Orgoth Ruins Project Log (GenCon 2011)

[Terraformer]

I sat down to make a couple of hills for scenario games, decided to check the forums, and BAM. Like an hour gone reading this thread and checking out your web sight. Man that is beautiful work. I've got two weeks off starting in July and I now know what I am going to be doing. Thank you for the inspiration.

I'm happy to hear that we have content that can be damaging to productivity! Let us know how your terrain turns out

[PG_Kalfan]

Just an amazing thread. Keep going.

[Terraformer]

Here you can see some of the detailing being done.



I try to avoid long streaks everywhere, some places the ink is applied in blotches roughly running down bricks. Further final highlights were then drybrushed very finely onto to the bricks using Folk Art Mushroom, Delta Sandstone and Delta Mudstone, to simulate dirtied, discolored areas of stones. Particularly the floor stones.



The tree trunks were painted up from black with Americana Honey Brown and further lightened up with Folk Art Teddy Bear Tan. We deliberately kept the colors fairly uniform on the trunk without a lot of highlighting or shading, to try to represent better the large-scale uniformity of the huge roots. Also, the smoothness keeps the whole piece from looking too busy. The smaller roots we blended into light green/brown to look like newer growth.



And finally, with everything underneath the trees almost fully painted, it was time to leave.



And leaves we did. Each leaf was actually two pieces, cut individually from a folded piece of paper, and then sandwiched over the wire stems with PVA glue. Actually, Mismuse did most of the leafing, I tried to help but was relegated to an assistant role because I have a crippling handicap called ?Big Ol? Awkward, Dry Man-Hands.? This syndrome prevents me from manipulating tiny, thin things and I am physically unable to peel open those plastic grocery bags in grocery stores. It?s a real disease, I get to park in a handicap space. Don?t discriminate me!



Mismuse constructed the scaffolding pieces while I fumbled with the leaves on the tree for a bit. I think I averaged one leaf every 10 minutes to Mismuse?s average of 1 ? 2 leaves every 2 minutes. Also most of the ones I was able make ended up falling off. We agreed that my time would be better spent working on different parts of the project.

[Terraformer]

I painted the Orgoth Tower base in gunmetal metallic mixed with black, then highlighted up with Delta Metallic Toupe. I wanted to show that it was totally different from the surrounding ruins, something much older and made with a different kind of exotic technology/magic. Here the scaffolding is test-fit into holes we cut in the hill, but not yet glued down.



Now Mismuse tagged me out of attaching leaves, and I took over painting the scaffolding.

I started with a dark, rich blend of Delta Brown Velvet and Americana Light Cinnamon, and brought it up through shades of Honey Brown and Americana Sand, then shaded down with Vallejo Smoke ink. I really liked how these came out.



meanwhile, more leaves. Mismuse trimmed them as needed to keep the edges of the two halves meeting flush with each other.



We glued the scaffold down, then added a few connecting pieces (not shown) so both platforms were connected.

[Terraformer]

And still more leaves. The sun was rising yet again in the background. I swear it felt like the outside world was on some kind of time lapse special effect, days and nights flying by. ?What? it?s already morning/night?? was a common statement in these final days of work.



Now there were enough leaves that Icould start painting them, even as the leaves on the other side were still being attached.



The leaves were painted in different shades of yellow, green and brown, and then shaded with inks, picking out details like darker or lighter veins inside the leaves.



Multi-tasking made this project possible. While I was still painting the hundreds of leaves, Mismuse began carefully drawing and cutting out scores of different kinds of jungle plants with some very sharp little cuticle scissors. Each one was attached to a wire stalk and curled or bend to a natural shape before priming white.

[Terraformer]

Of course, they each had to be painted as well.



We started attaching the plants and I sprinkled on a few different blends of fine turf, but only in patches in a handful of places. As I?ve said elsewhere, we have issues with turf, namely it can easily be overdone and make a terrain piece look like golf course, abolishing all the contrast and detail underneath.



It?s really hard to capture this on any kind of camera, but inside the excavated mineshaft I used glow-in-the-dark paint, thinned to the point of going on transparent, and drew an arcane symbol of spidery runes, which only appeared when the ultraviolet light was turned on or in darkness, as seen above. (Better views of it in our final studio shots.)



For some of the more exotic ferns we cut up peacock feathers and bunched the tips up, gluing them into holes drilled with a pin vice.

[Terraformer]

We also made dead leaves and forest litter with cut up small leaves and sticks, dyed with brown ink mixed with alcohol, which dried with a mottled, aged appearance.



