The Painting Bunkerc y

Hello Everyone!

Well, today I went on a massive coffee fuelled painting bender and made some pretty serious advances on the 8 Forge World Realm of Battle Cityscape Boards I’ve started to paint so I can have a good quality board to play on.  I have to say, the more I paint these boards, the more excited I get about completing them and the more impressed I get with the striking level of detail that has been crammed onto them.  So, lets take a look and whats happened in the last few hours.

The first picture we’ll look at is the roads of the Forge World Realm of Battle Cityscape Board.  This area was one believe it or not I spent a lot of timing thinking about.  It was tempting just to paint the roads black, give them a light dry brush and be done with it. Pardon the pun, but that would have been the easy road.  I instead went and had a good look at asphalt roads in war zones and studied how they looked, even just went and had a good look at roads in general.  You see, roads aren’t black.  Depending on their age and level of use they can be anything from a very dark grey, charcoal.  To a very light ash grey.  So I decided to paint the roads a very dark blue/grey and then using a tooth brush added very fine splatters of various tones of grey and bone colours to simulate the small rocks that roads are made of.  I then added in some soil colours into the areas where impact craters had been made.  To top it all off, various oil washes were added to the roads and craters.  Finally, to add some modulation to the road, I blended in a few blotches of various brown oil paints onto the road and gave some of the rocks and rubble a light dry brush with a mixture of white and brown oil paints.  I used mostly oil paints at this stage because of their “blend-ability”.  Once the boards are completed I’ll give them all a few coasts of gloss and then matt varnish to give them a hard wearing exterior.

This is a great picture and came out illustrating exactly what I wanted to achieve with the roads.  Not just a plain black or grey surface, but one that has many areas of interest for the eye to dwell upon and move around amongst.

Next was an area that I was very excited to paint as I really was keen on trying a few techniques that I’d never used before.  Now the roads were done, I was ready to move onto the Forge World Realm of Battle Cityscape Board Shattered Plaza.  The detail as I’ve mentioned in previous posts is superb on this board section and will a real feature for the board layout that I have in my head.  The plan is to have this as the centre of a 6×4 table with two Forge World Realm of Battle Cityscape Board Concourse Sectors on either side of it (the ones where you can have a statue mounted on a plinth)  So the centre section will have a grand Cathedral (what 40k board is complete without a Gothic Catherdral adorning it?) with two statues of a Space Marine flanking its entrance.

So I want the foundation of the Shattered Plaza to look like I’d expect a place of worship to look in the 41st millennium, grand and imposing.  So the foundation should be made of marble.  I was keen to experiment with creating a paint effect that looked like marble, so I went and did some research on how decorators achieve this effect on tables etc.  Thanks to the miracle of YouTube I was able to find some very good and some not so good tutorials on how to do this, and I was off to my local art shop to pick up some supplies.

The first step was to put down a base colour.  I used Bleached Bone.

Although I knew that being able to blend the paint was critical for successfully achieving the desired effect, I decided not to use oil paints for such a large task.  The reason being that they take too long to dry.  However that left me with only acrylic paints to use… which have the problem of drying too quickly.  So I had to invest in a paint drying retarder.  Its an additive that ensures the paint remains “open” for longer.  This was very critical as its summer here at the moment and acrylic paints dry in a very short amount of time.  Heres what I purchased.

Pro marketing tip.  Name your paint brand after a famous dead painter to add street cred.

So below is just a graphical step by step of what I did.  I won’t go into any details because one, the caffeine has worn off, and two, the effects of the beer I’m drinking is kicking in and three, there are tones of tutorials online you can check out if you really are that keen.

I’m very pleased with the effect.  I wanted each slab to look as natural as possible and look like it had been placed in separate sections.  Hence the different direction of the grain.  Remember also, that I haven’t “grim darked” the stone yet.  So no weathering has been applied.  Thats going to have to wait until I finish off the rest of the marble and have allowed enough time for the paint to set so I can apply a gloss varnish for the oil paints to be applied to.

And finally, a detail shot

There is still quite a way to go on this piece but I am really pleased with how the effect has begun to take shape.  Tomorrow I plan on embarking on another massive painting session, punctuated by xmas day, then another big day on boxing day, where I’m expecting a few of my mates to come over for a big session of hardcore painting action.

I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this experiment I’ve embarked on, has my coffee addled brains judgment been affected, or am I on the money.  Do you think its hot or not?

Thanks for dropping in.

John