The Custodes projet continues!

After spending >> A LOT << of time painting NMM gold, I decided to do something a bit different – hence, the base you can see above.

I always wanted to try to build a mini base, that included two things: stairs and marble. My previous tries failed miserable – mostly due to problems with properly cutting plasticard, not sanding to a correct degree and using too much putty. Here you can see one of the only finished ones.

This time I wanted to do this properly.

Firstly – I needed to plan appropriately. I made a suitable schematic (which you can see below) to make cutting plasticard more easier.

Then came the scissors. I got three roughly cut circles – all, more less the same shape. Next step was to cut off each of them a specific portion – you can see how much on the schematic (first – around 50%, second around 66% and the final one 82%). This was really simple, as I put each circle on the schematic and used the black lines to draw the line to mark the areas I needed to cut out.

After that I glued everything in the right order, filled the gaps with milliputty.

The result of this you can see here:

Next stage was sanding (and adding some cracks, and oh, leaves!)

I am not sure where I ordered those leaves – but they are made of paper, which was cut out with a fancy laser. One tip here – I glue them with PVA and afterwards, I brush them gently with a mix of PVA glue with water. This makes painting them easier.

Then I gave the whole thing a black undercoat and started painting

I had this idea, to paint the base as white marble, with autumn leaves here and there, giving it this warm and nice look.

Thing is, I kind off didn’t pull this off…

The main thing that went bad, is I hadn’t got this nice and smooth look I like. The cracks didn’t help either, making the whole thing look sloppy and seems as a rush job. Moreover, when I put the miniature on top it – it clearly wasn’t working out.

At this point I decided to start again…

The top got a full sanding – to achieve a smooth surface (and remover those cracks). Which I then painted black and started working on the marble. The effect can be seen below:

How to get this effect?

0. Start with Black Undercoat

1.  Using a Drybrush – apply chaotically Sotek Green by Gamer Workshop, from above. Stabbing the surface fanaticly.

2. Using pure Sotek Greem, draw cracks.

3. Add a bit of White to Sotek Green and draw smaller lines within those cracks you painted in step 2.

4. Add more White to Sotek Green (up to almost pure white) and put some small dots inside of the craks.

5. Grab the drybrush again, this time with a mix of White and Sotek Green and again stab the surface, here and there.

6. (not pictured here) use some glazes to make the surface a bit more interesting.

The base, was painted in around 1-2 hours and the effect is really nice (at least in my oppinion).

Moreover, it should look really good with all of that fancy shiny gold!

Cheers,

Hesser