Well last night some painting needed to be done (you know when you get that itch that only working with models can scratch?) So I gathered up my son and we headed down stairs to make some magic. I wanted to start on the Vindicator and Predator but they were not yet fully dried from their Simple Green baths. I really didn't feel like painting my Legion of Everblight, and my son wanted to work on his Protectorate of Menoth by himself.
Then inspiration struck. I have always loved looking at wargaming diorama's. The good ones, the bad ones, the jaw dropping stuff you see from folks like Maz at Winterdyne. I started looking around at my shelves to see what I had that I could use. I decided I wanted to do something fun, on the easier side (it's my first time so why not try and be gentle?) and big.
I remembered that my wife had these 10" basswood rounds in her craft room just taken up space.... I grabbed two of them, some spackle, and it was time to build.
This is going to be a Warmachine Diorama as those are what I have laying around. I had purchased a few models that I wanted to paint but dont have armies for yet so they will go in this thing.
So here is the break down of what I have done and how I did it.
1. Two 10" wood rounds glued together - no picture because come on, use your imagination of a circle people.
2. I grabbed bases for the sizes of models that will be going into the diorama and used blue tack to hold them down on the wood, laying out where I want them to be.
3. As I was doing this my son (8yr old no less) was making sandbags (well cutting them off the sprue) I got these at Hobby Lobby for like $3 fantastic investment I say
4. It was time to figure out where to lay out the sandbag line. I did this dry and then used a pen to loosely mark how I wanted them layed out. Then glued down the base layer using super glue.
6. Now the fun part, laying down some spakle, I don't own a "spakel knife" nor would it be a good idea to use on something like this (too big) but I did have a few plastic knives about so we used what we had. I like using spakle for something like this as its light weight, can be primed and painted and you can make it smooth or give it some texture depending on how you applied it. It was my go to for basing when I took a month and did a FOW army way back in the day. Also a small tub of the stuff is like $4 and is more than enough to fill this entire thing up.
If you notice from the picture, I filled the spakle in high around the bases and up about 1/3 of the way up the first row of sandbags, its going to be the ground (obviously) so it needs to reflect that. The reason to get it slightly above the bases is so that when I put the models on it they look as seamless as possible.
This should dry in about 24 hours and I can start priming and painting it up. Just in time for the Vindicator and Predator to fully dry so I can work on them.
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