Making a scenic base
Miniature: Lich for Village Attacks board game by Grimlord Games, painted by Jure Cukar
The initial idea was for my Lich to be on some elevated surface below which layers of earth with roots would be seen. I wanted it not to be a classic vertical composition but to decompose the model a little out of the base and play with the base as a frame, ie to get out of that imaginary frame that somehow imposes the base on us. That way, I could throw the figure out and make a slightly better sense of the depth of the earth and one of these guiding threads, a skeleton found in the earth influenced by the Lich incantation.
I first made a structure out of balsa. At this stage I want to achieve the desired height and position. I still don't know if the model will be frontal to the base or slightly curved. I suspect I'll twist it a bit, but it's not important to decide at this stage.
The structure is then molded in several layers with clay, and on top I put a few pieces of FLAG STONES shaped with a roller by GSW. In the front right corner of the base, I made clay with a relatively regular shape that would play a continuation of the base across the terrain, which I would later paint in black. DAS air-drying clay proved to be a good choice for this phase because it took a lot of patching, and it is cheap so I was not sorry to tear and toss.
As I assumed, the model will work better if it is slightly turned to the front left corner of the base. This is how the whole base works, not just from the center to the right. Certainly, in my composition, a gap in the depth left opens up, and I think that in the next steps I will put something that will slightly domesticate that gap.
In the meantime, I paint the miniature as the base dries. For the texture of the base, I made a mixture of the finest sand with cork crumbs, slightly larger flock and static grass.
With diluted PVA glue, I coat everything and place larger stones in strategic places with a slightly smaller flock around them, and a mixture of the rest.
In Tedi I bought two flocks for 14 kn each.
It would probably be best to make the roots from real plants, but since the state of emergency had already occurred, I was unable to dig through the parks, so I decided to make them of wire. I made small simple rootlets from the thin wire found in the plastic cord clamps. I branched two or three of these strings and twisted them. I glued the joints with superglue and subsequently molded the greenstuff to get an organic shape.
The idea for the skeleton was not to be too noticeable, but to see that it was already on the move and getting out of the ground. His right hand was with a spear. I removed some of that spear and put a piece of wire into the extension to look like some of the stronger roots that pull it out. The rough processing of green stuff made the transition from thicker to thinner. I put my chest and head in a position that suited me. For my left hand, I knew that it would be buried for the most part and that only the shoulder would be visible. With Green stuff, I repaired the skeleton joints and filled the larger gaps around the skeleton.
In the next phase, I bury the skeleton. Again, I use a combination of superglue and DAS air-drying clay.
I cover everything with a flock on the same principle as before. In the gap in the picture to the right, I add a piece that represents a piece of beam jutting out of the ground.
In the painting phase, it turned out that I had made a rather weak and uninteresting texture on the front that I had to save with colors, brightness and turfs so that it would not be boring. The texture part that goes down the front left corner of the base dynamizes that part a little and saves that combination, but I think it's still the weakest part of the model. The focus has to reach the figure across the base, but I think there may have been more elements of the story and that I left that part quite incomplete.
Conclusion:
For a heightened sense of the subterranean and the subterranean, he only needed to make the paved surface on which Lich stands so that he emanates even more emphatically from the sides of the elevated part of the earth. I needed to spend more time at the front of the base, uphill. Put some more twigs, different pebbles, etc.
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