Craft-off – Carol’s cabbage farm

My Ruined forest temple last month ended up winning the judges’ votes 3 to 2, and moved forward to this month’s round.  It was really close based on the judges’ commentaries, and could have gone both ways. That’s always nice in a friendly competition. It was also great to have the opportunity to read judges’ notes!

For October, my imposed theme was “farm“. I struggled with that theme more than the previous months. One personal goal I gave myself was to make terrain that I could use in games, and nothing was really coming to mind early on. Eventually, after painting Laios, I went through my shelf of games again, and a bright light popped up. I would build a rabbit-run cabbage farm for Burrows and Badgers! That would be a good incentive to finally work on those minis.

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Craft-off – Ruined forest temple

Earlier this year, I decided to join a terrain building challenge, the Rogue Sculpts Craft-Off Competition. The gist of it is, each month, all participants are paired up, and each pair is given a random theme. At the end of the month, a panel of judges reviews the work from each pair, and the winner gets to advance to the next round. Rince and repeat, until there is only one, Highlander style.

This month, the theme I got was “Ruined temple”. I did a sketch of a forest temple for Endless: Fantasy Tactics a while ago, and it was the perfect time to work on that project. Unfortunately, I could only start late in the month, so I had to reduce the scale of my piece. I ended up doing an 8 by 8 squares board, the quarter of a full EFT board. When I get more time, I can build the other parts, especially as the rest of it is easier and simpler.

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World of Twilight terrain: planning and first steps

Outside of casting -a lot of casting- the past few weeks have been centred on all new games and miniature lines. I’ve played Gaslands, I participated in two painting challenge and contest, the first for Gangs of Rome, the second for Deepwars, and this is not the end of it, au contraire. I have been eyeing the miniatures and artworks of Anyaral: The World of Twilight for many years now, but always put aside ordering some for a lack of funds, or opponents.  However, the painting and hobby contest they have launched some weeks ago now finally got me over the fence.

They have 3 categories: Best Painted Force, Freestyle, and The Painted PreePree. There is no way I’ll have the time to order a force and paint it, so that one I put aside quickly. However, the Freestyle category covers terrain, and I’m always interested in cool terrain projects. The PreePree category covers all their small critters, so I made a small order for some critters and a bigger models that will hopefully get here in time, if Salute didn’t completely drained them of inventory.

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How to paint a M4 Building by MC Studio

MC-StudioLast March, I had the pleasure of painting the M4 buildings demo kit for the project MC Studio launched on Kickstarter. The laser cut cardboard buildings are well designed, surprisingly sturdy,  and fun to paint. Once the project was over (successfully, I must add), I discussed with the laser man about future project and the first thing that came was doing a tutorial for the painting of the official scheme. Life sadly took its toll on my free time in the following months, but finally, here is that tutorial.

So here are the steps to paint the M4 buildings like the ones in the initial demo kit.

Small note: this guide is only an example, and you can paint those a multitude of other ways, like using spraycans or large brushes, using different colour schemes, or add a lot more weathering. The building are yours.

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How-to – Frozen lake base

I’m working right now on a commision piece, Lylyth, Reckoning of Everblight by Privateer Press. The client wanted a thematic base representing a frozen lake breaking under the weight of her sleigh. I must confess to you all, it isn’t a genre of basing I had ever worked on previously. The is a huge base though, 120mm, which gives lots of space to create the effect.

By luck, I had seen earlier a similar base (without the broken ice though), which was made using water effect for the ice. I liked the idea, but I remembered that I still had plexiglas left from the window made for the Space Station Yaumato that could be used as ice too, and add the opportunity to have solid ice shards. I wanted to add some volume to the base, so I chose to represent a lake shore instead of only the frozen surface. After some brainstorming, I made a small 40mm test base and I had a plan to start the big one.

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Space Station Yaumato – The building phase

Last year, I had the idea of giving terrain pieces to my friends for their birthdays. The first one coming at that point was Yaum, a big Infinity fan with a really nice painted army, but no display for it. I decided to build him a display board, and took the measure of his display cabinet in secret while at his place for a game. Yaum plays Nomads, a nomadic (duh…) faction living on three giants spaceships, instead of owning land like the other factions. The display would represents a section of one of those ships, with an industrial look to match his existing bases.

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