Greetings folks… sure, shock and surprise, I am alive, and
in fact posting. The horrible truth is that I have been working on plenty of
hobby related tasks, but I have been terrible completing projects, and even
worse at taking pictures. What I have to share with you all is a quick piece of
terrain I threw together over the past three days. I am playing in a Warhammer
Fantasy Escalation League, and one of the really cool features of the campaign
is that everything is achievement based (instead of solely win/lose). Players accrue
achievements but building unique armies with various restrictions, pulling off
feats on the game table, and engaging in the hobby side of the game. There are
achievements for conversion work, having your army painted by the last Friday
of the month, creating a unit filler each month, and finally for creating a
piece of terrain.
I had every intention of achieving all of those milestones
this month, but it simply didn’t happen. Instead I am staring down five half
way finished projects, and I realized that I would earn no extra achievements…
unless I could find some focus.
Enter terrain making. As I have mentioned before, I have
gotten into casting with Hirst Arts molds. Sadly I have spent the last three
months out of Hydrostone, but that situation has changed. A family trip down to
Sacramento (Alpha Fired Pottery Supplies) and I am happily sitting on 150lbs of
the precious gypsum based material. Upon returning home, casting commenced with
great gusto, and I was averaging 5 casts of 5-6 molds each time per day. My
collection of building bits grows.
Now staring down the looming deadline of the last Friday of
the month, I latched on to the idea of a terrain piece as a last result to pick
up an achievement. Since the latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy was released,
I have wanted to build at least one piece of each special terrain mentioned in
the big red book. To that end, I started looking at what cast pieces I had, and
what terrain features we always seem to be missing a piece for. I settled on
the Sorcerous Portal.
My initial plans for the piece, and what it evolved into are
very different, and I have to admit that it is one of the things that I love so
much about the Hirst Arts bricks. You casts hundreds of blocks, looking at some
of the pieces and wondering “when the heck will I ever use that piece…let alone
20?” Then you start playing around, dry fitting pieces, and you learn that the
obscure and scorned brick suddenly become integral to your plans.
I decided to give the piece a quick desert paint job to go
along with the army that I am playing for the Escalation League, my Knights
Templar Bretonnians. I will hopefully be posting some images of the work that I
have done on that force in the near future. But until next time, good luck, and
get creative!
