Realm of Chaos scenery

So, a couple of years back, during my 'determined to start a Path To Glory campaign' phase, I decided to make some scenery to go with my set of generic rocky terrain to portray battles fought in the Chaos Wastes.

Thick card for bases, thin cork layers and a box of Wargames Factory skeletons that I bought from someone on the Lead Adventure Forum that had tried building them and given it up as a fool's errand (as one of the connections in the models is between the ankles and feet, giving almost no point of contact for glue...)

Some cutting, layering and glueing later, we have the basis of a couple of bone pits and a pool of blood (standard northman decor)

Apply textured paint (just cheap black acrylic mixed with sand, filler and whatever oddments I happen to have within arms reach)

I fancied making a mini diorama-esque piece too - the skeleton of a marauder that had had his leg broken, and propped himself up against a rocky outcrop to wait for death. The body was easy enough to make (as it rested against the rock, rather than trying to build one standing)...

And to really tie it in as a piece of Chaos scenery, I hollowed out a marauder helmet and shaved down a skull to fit inside it!

Cleaned up skeleton bits were then haphazardly glued into the bone pits, and everything got a coating of poundland grey spray. [side note: I don't think I've actually finished painting any of the miniatures that you can see undercoated in that last picture]

After painting the bones and bottom of the blood pool, I have everythin a generous wash of diluted Vallejo Smoke, the get everything looking grubby and shaded.

Fast forward a couple of years...

A couple of weeks ago I decided to finally finish this mini-project, as it had been sat in a box near completion for far too long. I painted all the bones, drybrushed all the rocky areas up to Bleached Bone, and then made a start on the blood in the pool of blood. 

After painting the base of the pool in reds and a layer of Tamiya Clear Red (the go-to paint for blood effects) I gave it a coat of PVA glue, figuring I could create some depth with glue and translucent paints to make it look deeper than it was actually modelled.

The thing is, I hadn't realised how long PVA glue takes to dry. Into the cupboard with the stacks of half-painted miniatures and currently in-use paints it went for a couple of days to protect it from dust, until it looked like this:

Not very deep at all. So, rinse and repeat:

Another thin layer, another couple of days, and I think fine, that will have to do to avoid it taking another two years! Plus, the PVA was drying less translucent than I had envisaged, so on to painting!

A layer of TCR went on, which looked a little bright on its own;

So while it was still wet I added a few drops of Armypainter Strong Tone and blended it in, to make it look darker and gorier.

Several layers of the GW blood effect paint Blood for the Blood God later and we have a nice sticky wet looking pool of blood!

So the finished set looks like this:

Added to the existing rocky scenery, we have enough to set up a picture of Gotrek and Felix trekking through the Wastes, waiting for the next calamity to stumble into...

Now, for some behind bs the scenes info: just how do I get these blurry poorly lit shots that seem to make up most of the pictures on my blog. Well, this is how:

Yes, I wear a shirt and tie whilst taking iPhone pictures for my blog. Which also explains some of the weird typos you might have noticed, as autocorrect doesn't believe in some words that I use and I don't always catch them before posting...

One day I may come back to this terrain set (if I ever paint my Path to Glory warband that's been sat undercoated for who knows how long now), and add some additional elements - a forest of spikes jutting out of the ground, a large altar, or some mysterious gateways an obelisks maybe...