Sinister Statue

I went to the craft store looking for a quick pedestal for it & grabbed a wooden candle stick like this:

and cut the bottom off. I picked up a Reaper mini to be the statue. (It's #3084 if you're wondering.) I was a little put off about the ratio between the pedestal & my mini, but I guess it'll be fine.

I took some Sculpey & tightly packed it around my wooden piece. Baked it, plus a clay plug to keep the final plaster piece hollow to fit a red LED tea light, then cut a dividing line into the mold to remove the wood.

I taped my mold back together along that seam to prevent excessive leaking. Conveniently, my mold fit nicely into my plastic  cups. The knob for the center was taped to a bamboo stick which rested on more cups to keep it in place. Mixed & poured the plaster. Then waited for dry time.

Not the most perfect cast I've ever seen, but that's ok. It's going to get broken anyways.

And break it did.

 
Getting it glued back together while still leaving gaps was awfully tricky. I'm still not confident in it's strength at this point.

But oh, to see it glow!

Started working on some platform stones. I drew them out onto foam core.

  
Cut them out individually, painted them & attached them to a CD with gaps for more light to shine through. For my ground, I covered it in course pummice gel medium & sprinkled on some stones.

Also got my lady together with some extra skulls around her feet. I did end up doing extra glueing on the pedestal which was a good idea, because this has been dropped a good 4 inches onto a table & survived.

   
Did a marble-ish paint job on everything based on this lovely article we have here. I definitely think I need more practice, but it's not so bad (not that you can tell from this photo). 

And here's everything together so far.

  
Did my first ever attempt at OSL painting on her eyes. The result raises an enthusiastic "Meh." Wasn't expecting much, but I'm not sure it gives off the effect I'm looking for or if she just looks sunburnt.... 

 I ended up toning that down some by taking a dark grey wash on the outer edges of the glow. Also added some grass tufts between the stones & around on the ground. And that's about it for this one.

  

 

Altar of Khaine

This is one had a lot of trial & error to it, but ended up alright in the end.
I wanted to have a Dark Elfy looking shrine & altar for killing people on top of a stone platform. Inspired by Ale's Dark Elf Tower over on TerraGenesis, I set to work on creating a sort of spine out of card. They are 8 of the same shape glued together at the core with hot glue. Then panels were cut out to connect them together.

As it turns out, this first shape looked dumb after all of the panels were put on... so did my second attempt. Third attempt worked out more like I was hoping for.

After I got that figured out, I cut the stone platform out of 1" insulation foam. The altar is also a scrap piece of foam with a bit of foam core under it & spikey corners cut from blister plastic.

  Moving on to painting...

 This is where I realized I needed something more. The Altar of Khaine is all about Dark Elves making blood sacrifices. Sure I can make the altar part all bloody, but would that be enough blood? The answer is: no way. I also felt that big pokey thing in the back needed something else to balance it's massive height, so some brainstorming & I landed on adding pillars to either side.

 So, I hacked into the platform a little bit and cut up some foam core for 2 obelisks. The decorative faces on them were just drawn in with a ballpoint pen. Now we have a nice inventory of blood & a better overall balance to the piece.

Pour in some blood & we're all set to go. For the blood pit, I did a thick layer of dark red colored resin, let that dry, then poured a thinner layer that barely had any red to it, & took a stick with a brighter red (and sometimes black) paint on it & swirled it into the wet resin. Then I put in various sizes of red plastic beads for blood bubbles & dragged some of the resin over them to help them blend into the surface.

Taaadaaa! That's my Altar of Khaine. Thanks for looking! :-)