(T)Raumschmiede: Whoooommmmppp a swaaaaaaammmppp...Step by step, again...

Matuschiiiikaaaaaa dear readers!

A while ago I painted the nurgle dude, remember, I showed you the rust on the armor as a step by step. I've started building a base for him before eastern, and kept on building it till now.

Before I painted him I already build a base for him, but when I showed it do Grumbler from http://chromaticstimulus.blogspot.de/ he said it's booooooring as hell. So I asked him if he had an better idea, because my original plan was to keep it simple, was more about painting the miniature and not building a big scene. His idea was him walking over a field behind im everything is rotting, in front of him everything is still beautiful nature like. An apple is hanging on a tree in the front, a second rotten tree in the back. I thought about this idea and changed it in my mind to a scene where one tree is rotten and the other tree has a root where the miniature is standing on and from this root the rottening process starts for the second tree. Well while building it it changed to a quite normal rotten swamp nurgle theme. The idea itself is not very exciting anymore but, I tried to get some cool details in it. Flies, maggots, a three eyed frog, a nurgling in a sack and other nurgle stuff.

So here we start:

As trees I took some roots I bought in a flower shop, filled the holes with maskol and filled them from the inside with plaster. I took my saw and sawwwwwwed some parts off and mainly it were the parts I filled with plaster. So done the plasterthing for nothing...but before I did the plasterthing I didn't really know which roots I would use and which part of them. I also sawed the socket into the form I wanted it to be. I planned a pool on the lower level. Here's a first positioning of the miniature and the trees on the socket:

Then I used milliput for the ground and fixed the trees on the socket with some wire. I attached some roots to the trees to get to the vision I had on my mind of the swamp:

Then some more roots, more roots and more roots (I finished the root part a couple of times and everytime Luke and others were saying moooore roots, and I've been all the time afraid of painting it, because I didn't know if I would be able to reach everything with my brush), sand, skulls and other detailing stuff:

Finished, and foundation spray on it:

I sculpted a three eyed frog for the base and a nurgling (twice because forgot the first one in Berlin at the presidents mansion). I planned the nurgling to hang in a transparent birthsack on the tree in the front. The frog turned out to be in a jumping position and catching a fly during that, so he's kind of a multitaskingable frog, might be due to his third eye. Here is the sculpt of the nurgling and the wire of the frog:

Started the painting in brown tones with some purple and other colours:

Well as I planned to fill up the lower level with water, I had to replace the stone the frog is on with a bigger one made out of tree bark and superglue.

Base and stuff painted and waiting for the water:

For the base I glued some plasticard with superglue on the socket, the edge of it was as high as the border of the sand of the scene. For the nurgling I glued a stripe of transparent plastic into a wee hole in the middle of the belly of the nurgling. Also I've build a cube out of plasticard which was open on one side. One of the sides of the cube was higher than the other ones, I bend it over and glued the transparent plasctic stripe of the nurgling on it so that the nurgling was hanging freely in the middle of the cube. I mixed the 2K water effect and coloured it with a drop or two of Tamiya clear yellow and clear green for the nurgling. I filled the water into the cube.

I planned to put some more colour into the rest of the water which I wanted to use for the swamp. But then I noticed even though I mixed the water effect 30 minutes ago, the rest I left in the pot was already quite hard/dry, not flowing at all. When I started to pure in the components of the water effect into seperate pots, for the resin part first there came perfect liquid out of the bottle and then some crystallized stuff. Well like last time I put each pot into a warm water bath to make it more fluid, the crystals of the resin melted and it became liquid again. So as I said the water effect I wanted to use for the swamp was already near to dry, I had to mix a second round. This time there was nearly no liquid resin coming out of the bottle, just real thick crystallized resin. Again they melted in the warm water bath. So I mixed the two components and coloured them with red and green to get a brown tone (I think it turned out just red, but I'm not sure...curse you my red/green-colour deficiency). I pured the water on the base and left it overnight.

This time even after weeks it wasn't completely dry. Well I got some ideas why, first I didn't have a transparent pot anymore two mix the two components in, so I just guessed that they were mixed well enough, which they might not have been....second the next day after I pured it in I had it standing next to the window in direct sunlight on a very warm day, I had the feeling that it got stickier than the last time I checked it before that. Third guess would be the consistence of the resin out of the bottle, the first run there was more liquid than crystals and it dried a lot faster than usual. Fourth guess would be the colouring process...

Anyway as it was a bit sticky on the top, I just hoped that it would be hard on the sides so I would just need to somehow cover the top area with something. I cut away the plasticard with knife and I was lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky...only a thin layer of liquid was between the palasticard and the dried water effect. So I just rubbed it away with a paper towel and sanded the rest.

Used some gloss varnish and 1 K water effect to make the sides transparent again. For the top I used several thin layers of 1 K water. When one layer was dry, I pushed carefully on it with a toothpick, on some places the not dried 2 K water came through, rubbed it away and closed these holes with 1 K water. When that layer was dry I did the same thing again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again and again and again....till I was satisfied with the result (took about a week or two I think). The result isn't perfect but I didn't want to cut out the whole water effect with parts of the tree and do it all again. I took it as a lesson to make sure the water effect is perfectly mixed and not to leave it in the sun.

So I attached the mini to the base, glued the flies on, build more maggots and glued them on and finished the rust effect on the mini by setting some shadows and lights on some spots with pigments. Wellllll for the rust I had the feeling that over the time some of the 3D rust got rubbed off...dammit should have been more carefull with the mini. Ahh I nearly forgot the flies...I took some plastic foil which was stiff enough but still really thin. I used a punch set and punched some circles out of the foil and afterwards used a smaller punch to cut away a bit of the circle so that the original circle looked winglike to me.

I then took some really thin wire (long enough to be able to hold it), put a drop of super glue gel on one end of it, attached the wings, put some activator on it, and cut the end of the wire with the wings on off. Painted the fly black and then some gloss varnish. Done.

For the nurgling I cut of most of the square and then sanded it down into the form of a drop, 1 K water to make it transparent again. Glued it onto the tree and painted it with a mix of Tamiya clear smoke, red and green. For the strings I let the mix dry a bit and picked up the skin with a toothpick and attached the string to the birthsack.

Here are some pictures of the flies, the frog and the birthsack and a link to some more pictures: