Sorcerous Portal

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!