High Elf Tower diorama

Here's a diorama that I sculpted years ago.  It was for a Celtos faction of High Elves called the Sidhe.  It is the tallest piece that I have done until recently.  The entire building was sculpted with white sculpey (see WIP images further down).





All of the knotwork designs were the biggest challenge to create.



Carrying the knotwork around the curved dome surface was extremely difficult.







Here are a few images with a miniature, which gives you an idea of scale!





I had fun sculpting the door texture :-)







Here are the WIP images showing the sculpting...








One last close up!



I hope you enjoyed this piece.  It is so incredibly different than my approach today!

Gearing up for terrain week...landscaping for Dark Age Skarrd

Well, I guess it is not really terrain week, but there will still be a lot of pink foam, glue, rocks, and flock all over the place!  In other words, it's gonna get messy.  I am going to start making my army board for the Lord of the Rings tournament, and we will be making a terrain board for the Dragon Shoppe!

Here is a quick terrain piece I made for Dark Age years ago.  It is a small reminder of what's coming! :-)





This piece was made to photograph various Skarrd units.  In this case, some Harpies.





Here's a little marker that I created for some added effect.






This had to be generic enough to allow for smaller or larger units, but big enough that you would not have to do any extension of the terrain in photoshop in wide angle views.





Here's a view of the whole terrain piece.



Some work in progress, showing some of the materials.  The standing stones were made with sculpey.  We took actual rocks and pressed them into the unbaked clay.  Cathy discovered that simple but amazing technique!!!



Gluing down all the chunks, the rocks and the stones.

Wrath of Kings: work in progress bases for Hydross faction

There is a new line of miniatures appearing on the Coolminiornot website.  It is called Wrath of kings, and this is one of the new factions, the Hyrdoss.  Here is some concept art:



Obviously, there is an aquatic theme here :-)  So, I tried to make bases that conveyed that flavor.  I wanted them to have a sort of Atlantian look, with some mosaic tile, etc.  The seaweed was an idea that came a little later.  I decided not to have it curling up towards the surface, since it would be fragile and perhaps take away from the minis.





Instead, I had it flattened out on the marble.  Since I had never sculpted it before, I had to do a bit of research.  I learned a lot about sculpting that particular vegetation!