Base for Arinthuil

 

Actually when the competition for the hobby hangout was announced I decided that finally this elf was going to be painted. But no clue on what I should do.  One thing was that I should tell a story with him and make a bit bigger base since i mostly haven’t done that before and I needed to try that more.

 

I found this wooden piece laying around in my garage, probably from my parents and thought I will us this. After some time I thought that I will do a beach area and he is coming down from the more grassy area out on the beach.

 

I started by looking at pictures from real beaches to get a better idea of what I am looking for. After looking at pictures I had an idea to have some areas that are higher with some grass and a sloop that he goes down. I started to remove some wood to make the lower area and used some cork and other materials to build up the higher areas.

I then proceeded to cover the whole area with milliput and make a basic shape of what i wanted.

Next step I fitted the figure to the base and made smaller changes to it so that the pose became correct on the base and the vision I had

I then proceeded to Test how to make the grass and incorporate it on the base (No pictures) and I decided to use hemp rope to make the grass and incorporate it into the milliput and let it dry and then add it on top of the already sculpted base. This gave some nice separation of the grass and it looks more naturally growing out of the ground. There are some parts that became harder by me doing it this way but more on that later.

I also added more milliiput at this stage to make the feet and balance of the figure to become correct.

IN the next step I added some sand fine graded that I bought from a Zoo shop. Very small grains and extremely good price compared to hobby materials.

I then proceeded to color it with washes of a light sand color to give it a base color. I also started to add in the shadow areas to give a feeling of what I wanted. I also started to color the grass with some washes of green to give more life to it and at some places let the hemp base color to shine through to give more life to it. I then proceeded to add dark blue into the grass on the shadow areas.

The sand still felt to flat and I wanted warmer colors on the front and I started to use pigments and chalk to add color variations and warmth to the overall base. Making it belong to the figure more then it had before.

I also trimmed the grass and made it less tall then it was from the start, do not remember where in the progress i did it 🙂 so adding the information here.

Final words a lesson learned. When I did the grass and incorporated it directly into the milliput it became very nice looking but very hard to paint the inner parts of the ground since there was a lot of grass in the way and became hard to reach. i will use this method more times but need to think of a good solution for how to paint the ground inside the grass tufts.

Thanks everybody that have taken the time to read this, hope it can be of some help.

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