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Sorry for the topic whiplash; haven't had much of a chance to do much with the Terminator, but I have been working on the Barque's scenic base. It's been an education!
 
First, a quick recap. You might remember how I wanted the Barque's scenic base to represent Neter-khertet, or the Great Ocean; an inky sea filled with the neverborn reaching upwards with predatory intent. However, I'd arguably only got as far as an ice cream carton lid turned upside down and painted black. Here's what I did next!

Firstly, I attached my flying stand to the rest of the base. The stand I bought was six inches long, but that was far too high for the barque; I wanted to make it look like it was skimming the surface of the Great Ocean, not flying far above! So my first job was to saw it in half. This was a relatively easy, if nervewracking, process. Once that was done, I took some milliput, pressed it out flat in a vague circle in the middle of the base, and jammed the flight stand in. I then used a wet sculpting tool to carefully press the byproduct into a cone, and made sure in doing so that the flight stand was sticking up at a perpendicular angle by resting my phone on top (the spirit level app is very convenient!). Here's what it looked like...

Base7.jpg
 
When the milliput dried hard, the stand was extremely securely attached to the base. This might not be enough on it's own, but I figured the rest of my method would secure it still further so it was good enough for the time being. I painted the white milliput black to blend it in with the rest of the base, then prepared the denizens of the warp...
 
WIPs24.jpg
 
Remember these guys from a few months back? They're just WHFB Spirit Hosts with the lower body sections chopped off (or in some cases, not stuck on). Painting was literally the work of ten minutes. After giving everything a black undercoat. I drybrushed a dark grey on, followed by a lighter coat of light grey, mainly around the faces and hands. Finally I did a fairly light drybrush of pure white on the face and hands, making sure that you could still see the light grey around it, and the dark grey around that. They actually looked pretty good greyscale, but to finish everything off I gave each model a blue glaze. This dried more subtly than I intended, but the models were none the worse for it.
 
I plonked them around my base, mostly looking up at the barque above them and reaching up, either threateningly or imploringly, depending on how you want to look at it. At this point I just wanted to get a sense of where they should go, so no glue was needed; when I was happy with the positioning I took a photo to serve as a memory aid and then removed them.
 
With this done, I mixed up my first layer for the base, which was just some plaster of paris. I added some cheap black acryllic and some blue ink to the mixture; I wanted it to be a sort of midnight blue. Once mixed, I poured it into the inside of the base, up to a few milimetres deep, and made sure that it settled more or less flat. It looked like this...
 
Base8.jpg
 
I then plonked on my denizens. The joy of doing things this way is that you don't need any glue; the plaster will fix the neverborn in place and you've got ages to pick them out, wipe them off with a tissue and put them back somewhere else if you don't like your first attempt. Here's what I ended uip with; you can see that the models are sinking right into the plaster, which will help them disappear into the inky blackness a bit later.
 
Base9.jpg
 
This took a while to dry, and when it did I realised that the plaster was still far too light in colour; nothing that a mix of black and blue ink couldn't fix, though. With the plaster dried and the inhabitants of the great ocean secured in place, I could add the clear resin....
 
I know that clear resin is intimidating; but it doesn't have to be. I used a pot of Deluxe Materials Scenic Water, which I got on eBay for about a tenner. The only downside to the stuff I was using was that it's quite a small pot, only 150ml; but I'd already experimented with water and found that this was enough to fill the base to the brim- a handy coincidence! The resin is completely idiot-proof, with no mixing or weird smells whatsoever; It just goes liquid when heated to 60 degrees C ((140 degrees Farenheit). it doesn't dry rock hard but instead goes a bit like jelly, and best of all it's completely reusable so you can liquefy and reset it as much as you want. While the instructions on the pot suggest placing the whole container in a bowl of hot water, this wasn't hot enough for the middle of the pot, so you ended up with a solid lump of resin floating like an ice cube in the rest of it. Not very helpful for pouring. My solution was to spoon it all out into a glass pot, then stick it in the oven set to about 75 degrees. After ten minutes or so at that, the whole thing had liquefied and was ready to go.  I divvied it up into two pots, and stuck some drakenhof nightshade into one half, stirring as it dried;

 

Base10.jpg

 

You might be able to see that the one on the right, which is just the regular un-dyed resin, has a slight yellow tinge, but this is only noticable against white backdrops. With half my resin coloured, both pots went back in the oven. First I took out the blue one, and poured it into my base, making sure that it went everywhere and gave an even coverage. After leaving it for a few minutes to cool a little (but not all the way- I figured a bit of mixing would help the transition) I got the other pot out and poured that on. Here's the result; it's so shiny that it's difficult to take a photo that makes sense, but hopefully you get the idea...

