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My club, DorkaMorka, is hosting a tournament in a few weeks (check it out here), and I've volunteered to put together terrain for a daemonworld table. Which means I have a lot to do in just a little while.

Foolishly, I've spent the better part of a week working on just one small part of the table!

Specifically, I've been making a warp gate. Another club member started that project off by filling a shallow dome of lucite with plaster and sand. Then I went to work daemonizing the thing "tinfoil style."

My main inspiration came from descriptions of the Gellar Field and the visicious, swirling, protean mass of malignant daemons gnawing at it. I say "inspiration" but not in a literal sense. I just wanted to capture the idea of the Warp as a seething mass of semi-sentient matter and malignancy.

To that end, I decided to sculpt a gigantic, disembodied hand on the back , meant to look as if some daemonic power is cupping a piece of warp stuff to generate a portal:


Then I turned to the other side of the portal, the part depicting the membrane between Materium and Immaterium. The idea there was to make the surface look like reality bubbling open, with half-formed creatures starting to pierce through...



I like the way the gate side came out looking like a lake of nightmare:


Finally I worked a bit more on the "hand" side, sculpting "fingertips" curling around and dipping into the gate's Warp energies:


The lucite rod protruding from the bottom will attach the gate to scenery on the table top. The current plan is to use GW's Temple of Skulls base for that, since I have to get this thing finished quickly and move on to other parts of the table. Longer-term, I might (not sure yet) re-situate the game in some possessed Imperial shrine setting.

Anyway, I'll keep posting as the rest of the table comes together. As I say, it has to happen quickly, so it won't all be as intense as the Gate.

I do have a few ideas, though.

Thanks for looking.

Great work I like the skull in the middle. What colors are you going to paint it? I think a gory red would look cool dripping from it like blood pouring through the portal. or you could do a nurgle type and have ooze coming out.

Its obvious a lot of time went into this piece. It looks good, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the other table pieces - including this one fully painted!

looking awesome.

I'm envisioning more of a deep dark purple and black (like obsidian) swirled together with maybe a few flashes of red like lava growing around the creature as it emerges through the warp.

Either way, I'm excited to see your progress on the terrain! Awesome work so far.

Nice work love the deamon hand.

Cant wait too see the finished terrain.

This portal holds the perfect mood for this subject, great job!

Looking good so far

Best of luck on the rest of the terrain.

Awesome so far... can't wait to see the additional terrain and hopefully you'll post a shot of the whole table when you finish.

Good luck with it! It sounds really great! I'm looking forward to keeping an eye on your progress!

Also, i agree with The Ravening Jaw, i hope you post the whole table on here when your finished! Woo!

Yay! Tinfoil scenery!

Looks boss so far dude

You should link this to The Harrowed (and vice versa) seeing as they tie in aesthetically

Looks awesome!

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely post pictures of the table when it's done. And along the way....

A story behind this landscape is starting to take shape in my fevered imagination. My narrative sense of this place is that it was originally an imperial shrine world. As Warp storms waxed high, as a dark crusade impinged on the sector, as cult activity on the fringes of the world grew more zealous, Imperial authorities vowed to draw the line here and defend this world's sacred reliquaries at all cost. Elite regiments of the Imperial Guard were stationed here, under the command of a ruthless Inquisitor Lord...

Hubris! The Ruinous Powers had dark designs on this world, but those designs did not hinge on measures as crude or blunt as siege and invasion. No, far more sinister and insidious plans were afoot. Inscrutable and vastly powerful eldritch sorcery unmoored the planet from its orbit and hurtled it into the Eye of Terror. Shrines,the populace, hapless "defenders," all were borne helplessly with their world into damnation.

So now this world sits in a some nether zone between Materium and Immaterium, between "reality" and the raw stuff of chaos. It is a world where Imperial shrines have fractured and split open, creating arenas where nightmarish daemons cavort. It is a daemon world. Bits and pieces of temples and other shards of recognizable landscape still stand, but fiendishly twisted, tectonically tilted....

The centerpiece of the table will be the fragments of an imperial shrine, now fractured into several patches of terrain. I'm starting with GW's shrine kit, but that piece was pretty tall -- three stories high. So to start with I've sawed off floors:


I also lopped floors off of the terrain I had twisted, tendril-ized and tinfoil-ated some months ago:


and:


and:


The plan is to have these fragments stand as "shards" of tilted landscape, set amid jagged spires and dark rock formations, with maybe lava? Not sure yet.