Mossy logs, sticks and more jungle plants.



More vines were added, more plants. And at long last the final jungle look was emerging. All this time we were still taking turns painting leaves.



Every time I thought we were almost done with the damned leaves, I would turn the whole piece over and see a few dozen that I missed. But we did get it done, and we actually wished we could have put more leaves and plants in, and a myriad of other details, but as always we were constrained by time and budget. I just couldn?t spend another week painting jungle plants, as it was we were just barely finishing this in time for GenCon, and had well exceeded our anticipated labor time. The other pieces in this set would have to wait, but we got the main pieces critical to the campaign done and we learned a LOT. As the final step, I brushed a little MiG pigment dust and turpentine into the ruins, and at this point I stepped back and realized that we had not only made one of our most beautiful pieces, but now we have a solid tactic for taking on jungle/forest and beautiful crumbling ruins. But I?ll let the finished pictures speak for themselves.

On to the finale!

[Terraformer]

[Terraformer]

[Terraformer]

Somewhere along the way we completed the small Standing Stones piece as well:

[Terraformer]

And that's it for now

[jojukorh]

Yes, this is art as its best!

[zor]

Beautiful work. Its exciting and refreshing to see this level of detail go into a terrain piece. Hand painted leaves WOAH! Dig it!

[Lord Tyrant peers]

AMAZING!!!! keep up the rapid and exellent work

[Fish76]

Really breathtakingly beautiful!

One of the WIP shots has a newspaper ad in it that says "Get Results!" next to two empty bottles of "5-hour energy". I found that pretty funny.

[Terraformer]

Really breathtakingly beautiful!

One of the WIP shots has a newspaper ad in it that says "Get Results!" next to two empty bottles of "5-hour energy". I found that pretty funny.

That is funny, I never noticed that until now

[patisarat]

This is un-flippin-believable! You guys deserve major kudos and recognition for such breathtaking effort and attention to detail. Every single bit is great, but I like the broken seal on the well the most.

I don't understand how there are not 500 comments here already saying how great this project is.

[Lead Farmer]

How do you bake your sculpey in a toaster oven. I have only been able to use a big oven because the toaster burns it. Do you have any tricks.

[Binz]

This is extremely, ridiculously cool.

Amazing work! Really, really amazing.

Im so jealous

[Mustakrakish]

Those pieces look fantastic, but they don't look very playable.

[DDpete]

The detail is so awesome, great job !!

[Terraformer]

How do you bake your sculpey in a toaster oven. I have only been able to use a big oven because the toaster burns it. Do you have any tricks.

For the most part I use a special polymer clay oven, it looks just like a regular toaster oven, but it seems to heat fairly evenly, so once you figure out the best temperature/time (approximately about 15 minutes at about 230- 240F for clay pieces about 1/4" thick.) it works fairly consistently. Of course different clays have different baking requirements and the size and shape of the object also play a part. It also keeps potentially toxic clay fumes off our toast, which is a good thing.

I rather burn sculpey than undercook it anyway. I've lost a lot of well-sculpted pieces due to under-cooking, having them just crumble away as soon as I try to handle them.

[Terraformer]

Those pieces look fantastic, but they don't look very playable.

Everyone seemed to have a good time playing with them at GenCon. The large piece creates a strategic bottleneck and some of the scaffolding and paths created some unique perches for ranged units

[BrianRaymond]

Resin sculpture is always a center of attraction.I am amazed by it's beauty and tactics that make it special.

[peanutbutterconspiracy]

Really beautiful, really intimidating work!

[PG_The_Veneficus]

id love to have a go at making one of those trees, is there any chance you can post a bit of a tutorial up about how you guys went about it?

[John Q.]

That is one of the most impressive terrain logs I've seen.

Really fantastic work!

[PG_Trevy the Great]

That's all I got. Otherwise speechless.

[Terraformer]

id love to have a go at making one of those trees, is there any chance you can post a bit of a tutorial up about how you guys went about it?

We'll probably post a tutorial on tree-making some point in the future. Right now we're just trying to avoid any more projects with trees! It's really, really labor intensive but the finished effect is a lot nicer than the usual fiber/flock glued to sticks, which is really the only other way to make trees. In the meantime you can read the un-edited project log over on our website, it details a little more how we went about the process, and the practice sessions we had before attempting the big tree.

[Defenstrator]

Wow. That's not a table, that's art.

[Trollknight]

INSANE work. +1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 000000000.