Door One - I can walk on water, which is frozen -Base Step by Step

It's "this time of the year" again, crowded malls, "Last Christmas" played at least a thousand times per hour (Challenge your friends, who will be the last one to hear it this year? Two years ago I had the golden run, not hearing this damn song once) and tons of cookies, hot wine and candles.
But also the time of sitting with your dear ones, using the Saturdays to relax and celebrate.
For me, it means working much more at the store to deal with more customers and so painting something and having nice hobby chats every day. It means having Advent Calenders for my cats, my old bear calendar that went along with me through 3 flats and 18 years of life for my self and another that my girl sent me from Japan. Baking cookies with my friends, all to prepare for the big evening when goose and presents will mark our Christmas under an oldschool tree. I love it.
As a fanatic Christmas addict it is my pleasure to share some of my love for this time with you. We will accompany you through the next 24 days of Christmas preparation, cozy grog evenings and shopping madness.

The first door of our calender is a gift from Klaus to you, as he explains how he made a very nice and frosty base for his ice demon.

Thanks Bro for this tutorial, and to all our readers, have fun reading and trying!
-Martin





Nuug Nuug people around the world!
It's gettin cold in here so put on all your clothes.... in this article I want to show you a step by step of the base I made for my Ice demon version of Fugol. I planned to keep the base simple, with some nice details and a topic that underlines the ice demon. So I went for a frozen lake with a skeleton of an warrior on the ground who died long ago in the war against the ice demons.

I started by building the ribcage of the warrior. I formed a piece of putty into the shape of the ribcage. Then I took a couple of thin wires twisted them together some milimeters as the start of the backbone, another wire as a pair of ribs horizontal to it, some more twisting on the backbonewires,  another wire as ribs, more backbone twisting and so on. After that i flattened it, straightened the backbone and put some super glue on the backbone so that the ribs and the backbone itself were fixed together. I know it might be hard to understand what I did but I hope the following picture will show you what I meant:

 Then I bent the wires into the shape of a ribcage with help of the putty ribcage form. I glued the ends of the ribs together.

I bend another wire as sternum around the bonded connection points of the ribs and put a layer of miliput onto the sternum and the backbone.

Then I put a couple of thinned layers of liquidgreenstuff oder the complete ribcage to give the ribs more volume, afterwards some sanding to flatten the ribs.

As the skull I took one that not actually fits the size of the miniature as it is too big, but as it is under water I assumed it doesn't really matter. I cut of the lower jaw to be able to put it into the desired position on the base. I had to repair the lower jaw a bit, but for me it turned out okay. Here's the skull:

In between I sawed a piece out of a wood cube and sanded it. After that I put a layer of milliput on it, letting it lap over the edges (to sand it down later on for a smooth transition between wood and milliput) and positioned the ribcage and the skull on it.

Here on the pictures I already sculpted the "fish" -more kind of a sausage- and the remainings of his clothes. The clothes are several pieces of thin milliput, put piece by piece onto the ribcage and bond together so that the remainings look old and torn.

Next I glued some small pieces of I think it was tree bark as stones, some dried leaves as plants and a shield of the GW skeleton warriors onto it. This is how it turned out:

For the plants I put a layer of thinned down wood glue on them so they get more stability. And this is how it looks after priming:

And the paintjob done:

For the water I used Noch two component water effect. This time I tried it with sellotape but that idea was total crap as it turned out quiet deformed. So I sanded it down a bit to the shape of the cube and for areas where there was not enough volume I glued plasticard around the base to fill these places with the water effect. Again some sanding so that it becomes more cube-ish. For the ice layer again Noch two component water. This time after I stirring each component in a cup standing in a warm water bath, and pouring them together, I stirred the mixture heavily to get as much bubbles into it as possible and to make them as small as possible. As this was only a thin layer (which should have been thicker, it turned out afterwards) I took sellotape for the barriers to pour the effect into.

I let it settle for 2-3 ours or so came back to stirr it again as the small bubbles had formed bigger bubbles. This time the fluid was already a bit thicker so by stirring the result was a lot of very fine bubbles. When it was completely dry it looked like ice to me, just as I hoped for. Martin had the idea for the ice when I showed him my first fail with the water effect back then (many bubbles in it due to no warm water bath and too fast stirring).

The last thing on the base itself was the snow. I used a mixture of Natron, grinded glass from lightbulbs and Microballons (weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee glas bubbles, smaller than the natron). But I should have gone for just the grinded glass and the micro ballons. The microballons give the snow a nice white and a bit sparkle and the grinded glass some more sparkle. To fix it onto the base I used wood glue. A thinned down layer of wood glue, some of the snow, letting it dry, another layer here and there of wood glue, another layer of snow...and so on until you got the wanted volumes of snow.

This is how it turned out for me:

That's it. I hope you liked this article. Read you soonish.