the base of the model touches the surface it is placed on. That made sure that the glued join between the base and the model was strongest.

Glue is only as strong as the surface it is applied to, if you try and stick parts to a painted surface then you are only getting the strength of adhesion that the paint has. Not much in other words, I superglued the Ninja to the resin base.

I had previously test-fitted the Ninja to the block to ensure the alignment would look good.

And there you have it, a display miniature rather than a wargaming mini. It just finishes off the look and creates another source of visual interest with the Kanji. I can heartily recommend the Voodooworx plinths for this kind of work. The only problem would be if you wanted a wooden effect base as these resin ones only work for solid colour. Until next time.

TTFN