Monday, August 31, 2015

Eldar Craftworld table


Part 7 The Final Product

Here are some links to the other parts of the series:
Bonus Post (The Pool of tears) (On the Rogue General Hunter Blog)

Hello All,

We have come a long way from concept to a ton of completed parts. Now the wait id finally over. I am pleased to present the finished Eldar Craftworld Table! I hope you like it.









After I took the above pictures I decided that the table would look better with some figures on it. Unfortunately I do not have a Sons of Orar nor an Alaitoc army so I was forced to use substitutes from my own collection.

To represent the  Sons of Orar I went with a fast moving Space Wolf Army



For the Alaitoc Eldar I went with my Dark Angel army (Made from several successor Chapters)


I set them out in an interesting way to see how they would interact with the terrain.















I think it looks pretty cool.

All things must come to an end so when I finished playing with the new table I had to put it away. Even that turned into a photo op!


Eldar Table Storage Box and cat for scale


















The box that the Nova purchased for this table is 30” x 30” x 30”. Why such a large box, you ask? Well, we had no choice. The tiles are 24” x 24”, so we needed a box that was at least a little bigger than that, otherwise the future owner of this lovely table would not be able to get it out of the box! Unfortunately, the next largest size we could find was 30”. I suppose that makes sense, since it’s half a foot bigger, but man was it ever annoying!

On the bright side, we easily fit everything inside the box, but we needed to use quite a few packing peanuts to do it. My Wife wrote instructions on how to pack the table into the box. The downside of using peanuts is that the foam breaks down and gets on the table and terrain. However, if the table is being used frequently, the peanuts can be left in the large plastic bags that we thoughtfully included in the box. The table should be moved with the peanuts, but it can be set aside in the box without them.

Well that's it. The NOVA is less than 48 hours away and that's all she wrote on this project.

Till Next time
RGH


  










Friday, August 28, 2015

Eldar Craftworld table

Part 6. Terrain Painting


OK. So now you know how the table was built and painted and you know how the terrain was built. Let’s talk about painting the terrain. Since the Hill was painted the same way as the table, we’ll skip that and start with the laser cut terrain, working our way towards the blasted pieces.

Here are some links to the other parts of the series:

Laser Cut Terrain

Initially, my Wife popped all the pieces off of the sprue for the terrain piece she was assembling and I tried to prime them that way. It wasn’t pretty. The light-weight pieces wanted to blow away in the wind from my airbrush, let alone a can of spray paint. So, for the next piece, we painted the sprues a dark brown prior to removing pieces for assembly. For later pieces, we decided to paint them a medium brown to speed things up. The final results were good because there were no places that looked unpainted.

This process of painting the pieces before removing them from the sprues did make it a little harder for me to assemble the terrain, since I felt the burn lines were harder to see. However, my Wife did not appear to have this problem, so maybe it was just me. J



All of the terrain pieces were painted in a similar way.  I will describe the process in general rather than cover each piece separately. Where needed, I will single out specific terrain pieces by name.

Once assembled, a base coat of Vallejo German Green Brown was applied. When dry, a mid-tone of Folk Art Honeycomb was layered on, allowing some of the base coat to show through. A top layer of Screaming Skull was applied, giving the piece a nice effect. (You’ll note that I skipped the Americana Buttercup this time.)

German Brown green

Honeycomb

Honeycomb group shot

Screaming skull 

It’s all in the details

In general, I used GW’s Zandri Dust as the base color for each of the designs on the laser cut terrain. From there, I used shades like GW’s Seraphim Sepia and Army Painter Strong Tone to make them stand out against the bone-like color of the majority of the piece. Once or twice, I used the Secret Weapon Green Earth/thinner mix instead. (Discussed in Part 5.)





The sanctuary of souls (Including the gun and comm tower) got special treatment, as I decided to really tie it in with the themed armies. Some of the panels on the outer walls were painted with the Alaitoc color scheme (as defined by GW) using a base of Alaitoc Blue, then stippled Kantor Blue and a watered down glaze of Guilliman Blue. The yellow was a base of Averland Sunset with several thin layers of Yriel Yellow on top. All of the joins within each piece were given definition using the Secret Weapon Green Earth/thinner mix. The gold sections were done with a base coat of Warplock Bronze, a layer of Emperor’s Gold, and a wash of Seraphim Sepia. Various gems were glued onto the pieces in a repeating color pattern to make it really stand out.





Uridium Space Modulators- These were the first parts painted, so I tried something with them that I did not repeat on later parts. I accented some of the parts with blue and gold (just like the above.) It does not detract from the pieces, but I felt it would look gaudy on the larger structures. I used a blue out to white fading technique on the modulator’s energy field using my detail airbrush.



The Goddess- Since the goddess is a mixture of laser cut terrain and traditional techniques, I want to go over what I did for it. The outer ring is the laser cut walkways and was painted as above. The statue was primed black before a base coat of Americana Milk Chocolate was applied, followed by a dusting of the Folk Art Honeycomb. Finally, Screaming Skull was applied, but lighter than before to allow more of the undercoats to show through.  The gems on the base were painted red using a silver undercoat with a Glaze of Tamiya clear red X-27 (Not mentioned in the bonus post because I just remembered I used it.)





Goddess before details were added

Blasted Terrain

The three blasted terrain pieces were perhaps the hardest parts of the entire project. They had to work with the table while being opposed to the aesthetic. In other words, they had to look like they once belonged, but were damaged. The color options were also a challenge as the entire table has an off-white scheme that needs to be complemented. In a more traditional ruin, there are more color options and textures, so I find doing them easier. This may be why GW never produced very much Alien terrain and stuck with Imperial, which is not that far off from real world architecture.  It is hard to make them look interesting. I feel that I succeeded.

I started painting the blasted terrain much like the table. I began with Americana Milk Chocolate, then Folk Art Honeycomb, then Americana Buttermilk, and finally a dusting of GW Screaming Skull.  On the sides (the parts that are supposed to look like bone marrow), I went back in with GW’s Zandri Dust and a wash of GW’s Seraphim Sepia, followed by a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone. For the chunks of destroyed building, I painted them as described above, but I added Secret Weapon Green Earth/thinner mix where I thought it would give depth.




I then went in with my airbrush loaded with black paint and added some “burn” blackening. I tried to angle the lines to look like explosives were used and not a normal fire.  I used Screaming Skull to blend the lines and shape the blast marks even more. Lastly, I made a mix of Secret Weapon Ash Grey and Slate Grey with thinner and applied it as a highlight to the blast effects.





Blasterpiece Theater- In the end, I decided it need something else. I recalled an article from a few years ago about making blast markers out of stuffing and electronic tea lights and thought that might do the trick. I went to the web and discovered that there are a ton of videos on the subject. After looking at a few, I picked this one out as the best: Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26imGXSbI6g

Here are the ones I made:





Up Next – the finished table!

Later

RGH