A Walk Down the Village Street

After a medium long break from house building, I have finally finished the first of my new style Games Workshop scale houses. This one was based on a house from the amazing Pardulon website. If only I could afford it I would snap up all of their stuff! It's been an arduous process building my own but I'm glad now it's done.

And now my son Horatio has recaptured the house building bug! He's working on a new house for me and this has prompted me to go out and buy materials to finish the market hall I've been doing and maybe start another house similar to this one!

A Trip to the Lake District

A while ago I started work on a major scenery project. I haven't quite finished it but I've now acheived my initial target.

Just before Halloween I bought two gigantic skulls that glow and issue mist from their eyes (how cool is that?). This got me off my fat idle arse enough to build the first stage of my Valley of the Skulls. But the big skulls needed a waterproof base to stand on. Hence my lakes. The smaller ones are built on cardboard but these two big beauties are actually covered in plastic tablecloth material!

That's an Ogre Tyrant for scale.

Now all that was left was to add the skulls and sit back to enjoy it all.

Here was can see the full extent of my skull-inspired terrain and associated water features.

Not as much mist comes out as I'd have hoped but there is a lot of mist inside the skulls and lit up it looks amazing!

Great Lakes

So getting motivated to do my Valley of the Skulls I decided I also had to create lakes big enough to house the gigantic smoke-emitting skulls I haven't yet completed. However in the process I thought I might as well produce some smaller lakes and ponds (and repaint the one I'd made already).

The idea of the smaller ponds is so that they are small enough to look pretty and provide some tactical advantage but not big enough to cause too many traffic jams.

You can imagine a unit of archers deploying behind a pond to deter chargers or some skirmishers hiding from missile fire by lurking up to their noses in the shallows.

And they look pretty nice.

I decided in the end to go with a greenish tint rather than the traditional blue and I think I made the right choice. And they can double up as marshes if required!

The process of creation (if you're interested) was as follows:

1. Cut a piece of stiff card into a pleasing shape.
2. Mic up some powdered all-purpose filler.
3. Make a little mound round the edge of each pond.
4. When dry, spray black.
5. Paint the water Catachan (dark) Green.
6. Ink near to the edges with Badab Black ink.
7. Feather this gently towards the middle, fading it slowly out.
8. Higlight the middle of the pond outwards with Catachan Green again.
9. Highlight from the middle (but not as far) with Knarloc (mid) Green.
10. Highlight again with Camo (light) Green.
11. All highlighting should be gentle and feathered, blending into the layer below.
12. Varnish with yacht varnish