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That is pretty damn epic.

If I am ever so fortunate as to get a RoB board, I will be stealing pretty much everything in this blog - utterly awesome.

As it is, I have plenty of inspiration to add things to my own home made board now

Excellent work

Edit: Just realised that I keep posting directly after your updates - I'm not stalking you, honest

Looking good, we going to get painted pictures now?

SilverMK2 wrote:That is pretty damn epic.

If I am ever so fortunate as to get a RoB board, I will be stealing pretty much everything in this blog - utterly awesome.

As it is, I have plenty of inspiration to add things to my own home made board now

Excellent work

Edit: Just realised that I keep posting directly after your updates - I'm not stalking you, honest

I think it would be awesome to see more boards done in this style or even more fantastic designs, I really wish you the best and feel free to come to our blog and discuss your progress And it's okay about stalking, I have a saying that goes "stalkers can't stalk you if you're the stalkers stalking you."

Young_Logan wrote:Looking good, we going to get painted pictures now?

Soon, the board is done and I'm just re-posting these logs as I get a chance between working on current projects.

Terraformer wrote:I think it would be awesome to see more boards done in this style or even more fantastic designs, I really wish you the best and feel free to come to our blog and discuss your progress And it's okay about stalking, I have a saying that goes "stalkers can't stalk you if you're the stalkers stalking you."

Unless the stalker stalker is in turn just the stalkee in a stalker stalker stalker triple play

I have a WWI agri-world style board that I have been working on off and on for a while - currently in storage at the moment as I don't have room. I'm tempted to dig it out now and work on it, but my wife would probably shout at me if I did that... plus I already have way too many projects on the go

Cna't wait to see the conclusion of your work (I'm resisting going in the gallery to have a look at the finished thing).

Wow this board gets better and better! Can't wait to see more!

This is beautiful.

In a scary, evil sort of way...

a really interesting approach i've never heard of ANYONE taking would be to do a cities of death board of Commoragh! The Dark Elf city in the webway. That would have some crazy conversion opportunities and be completely original.

Here we go, last push to completion. At this point all six boards are fully constructed, primed flat black, and lined up waiting to be brought to life. Er, barren un-life.


I started with the soil. I wanted the ground to have a warmth, even though it was essentially an ash-waste, so I started by applying liberal coatings and washes of burnt umber mixed with medium grey to all the ground and gravel areas with a 3″ golden nylon brush, the same exact brush I paint my figures with. ( ) I was really messy with this first coat, because it would be touched up later, and messy was good for a natural uniformity of color.


After some drying time, I added a lighter steel grey to the mix and brushed that on in circular motions to reduce streaks. This color was not as heavy as the first, but I still used a lot of paint. You can start to see the textures of the soils popping to life.


Again, working in a circular pattern, with a much dryer brush, I work in pure steel grey over all of the soil areas and rocks.


This makes a very uniform and rather unrealistic landscape, so in order to break up the large areas of unchanging color, I went back to burnt umber and applied washes in random, blotchy patterns across the boards, sometimes mixed with a little black, or grey.


After the burnt umber washes dried thoroughly, I then changed over to a pallet of warmer toned highlights, mudstone and sandstone, sometimes mixed with steel grey, applying these last highlights more carefully with a smaller, 1″ brush, again creating a varied, mottled feel to the landscape. I carefully highlighted the square stones, cliff faces and rubble piles the same way, sometimes with a much smaller brush for tighter control.


Between monsoon showers, I lined up all the boards outside under pure, natural light and made sure the “connecting” tones were even between the boards. This process was quite time consuming. (On some boards I had to re-wash or even totally re-blacken areas and repaint because somehow the colors grew too light and wouldn't fit with any other boards, on others, the base tones were too dark and had to be brought up, Etc.)


That’s it for the ground cover drybrushing, the overall effect was rather bleak, barren, scorched and blighted. Perfect really. Some people would call it done at this point and start lining up their armies. Not us. We had a lot of work to do still. Ruins to highlight in contrasting tones, skulls to paint individually, fleshy monsters to paint, toxic gunk pit to paint and pour.

Using all these multiple levels of drybrushing prevents the finished product from looking… well, drybrushed. If you do it right, you can achieve an effect that closely resembles airbrushing on some textures. But enough of how awesome I am. Lets turn it over to MisMuse's work. She was tag-teaming this with me, or I would still be working on it.


First we recolored all the ruin elements in pure black. This would give definition and clean colors.
We tried a handful of different color schemes for the ruins, blocks and cobblestones, but finally settled on a contrasting, warm toned, dirty sandstone look, which MisMuse achieved by bringing these elements up through asphaltum, light cinnamon and finally sandstone shades. While she wore her wrist out on the ruins, I started on the fleshies.


This was a crazy process I don’t fully remember, because skin tones are very subtle and complicated, and I was working a large area of different subtleties. Essentially it started with Vallejo dark flesh mixed with GW elf flesh over the whole thing, then shaded with flesh wash and sepia ink, then highlighted with flesh tones again, then mottled patches of purple ink/saddle brown to flow into the skin texture, then painting on veins and arteries visible through the skin. Lot of work, but the finished effect was rather creepy. Also I painted those tentacles from way back, light skin with purple washes, then highlighted and flesh washed.


