Into the woods...

Just finished painting Orion - King in the Woods, and I am pretty pleased with the way he came out. I'll post him here in the next few days, but in the mean time I thought I would have a quick look at the base, without him on it. I painted the miniature mostly in shades of green (unsurprisingly), so I wanted to have a base that he stood out from. In the end I went for an Autumn theme with lots of browns, ochers and orange tones.

I wanted a two-tier effect so that one of the hounds would be dropped down slightly below his foot level - meaning that Orion wouldn't have anything blocking him, and create a stronger composition. The higher layer was built up with a slab of dry plaster (we have bags of the stuff of various thicknesses for basing purposes - here is a basic tutorial of how me make it) - that was broken up into uneven ground with Apoxie Sculpt, and textured with Liquitex Modeling Paste. I washed and sponged the basic colours onto that - starting with deep warm brown and going up through tan and yellow tones. While that was drying, I sculpted some mushrooms from green stuff (how "old school" is that! Still, I thought if I did it tastefully I could getaway with it, and it certainly gave the autumnal feel I wanted). I painted the mushrooms before gluing them to the base, and then finished the whole thing with some leaf litter and static grass.

I really like the way it turned out. The miniature stands out, and it creates a definite location for the scene - the two things that I really like to achieve with a base.

Pictures of the finished piece soon

mike