Some fairly chunky statues to add to the mix. The 4 in the first picture were Burger King giveaways – can’t remember where I got them from, but I only realised their provenance when I undercoated them and found the brand moulded into the back of the figure. Bit of work with a scalpel and a respray sorted that.
The bases are made from blue foam sandwiched between 2 pieces of obeche woodstrip, around 4mm thick. The top piece is chamfered on both side to give a rounded profile. The bottom piece is chamfered on the top side only, so the bottom side sits flush to the ground. The figures are fixed to the top ssections – one is screwed into place – tho others are partly hollow so I rammed and glued some wood offcuts, into them, then cut the offcut flush with the base and used woodglue to fix it to the obeche.
I tried 2 different effects for the blue foam sections. On the first I decided it be a single rectangle of carved stone, so simply applied a section of decorative plastic tape to the blue foam, as per the end figures in the picture below. Looks ok, but a bit sterile to my mind. On the others, I decided that I wanted to have it look like it had been made from blocks and been plastered, and that the plaster had suffered over time.
To do this I used a propelling pencil to score it so that it looked like it had been made of 3 rows of blocks. I then mixed some filler and smeared it over most of the surface of the blocks – covering most of the scoring. When it dried I then rubbed each face against a flat sheet of sandpaper to get a flat thin layer. Some of it flaked off at this time, but no problem as I wanted it to look damaged. I then used a scalpel to take some more off to expose the blockwork and carve a few cracks.
I then painted the bases with grey acrylic to protect the foam, and added a few pits of grit to the bases to stop them looking too pristine. I then sprayed them with grey primer.
A black/brown wash is then applied to the whole pieces.
Drybrush with white acrylic softened with a small amount of red-brown. This was done more heavily than for the pillars and ruins – I wanted these to stand out more.
I then painted the plaster with white paint to which a bit more red-brown had been added to give it a slightly pinkish appearance – the pics don’t show this all that clearly.
The final stage is to take a black/brown wash, and a green/brown wash, and apply them selectively to weather the figures, highlight the cracks and hint at muck being washed down by rain and snow-melt. The following pics show the finished pieces with a 28mm figure for size comparison.
The following pictures show some of the statues pieces from the LOTRbox, and another statue – this time from a magazine I think, which have been given the same treatment.
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