Altars, bugs and bones... more work on the ground level.

Once the Dais itself had been painted, it was time to make it match what was on the board.



That meant I had to match the scorpions and scarabs, as well as get more color and definition on th epiles of boes and broken weapons:





It would have been much easier to paint everything prior to gluing it on the board, but that was not possible.  It was tough to get at some parts, but I did the necessary contortions and shaded away!




I also had to match the cracks:
 

When I get more time, I will put even more details on these areas...
 

Tomorrow you will get your first glimpse at the would be grave robbers!

Painting by "design": more Armies on Parade Tomb Kings

OK, for those of you who have seen the post on how the big light in the center of the tomb was covered, you are familiar with the "dais" that Cathy suggested.  It was great, and it gave me a nice blank canvas on which to do a design.

I had the perfect one in mind... it is the one that I used on the bases of my big chariot unit.  Here is the image:


So, I got started by laying out the design:


I then worked in the colors I wanted:


The scarabs also got some color:


Now some lighter shading:


At this stage, I started to bring in my fluorescent colors:




Then it was time to get some lights into the other areas of the design.  There was intentionally some gold left of this design, to show that not everything is completely tainted.


Now some cracks are added:


More definition:




Tomorrow I will post the images that show how this looks with the rest of the upper level, which also got some attention with the brushes!

The weather heats up... counting down to the Armies on Parade qualifier

Yikes!  Not much time left, and lots to do.  Of course, much more will be done in July on the army, but there are things I definitely want completed now...

Here are the rest of the weathering pictures on the obelisk and the back wall.  At this stage, I was adding some bleached out color to the glyphs.


I was also darkening the edges of each section...


Since I wanted to keep the colors very limited, I added hints of reds and blues.


The hope in adding the reds and blues was to highlight the differences between the Empire and Bretonnian characters.


You can see the initial cracks painted on the walls...




Once I added those extra bits of color, it was time to weather them down even further...


I had to make sure that all three sections matched each other...


Here's how the day ended.  I will be doing more highlighting on the edges of the cracks and glyphs in July!

How's the weather? Making paper look more like stone!

Today was yet another test in the Great Experiment.  There have been numerous "firsts" for me in this endeavor, and here's another one.

The last post showed how I had built the obelisk and the back wall, using Plan C.  That is gluing the heavy pastel paper directly to the foam.  Today I had to make that paper match the rest of the board!

First, I began by getting paint to cover the oxide paste I had used on the edges:

I did the same on the obelisk:



Since paint tends to dry darker on the paper, I had to take that into account as I tried to "feather" the colors onto the paper.


As I worked around the edges, I started to carry some paint out onto the paper designs...

Here's how it started to look overall:

This is about as dark as I got with the weathering:



Here is a sequence on the other side of the back wall...



At this point, I began to think about putting some hints of faded color on the wall, and preparing to do the cracks and such.


Tomorrow I will be posting the rest of the images on the second part of the weathering process!

Hieroglyphs in a hurry: changing on the fly again...

This project has undergone many twists and turns, which is pretty typical, but the complexity of this one has meant a lot more than usual!

You saw the drawings that were done for the back wall, etc.  The original plan was to carve those out of sculpey.  Weight concerns and lack of time meant that would not happen.  My next thought was to trace the patterns onto the pink foam directly.  It became abundantly clear right away that the second idea would not work.

In desperation, I thought that I might be able to print out the designs to scale.  I have several sheets of pastel paper that were good colors and a nice texture.  That lead to a new plan.

I would print out the drawings on the pastel paper, and then use a glue stick to attach it to the foam.  If I could get it to stay flat and look normal, that would be great!

Here are some views of the back wall designs:




Here's the Obelisk, showing a few steps as it was cut and glued into place.



I took the two large drawings into photoshop and and reworked them into a multi sided obelisk, keeping the story of the Tainted Pharaoh running the whole way...





Once they were all in place, I needed to fix all the edges and corners.  That meant it was oxide paste to the rescue!




It did not warp the paper at all, which was great.  It wnet a long way to securing the edges as well, so I don't think I have to worry about them peeling away over time.




Once all this dries and sets, I will paint the edges, put some faded colors on the glyphs, and do lots of weathering to make the colors match the board.