Little display board

One of my favourite parts of painting minis is doing the base. Reading that you might think my basing is awesome but sadly no. I think it finishes off a mini nicely and gives it a sense of place in the world. Looking at a few YouTube channels has given me the drive to attempt a small display piece nothing too fancy though. The idea is to use it as either a display board for photographing mini or more likely a practise piece for something better.

So this is where I started having a rough idea of what I wanted and no idea of how to achieve it. The general idea was to have a cave leading out into a woodland clearing that contained a lake or swamp. My first draft also had a house, a well and a small graveyard needless to say this was heavily cut back  as I began to measure it out. 

Being somewhat clueless about the whole process the materials I obtained were less than perfect which proves that YouTube is not a suitable replacement for real experience. I ended up buying some carving foam from amazon which was then bulked out with a chunk of extruded foam I nicked from work. The trees and water were from woodland scenics and turned out nice if a little out of scale. The flock is the cheapest I could find on eBay due to holiday expenses, I’m not very happy with the shade so in future I think splashing out on some woodland scenics might be in order.

The finished product. It’s not the best but as a first effort I’m happy with it. Next time I try something like this I will definitely be spending more time on the little details and planning more rather than jumping in with a knife and glue. The end goal of all this is to build a Christmas scene complete with a tiny train going round a snowy village. The idea is for it to look like the overpriced ones you can buy but look better and last more than a week before breaking down.

How the satyr looks coming out of  his cave on the prowl for some hedonism. The large bush on the right should be a small tree, I’m sure I’ll do better next time when I try making wire trees.

The arty farty shot. My camera work is still not great so that needs some work too. I’m not sure if the picture still works with the blur on the main figure and the reflection in focus. Never mind if it’s that bad I can always enter it into the Tate gallery.

Thanks for reading.