May 2017 – sethe.green

Enchanted Fountain

Part of the Barkan-Seesholtz collection, this is an Enchanted Fountain from Grandier’s box set “Encounter at the Forest of Elvenwold.” Seesholtz had already painted the rest of the set, this fountain was the last piece to be finished, so I felt compelled to get it done.

I picked a few earth tones for the pavers around the base, and added a neutral gray to each color to tone them down and give them similar hues. The stonework of the fountain got some khaki, again toned down with the same neutral gray. The water was the challenge with this one. I was not confident I could pull off convincing water, but it was the quickest part of the mini. The coins in the lower pool don’t show up very well, perhaps I should have made them bigger. There’s nothing obviously “enchanted” about the sculpt, so to indicate that there was indeed something magical about it, I made the runes around the base glow with some OSL effects.

Griffon Twins

This is a pair of Reaper’s 03662 Griffons. One will be given to a friend as a gift, the other will go in my display cabinet.

I agonized over the wings for a long time, wondering how to cover those large surfaces, whether I should do more fancy patterning on them, should I make them identical or different… The light wings were a little too blank, so I did the dark feather tips. The dark wings had enough detail to satisfy me with the highlighting, so I didn’t do any further detail work on them. I was much more interested to do the lion bodies, which I wasn’t sure I could pull off well, but I’m happy with these results.

Winged Reaper

This mini was part of the Barkan-Seesholtz collection. It was made by RAFM Miniatures in their “Death Angels” series; RAFM RAF03896 Winged Reaper. My original concept was to put the reaper in a field of tall grass at night. So the colors would all be very dark with moonlight highlighting, grass approximately 1/2″ long blanketing the base, maybe looking like it was swaying in the breeze.

When trying to figure out how to execute, I came up with the idea of using fur cloth. I got a chunk of some shaggy brown fur cloth and attempted to airbrush it black. That went ok as far as it went, but the fur fibers were too thin to look like grass, even after I gave it a haircut to trim it down to the length I wanted. There was no good way to stick fibers together the make thicker,more grass-like strands. Also, cutting the cloth caused lots of fur to to fall out around the cut edges, which revealed the cloth mesh that holds the fur. After I got the fur painted and stuck to the base and highlighted with dark blue-purple, it ended up looking more like some strange smoke, or maybe fire, but not grass. So I ripped it off tried again with another piece of fur, was dissatisfied with the results again.

There are several tutorials on YouTube about making miniature grass for dioramas, but not the tall field grass I was after. Making a field of short grass with static grass is easy enough, and making long tufts of grass (like what I ended up using in the end) is simple, but have have not yet found any scheme for making anything akin to a field of tall prairie grass.

So what I ended up with was the Reaper in a snowy field, with some tufts of field grass sticking up out of the snow.