 

Base11.jpg

 

It was looking pretty good, but I didn't really want the water to be still. Waiting a few minutes to let the top layer cool enough to take some texture, I took a toothbrush and gently messed up the surface of the water. As the resin doesn't dry hard you can keep going back to fiddle with it as long as you want. Now it looks like this...

 

Base12.jpg

 

As a distance shot has a lot of glare, I took a few close-ups to show how the transparency effect works; I'm really quite pleased with it, and love how some of the neverborn are lurking just beneath the surface, while others are just reaching up...

 

Base13.jpg

 

I'm not quite done yet; I need to do a bit more toothbrush work to muddy up some of the obvious strokes. I also need to seal everything, as the one downside of this resin is that it's not that durable when set and will be a massive dust magnet. Finally, I want to add one last spooky touch to the whole thing. Hope people find the results so far interesting though! I'll do a full tutorial when finished...

Thanks so much everyone for the kind words, I'm really glad people like what I came up with! The idea for it has been percolating away in my mind for absolutely ages so it was very satisfying to translate it into reality, and (more to the point) have it look more or less how I hoped it would. I'll do a full tutorial later on and post it in the relevant forum, but I really hope this shows that you can do cool stuff on a pretty tight budget and with little actual skill beyond mixing and pouring. I still need to finish it off; at present the main priority is to seal the thing, and I'm hoping some gloss varnish sprayed on will do the trick. Need to buy some first, though....

 

I also hope that this inspires people to try other things out with the effect; seems like this is a great way to produce webway portals, random holes in the fabric of reality and summoned daemons.

 

Now I just need to finish the bloody barque! Of which more soon, I hope. In the meantime, today I spend some time on my other project, the MK1 Terminator. Revenebo is now assembled and almost ready to go, once the last bits of greenstuff have cured;

 

wip1.jpg

 

The right leg has come up in conversation before; I mentioned I was planning to have him stand on some power cabling to make the pose look sensible, and here's a quick mockup of the sort of thing I meant, although obviously the real thing would be a bit more convincing.

 

wip2.jpg

 

I've started work on the base too; I'm still waiting on the floor tiles, walls and door to turn up, but that still leaves a fair bit to prepare. I've ordered some of Fenris Games' "Sulaco" floor tiles, which look great and will let me have a nice 3d effect on the floor of my corridor. How? I'll explain. Firstly, I cut a rough rectangle out of some ABS Plastic I ordered ages ago. As you can see, my sawing is pretty rough (that's an understatement!), but this bit doesn't need to be massively precise, as long as the measurements just about work. To give a sense of scale, the central section is 40mm wide, and the whole thing is 125mm long. You can see I also drew on where everything would go, to help me visualise things...

 

Corridor-1.jpg

 

The plastic is about 3mm thick, or the same as a plastic slottabase. I could just place the grating over this, and it'd look fine; but that's no fun. Instead, I wanted to have some piping visible under the floor plating, so I needed to build up the wall sections a bit to create the space for this to happen.This was fairly simple; I just cut out two more rectangles that fit over the side sections, and placed them on top of my base. This still didn't really give enough height, so I cut out another two and added a second layer, as in the bottom photo. This worked fine.

 

Corridor-2.jpg

 

The next bit was even easier. Having got my trough, I needed to fill it; so I bought some plastic straws from the pound shop, slapped some pva on and stuck them in. The walls were exactly the right heigh for them, and (luckily) I was able to fit eight straws in side by side with no squeezing. Here's what it looked like;

 

Corridor-3.jpg

 

...once that was in and the glue was dry, I needed to paint them; then the grating could go straight on top and I could start on the walls. I cut the straws each end with some scissors, and then slapped on some paint. Here's what the whole thing looks like now; I still need to do some weathering, but you get the idea. This will only just be visible through the floor grating, but I think it'll add some real interest to the base.

