Door 7 - I'm a rich man,not your b*tch man! - Base Step by Step

Walk up the stairs till there are no more!

This time it's a kind of step by step, because the steps are big paces...didn't take enough pictures...sorry...but I think this article will give you an idea how I build the base.

It's getting started in here, so take out all your tools....the miniature this base is build for is a kind of spanish noble man sculpted by Degra and distributed bei Figone ( http://www.figone.fr/ ). So I planned him standing in his mansion on black marble stairs, behind him a huuuuuge portrait of who? himself of cause!



First thing I did were the stairs as I remembered a project week we had in school when I was 16. Back then we build windings stairs in the scale 1:10. So I started with building a form out of plasticard to pour plaster into as stairs. For the form I cut out a piece of plasticard as bottom of the stairs in the shape of an L with a plateau in the middle and the bottom for the lower stairs broader then the bottom for the higher ones. To bend the piece of plasticard into the shape of the bottom of stairs I carved on both sides were the stairs will go off with a hobby knife to be able to easily bend the upper stair bottom up and the lower stair bottom down. For the sides of both stairs I made the boarders looking like....well like stairs seen from the side. The Steps on bothe peaces for one of the stairs needed to have extactly-ish the same sizes so that, when they were glued to the bottom the fronts of the stairs could easily be glued onto them. Of cause the plateau got some borders as well, but this is no magic. See here the finished form:

 And filled with plaster:

Aaaaand sanded:

As the first version, where I tried to get the plaster stairs out of the form, were tooooo thin (and because the broke due to their thinninessssss), I left them in the form.

For the picture frame I took a half pipe profile and cut it into quarter pipes (skate or die!) and cut them into fitting pieces.

I took a piece of plasticard as the back of the frame and glued the quarter pipe pieces onto it:

I sculpted the edges and the bottom of the frame with pro create to make it look more interesting and kind of fitting to the scene. I made this frame myself because the frames I found available on the internet in that size seemed a bit clunky detailwise.

Next was the ground of the base. For that I took one of my loved wood cubes and glued a piece of plasticard on top and on the bottom of it, both pieces had the same shape. I cut out another piece of plasticard as back wall of the scene. Due to the shape of the pieces I glued on top and bottom of the wood cube the back wall had an angle to the woodcube to make the scene more interesting and not so symmetric/rectangular. As I thought it would look strange with just this thin piece of plasticard as backwall, I glued another piece of plasticard to the back wall, parallel to the back of the wood cube. Also I glued some pieces of plasticard between the wood cube and the back wall and between the back wall and the back of the complete piece to give it a bit more stability. Looky, looky here:

I filled the holes with plaster and sanded them, just like for the base of the Ninja lady. Also I  positioned the stairs on the base:

Now till the next picture there happened quiet a lot. As top layers of the stairs I again cut out some fitting pieces of plasticard and glued them onto the stairs. For the floor I tried to cut some notches into it to get square formed tiles.
The columns in the front of the stairs are plastic profiles with three layers of squares in different sizes and on top of that a plastic ball with a socket attached to it. I think I got this part out of the GW skeleton warrior sprue, might have been part of a sword or a spear...can't remember.  The Column in the corner is again a plastic profile and the ball on top of it is a ball out of a britta water filter.
The banister are two layers of plasticard, the first cut in an L form (well for the left one when seen from the front) and the second layer were seperat pieces of plasticard. The mounting of the banister are made of lead foil, drilled up at both ends and a ball (brita water filter again) glued on the top of the so emerged spiral. To attach the mountings to the stairs, I drilled a hole for each mounting into the stairs, glued a wires into them and onto the wires the mountings of the banisters (why do I always have to think about the Lannisters when I write the word banister...)

At last I filled the gaps with plaster, Mr Surfacer 500 (by Mr Hobby)  and sanded the whole scene. Due to carelessness the notches of the tiles got a bit filled up as well...damn....

This is the finished piece:

And the painted version were I tried to paint it in black marble...gnaaah...kind of....

Some more pictures of the finisher version klick here:

https://picasaweb.google.com/110256797700741183454/NoTaste02

Thanks for reading and I hope this little step by step inspired you!

Read you soonish!