Adokul the Monk part 6 - more base, books and scrolls

First up was doing the marble flooring for the new base.  I started with a base colour of JS Indian Red Oxide and VMC Red.  I needed three coats to get an even coverage of the plastic card.  Doing it again I would have airbrushed on the base coat.

Marble flooring

For the marble streaks I used white, grey and red in thin lines across the base all travelling in the same direction.  After I did some lines I would do a thin glaze of the base coat again (usually with more red) and then a layer of satin gloss.  Then I would repeat and do more lines, etc.  I also added in a layer of yellow flecks by flicking paint off the end of a wide brush.  Crucial was using flow aid to keep the paint thin.  I was using approx 50/50 water flow aid added to the paint.

Template used for drilling in the pin holes, much easier this way

I made two darks areas by first painting on VMC Smoke and then cleaning the bush and putting a line of the flow aid mixture on each side of the paint line.  This way the flow aid trapped the paint but softened all the edges.  The result was a dark patch with no hard transition line so I was pretty happy with that.  Once done this was glued onto the base with two part epoxy.

Book of burning spells, toothpick for scale

I painted up a number of books to be used.  Two of them will be the support for the raised foot.  I had made a couple of different thicknesses to I could get the height right.  While doing this I found the other foot to be very uneven.  I filed down the foot a bit, but then found because of the books it was in the air.  I used some green stuff to make a new sole of the boot to fill in the space and that worked well.

Starting work on the scrolls

To hide some of the gaps around the base of the books I made up some scrolls out of thin paper.  I used a small piece of green stuff as the core and then soaked the paper in PVA glue and water and rolled up the paper.  This was then painted with a warm white (Citadel Bleached Bone) and washed with VMC Smoke and VMA Burnt Umber.

Figure with books added and new pin for support

On the figure I redid the eyes again.  Twice.  Lots of deep breathing.  They were looking in the wrong direction so had to be corrected.  I really should have left glueing on the head until the last step.  The figure is quite heavy to hold which made working on the eyes harder than it had to be.  I’m still not sure about the left shoulder pad.  May rework that again.

So up next is gluing the figure onto the base and adding in the scatter books and scrolls.  Then the final touch ups and I’ll call him done.