 

Corridor-4.jpg

 

More soon, Royal Mail permitting!

Lovely work as ever. happy.png

I do hope you add dried blood/gore effects to the base (corpse or two?)

Oh, and seeing those straw pipes did give me an idea, doing an under lighting effect (a softened/muted led up underneath the grating and such to give a background glow) probably a bit late to recommend....sweat.gif but the base is certainly big enough... could even go for a spotlight wall or ceiling fixture. (hah, if you added one, that is)

It'd give the model a really cool ambient effect.... just a crazy idea teehee.gif

I really like the LED idea, but I don't think I've got the confidence to try that sort of thing at the moment. Not something I'll rule out in the future though, I do like trying to push myself! The base will be pretty weathered by the end; I'm not going to make it too much of a bloodbath but I'm definitely planning some occult glyphs drawn on the wall using an indeterminate bodily fluid. I want the corridor to feel like contested territory in one of the Calthan Arcologies, with the Ultramarines about to launch a raid into one of the Traitor zones.

 

I've made some progress, by the way. The Terminator is now basecoated, using ink over a metallic coat. I've gone for the slightly darker shade of blue I always associate with Rogue Trader Ultras, although the trim should brighten things up a fair bit.

 

wip3.jpg

 

I also finished the weathering on the pipes, which really blended the hazard stripes into everything else...

 

Corridor-5.jpg

 

In other good news, the deck plating, door and wall sections came today. To be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed with them; the plywood sheet of deck plating turned up a bit bent, and the casting on the door wasn't quite as good as I'd ideally like. Nothing major, just a bit more preparation work than I'd hoped for. Cutting the neccesary deck out of the sheet was a bit of a trial, and while I got there eventually, I was vaguely irritated with myself to find that I'd forgotten to take into account an extra milimetre on each side so that the plates sat on top of the trough I'd built, rather than in it. This wasn't a massive problem though; I just cut some little plasticard tabs to place the thing on. Here's what it currently looks like, with an initial coat of paint added; still lots of weathering needed.

 

Corridor-6.jpg

 

It's not so obvious in this photo, but the pipes underneath really do show through enough to give the subtle feeling of depth I was hoping for. I'm quite pleased I made the effort. I've also started work on clearing up the door, which will have a control panel on it and some other gubbins; but I couldn't resist taking a pile of white-tack and mocking up what I want the wall to look like when done. When it's properly done, the triangular strut section at the bottom will be at a 45 degree angle with a transparent covering, showing bundles of wires on the other side; it'll be joined by a counterpart at the top of the wall, giving the corridor a vaguely hexagonal shape. This gives me the opportunity to have trailing cables that have fallen through, and some broken glass, adding to the decrepitude of the scene. For a sense of the scale, each deck plate is 40mm square...

 

Corridor-7.jpg

 

Quick update; I cut out the bit of plasticard that will serve as the backing for the wall, and this allows me to give perhaps a better sense of what the whole thing will look like once assembled and done. As I mentioned before, the lower section with the triangular truss will have cabling inside and be protected by a transparent plate, except where the fighting has damaged it. There will also be some cabling dropping down from the ceiling, detritus on the floor and so on.

 

Corridor-8.jpg

 

It's nowhere near as complete as it looks though, sadly. Because the corridor has a number of nooks and crannies, I can't just go ahead and stick everything together; if I do I won't be able to paint it without missing crucial bits, but if I stick some bits on based on ease of painting I might find that other sections won't fit together properly when it comes to attach them! All of which is a bit of a brainteaser. I've come to the conclusion that the key component is the door; once that's stuck on, then everything else will be able to fall into place. I've added a console to the door and a few other things, but the fit needed some miliput work to blend in properly, so at present I'm adding battle damage to the walls while I wait on that curing.

 

I'm really looking forward to being able to finally stick this together, as the shape is exactly what I envisaged when planning the thing.

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