This weekend I had very little spare time for myself… well, there are good weekends and bad weekends… no need to whine about that…
Anyway, I did find my time to work on the hill of the commissioned diorama. I had been quite afraid of this step… I have built some scenery so far, but never tried myself at nature (they were more for 40K or Mordheim cityscapes)…
As I already wrote, I mixed real stones with model clay for the hill, the latter of which is destined to end up covered with static grass… and here’s the outcome of this endeavour… of course, on the first sight it’s not too spectacular now… you have to add sand and loads of static grass on everything except the stones… and those will get a new paintjob, too…
And here’s another dress rehearsal… it was good I did that because the hill turned out a bit too spacious first, leaving not enough room for the chariot… I had to redo the lower parts of it…
From above one can already discern the three parts of the diorama: the central chariot on the road, the “mountain” backdrop with another flag-carrier (which I could now aptly name the kid on the mountain… yeah, listening too much of the Dubliners lately…) and that small, almost triangular space in the lower left corner… which might end up having another stone glued to it, though I’m not sure about that yet…
The view from “behind” nicely shows the notch I had to work into the mountainside, so that the chariot would fit on the base… quite honestly this is the most depressing face of the diorama (apart from the back, of course)… but I guess some paint will make it look much better than now…
On the contrary I really like this point of view… with Ms. Boadicea riding for the win… the peasant in the front is from Games Workshop’s marvellous Giant kit… found this one in a heap of Chaos Bitz I bought on eBay two or three years ago… I love him, yet I never quite got to use him… he might do fine on this diorama, even though his clothes are quite different and he is slightly bigger than the other miniatures… well, there’s still more time to decide on that, but I guess I will use him. With Ms. Boadicea standing for my principal, I feel like this peasant standing for myself… gives everything a nice touch…
Besides, I love the Giant kit too much, so I will buy that one sooner or later anyway to pimp up all the Nightgoblins I got from the old starter sets… and I don’t think I will need two fleeing peasants anyway…
All in all I am very pleased with the outcome of the “mountain” backdrop so far. If there is one weakness, it’s the weight. All that model clay turned out to be far heavier than I expected. While this is ok for the diorama (it is meant to sit on some cupboard or the like), it’s not suitable for scenery meant for the playground, I think… a pity as I would have liked to work a three-dimensional hill with a huge cliff to one side with this method… well, I will do some research, perhaps there is some lighter clay-like material available somewhere… and of course I could use small cartons (either some I find or self-made) so that the clay would end up to be as thin as possible… we’ll see to that in the future…
The whole thing is now drying for a week (or two as next weekend I’ll probably won’t have time for my hobby – dreadful family visits are on the schedule), then I will apply sand and finally get to prime and paint the whole thing… keep you posted on all of this…
