Thursday 26 November 2009

Temple of Skulls Completed

The York Garrison Temple of Skulls is now finished, and here it is in all it's glory:




Assembly of the kit is easy, there's 3 skulls and 2 pillars to glue together, most of the piece is a single unit. One thing to watch is there is a massive line where the skulls you've glued on don't quite sit flush with the back half of the skull. I tried to cover mine will green stuff with limited success, but if you take your time a bit and file the GS flat you should be good. The only other work I did on them was to paint the earth bits with a PVA/water/sand mix to give them a bit of texture.

This was one of those paint jobs where I knew how I wanted it to turn out, but I just didn't know how to get there. Roughly it was something like:

1- Painted the whole thing grey (I used household paint, the shade is a bit darker than Codex Grey)
2- Drybrushed the whole thing pale grey (around Fortress Grey shade)
3- I wasn't happy at this point. I drybrushed the earth parts Tausept Ochre, twice
4- To take the highlights down, I washed all the stones of the temple in Gryphonne Sepia. This gave them a weather look
5- Washed the earth parts in Devlan Mud. Now it started to look better
6- Drybrushed the earth parts Tausept Ochre again, followed by a top highlight of Rotting Flesh
7- Painted the star in Brazen Brass, Skull White and Scab Red/Bestial Brown for the pupil.
8- Picked out some of the human skulls in Astronomicon Grey -> Gryphonne Sepia -> Bleached Bone.
9- Added runes to the temple floor. I thought the Chaos followers would decorate the temple a bit so I put some runes on the floor stones. The runes I took partly from Liber Chaotica, partly I just made up:


I went for a seperate stone for each god, and one undivided (top right) and tried to alter the rune style for each god, so the Slaanesh runes (on the left) are mostly sensous curves, whilst the Tzeentch runes (bottom second from left) are complicated and intracate. The runes were done using a 0.5mm pen.

10- Added some flock in cracks, broken tiles etc. I used a green/brown flock to make the grass look like it was struggling to grow.

This is a great terrain piece, and pretty enjoyable to paint up as well, and given it was mostly drybrushed and washed after the first coat, pretty quick

1 comment:

jabberjabber said...

Good work! I didn't realize that the temple came in so few parts ... I half expected it to have dozens of components.