The runes were looking great. Thank you MisMuse, for helping so much with this monstrous task, and thank you for taking pictures along the way and all that fantastic photography that you did so early in the morning even though “the light and shadows were all wrong, wrong!” And thank you for telling me that the first colors I chose for the ruins looked like “boring crap”. Yes, your opinion matters.


Skulls…. wow there were a lot. Most were base coated snakebite leather, and highlighted with snakebite/bleached bone, then some were washed with black ink, some were washed with sepia ink, then re-highlighted in shades of bone and/or grey. Some final highlights were added with bleached bone or grey mixed with white. This produces the effect of skulls in various states of decay or age. What, you didn’t think I was just going to drybrush them all white, did you?

Note that this is the only time in the whole project did I open a bottle of white paint, and it was still mixed with other colors and used only to highlight the cheekbones and foreheads of skulls. White is a very powerful "color" and should be handled with care. Every time someone drybrushes white paint on a model or terrain piece, somewhere a little bunny dies.


I painted the goo-pit in shades of green, fading to black to simulate depth, then attached the tentacles into the culvert with a little cyno glue. I didn't need anything too strong, since the resin would hold them in place once poured.


The resin is a 2-part polyester clear resin, with a little bit of dye added to further enhance the color of the pit. I used a disposable syringe to inject it into hard-to-reach-areas and up the slope to the culvert. This is the only stuff we use that gives off chemical fumes, so apologies to anyone knocked over when Mr X opened the box for the first time. Please note that the fumes disappear with time, and the brain damage is often reversible.

The resin is supposed to be done at the very end, but I must have spent another full day just fussing over details, l like missed skulls, repainting the edges of the boards, re-spraying matt sealant over the ruins and rubble, (with the resin carefully masked off.) And of course, making the lava background board and electronics cover for the wiring.


Just a piece of plasticard, textured lightly, primed white then painted with yellows fading into dark red, then a little black drybrushed around the red edges to look like cooling pieces of lava. It was attached with velcro tabs.

Then, our next step was to…. uhm, next we….

What?

What do you mean that’s it?

We’re done?



Oh. Okay.

Good god!

Any pictures of the thing as a whole?

And here we are. Finally finished and ready to wage horrible war across.



















It was a big project.




(There are more pictures on our website, 3t-studios.com, as well as here on dakka in my gallery.)

Looking extremely epic

Shame I mist being the first poster again (damn sending an email and generally being at work! ).

This is looking fantastic - really jumps off the screen.

Edit: Woo, missed the first post to your last update, but get the next

And holy god - that looks like you have visited the wastes of Birmingham (UK) and taken some pictures - very realistic and utterly amazing.

If I wore (or indeed owned) a hat, it would be well and truely off to you.

let's see how much trouble i get in for this but...



>.<

you are a god!
or at least a demi-god...

I couldn't imagine playing models on this thing. Instead it should be displayed, like a pristine work of art.

Amazing work!

Fantastic!

This was a commission project I think I recall you saying? Do you mind telling us what the price the client paid for this?

Thanks!

filbert wrote:Fantastic!

This was a commission project I think I recall you saying? Do you mind telling us what the price the client paid for this?

Thanks!

Sorry, we have an artist/client confidentiality policy.

And also how long it took and the man (and woman) hours involved?

Also, I didn't see mention of you sealing the boards - did you use anything like that, or did you just leave it with the paint as the top layer?

Edit: Never mind - just re-read it and you used matt sealant [doh]

Wow, just wow
You sure do know how to make a guy feel like his RoB board looks bad

When I see the end product I'm going to have to steal some of your ideas




Well that ^^^ reply got ninja'd by a whole lot of posts somehow.

That looks uterly fantastic. One of the best boards I've ever seen, you deserve several medals. you can barely tell its the GW board under all that awesomnuss

As soon as I have the funds (or any funds really) I want a board like this. I'll hold you at gunpoint if I have to!

Gorechild wrote:you can barely tell its the GW board under all that awesomnuss

That is probably why it is so good

SilverMK2 wrote:And also how long it took and the man (and woman) hours involved?

We quickly lost track of actual hours involved since it was our first RoB set and we proceeded cautiously into the new territory and challenges that came with them, but I can say that the entire project was in our workshop for approximately 6 months from start to finish.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

CrashUSAR wrote:As soon as I have the funds (or any funds really) I want a board like this. I'll hold you at gunpoint if I have to!

Nice threat/avatar combo

6 months? Not too bad - mine is taking much longer than that and it is hardly even 1/6 done

Truly impressive work on that board, bravo (and this thread too). Now I've got a serious itch to make some eevil (if not as awesome) terrain of my own

- Salvage

Every time I see the last pic of the board I can't stop thinking "I want to play on it :( "

Wow that looks much better than the measly board i started today!

Wow!

I came to this party late, but I'm glad I took a look!

It would be great fun to battle on boards of this quality - congrats on a job VERY well done!

Is there a particular reason you and the client decided on a RoB board? Was it just portability, or was it a stylistic choice? Now that it is finished, how well does it go in the carrying case? Have you ever done anything similar on, say, an mdf base?

Awesome Board!

Although I still believe Flying Spaghetti Monster and Space Eagles will use it to rule the Earth...

This project is amazing , love your work .

I'd hate to think just what kind of troll might live under that bridge *shudder*...

Fantastic work - outstanding! This board isn't meant for putting models on it... It's meant to be put on top of the models!

Congrats!