That's where I am at this point. As you can tell, I don't know where exactly I'm going. But I have to get there within a little over a week, right? Wheeee....

I'll be the first to say - wows!! Seeing terrain like this really makes me want to put down the troops and start making some buildings,
playing on the same old necromunda card terrain is starting to become a bit bland.
Can't wait to see this completed :-)

This is some really quality terrain! The hand in particular is an ace idea, and it's really ambitious of you to try and represent the Immaterium. Love where you're going with it - do not envy whoever gets to paint these though

Nice! Really digging the fibrous nature of your GS work. Can't wait to see what you get done here- but I do wonder if you'll be sleeping the night before the tourney

Haha! You should trademark "tinfoil-ated"!

Awesome!

Love the melty buildings and GS work on them. Looks great.

Scarper wrote:Love where you're going with it - do not envy whoever gets to paint these though

I know. I'm not looking forward to that part!

Thanks for the encouragement, guys. Progress is scattered, non-linear, incremental...

First, on Thursday I painted the table boards. They're not done, but here's the general idea:


Then, I've been working on a fourth panel of the Imperial Shrine facade:


As you can see, the terrain will incorporate my signature "vagina dentata" theme (a common topic for discussion in my gaming club) :

(I prefer to think of it as a daemonic Venus Flytrap.)

The hanging guy comes from some Warmachine/Hordes kit -- can't remember which one.

And then, I'm working on a few tank hulls, wrecked, abandoned, and haunted (of course):

The "fire," which will be painted icey-blue, is meant to be daemonic and not realistic.



And from the back (which I show not for any daemonic effect, but for the conversion bit from the Mechanicum city bitz -- if I made an IG army, I'd do this all over my tanks).


Thanks for looking.
Lot's more to do....

Looks awesome!! Love the Russ.

The hanging body is the Wrack from the Protectorate of Menoth range in Warmachine

This stuff is fantastic.

Subscribed

I'm liking this more and more

Hmmm i hope you are planning on doing some stuff that's a bit more demonic, like a living building of somekind. At the moment it just looks the same as your army. Obviously it all looks well done but i cant help but think some of your talent and greenstuff is wasted on tentacle overload..

Loving the shrines... your greenstuff work is very nice and I'm sure will look really nice all painted up.

Great stuff. Consider me subscribed. You've got some crazy GS skill.

Wow! how did I miss this one .
The warp gate is fantastic, the hand idea is inspired.
Then the building work is another masterpiece.
I want to do a diorama for my sorcerer, which I think will involve some of your ideas

Tendril-ized and tinfoil-ated need to be put into the dictionary

Perkustin wrote:Hmmm i hope you are planning on doing some stuff that's a bit more demonic, like a living building of somekind. At the moment it just looks the same as your army. Obviously it all looks well done but i cant help but think some of your talent and greenstuff is wasted on tentacle overload..

Fair point. I'm afraid this particular iteration of the project may not end up being as ambitiously twisted as I first pictured it in my imagination. Right now I'm feeling pressed because I need to finish up some version of a table for a tournament my club is hosting this weekend. So I have to pull things together quickly. But meanwhile I've been thinking up ways to dis- and re-assemble this project after the tournament's finished, to make something weirder and more ambitious.

In any event, I've been working on a second tank ruin as well:


Here I have a daemon still lurking in the wreckage:


And from up above and behind:


Meanwhile, I've put together various parts of the desecrated shrine fragments:


and:


and:


The "high window" parts are angled out a bit:


And then, I finished up greenstuffing and assembly on the 4th shrine fragment:


And here's another look, with a photo that's dark but that better captures the effect of the sacrificial offering strung up in front:


I'm still feeling very behind, but at least I should be able to prime these parts this evening and begin painting them tomorrow. Still unsure, though, about how I'm going to base them or otherwise plant them in the tablescape.

Brilliant work as always. I like how the structures mostly look normal, reminds me of the daemon world description in the codex. Getting half glimpsed visions of horror.

If you had the time it would have been nice to mount the portal as if it had been a stain glass window within a cathedral. Either that or daemonic forces were building a cathedral around the portal, using the surrounding buildings.

Perhaps some gravity defying pieces of terrain are in order? Nothing says gakked up like gravity going to hell!

Almost forgot: Is that a cheeky daemonette head I see in that portal?

Wow... that is a tall order finishing it up by this weekend. Best of luck in that, I'll be watching closely to see the painted product.

Nice green stuff work. Finished by this weekend!!! I gota see this