June 4, 2012

Salty Pillars, no thanks!

I am looking to play a little more with Moshar the Desertwalker and as such I needed something to represent the Pillars of Salt he can summon. Some 3" card are most defintely not enough so I went about making my own. I made these using some plaster, cork and the lids from a sandwich spread. It was pretty cheap to make I just had to put up with a lot of Apfel-Zweibel sandwiches. I didn't want to make the pillars to look like salt. I always envisaged them as a massive chunk of rock bursting up from below at the whim of Moshar. I know he has a desert theme but this is a little bit more in keeping with my army theme.

I used a few pieces of cork to represent the rock itself. The inside of the model was hollow and wouldn't stand up to the rigours of gaming. To fix that I put plaster into the gap and then covered over the top of the cork with it to make the soil area. This took a while to dry but the piece is really heavy now. There is no chance that it will be moving anywhere due to a careless or clumsy hand during the game. A lot of times I have knocked a template around and it never goes back in the same place. These shouldn't do that. I flocked the top and sides to match the army and started painting.

I have a lot of rocks painted in my terrain collection and I did these to match. A progressively lighter drybrush of grey on the cork really brings out the detail. I give a green wash in places to break up the tone of the piece. Over the top of everything I add a black wash this time with Nuln Oil(GW). This corrects any rough bits in the drybrushing and defines some of the features better. I then just painted the soil areas the exact same way as my army and added the flock to match. The black base shows that it isn't a terrain piece which is pretty important. I don't want these getting mixed up in my opponents mind when I lay down a few amongst the rocks I will also be using. Hopefully the base shows them as a gaming piece rather than a board piece. I haven't manage to use these yet but I brought them to last weekends Steamroller where a few people noticed them sitting in my bag. I got some good feedback so I guess the effort was worth it. Now I just need to figure out Moshar and what to bring with him so I can use these!

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