Ruined Chapel 2

Oh my God I'm so happy with how this turned out.

When I left you in suspense last time, I'd got to this stage:

The Khaki basecoat was on, and I'd daubed random bricks with Neutral Grey. I have to admit, I was thinking it looked a bit odd at this point.

The next stage was to daub other random bricks with Gold Brown. This made it look even stranger but I just went with it, safe in the knowledge that I have a new bottle of Simple Green.

With the colours added it was time for a drybrush with some more Khaki...

...and a second drybrush with Ash Grey, and then a third with Ghost Grey. It's starting to look better, although I'm still not 100% sure this method is going to work for this piece.

Now it's time for the shading. Using Black Wash I brushed it over the left side to start but couldn't see it doing too much, so I took a tip from the tutorial and just squeezed some straight onto the model's right side and began brushing. This was not the best of ideas as it covered way too heavily, as you can see between the right arch and pillar thing. I have seen ruins with blackened walls, which I've always assumed to be from some long-past fire, so I think it works. The wash darkened the whole structure so I gave it another drybrushing with Ghost Grey.

I drybrushed and shaded the stones forming the arch too much and they pretty much lost their grey and gold tints, which is bloody annoying. I didn't know if I should redo them or leave them, and I decided to leave them because I didn't want to risk messing them up.

If you look closely, Alicia's in this photo. Not that she knows.

At this stage it looked good, but I wanted to add some vegetation to it to make it more realistic. If I had access to my PC I could pick a bunch of photos of ruined castles and abbeys to show what I mean, but I don't have six hours to hunt through the garage. I decided to use a method I'd seen in another YouTube video: green paint and tea leaves.

I mixed them together into what's basically a lumpy paste, dabbed some on with the end of a needle file, applied it to the ruins and immediately wiped it off as it looked like crap. I'm so glad my nan isn't around to see me waste a good cup of tea. Well I'm not glad my nan isn't around as she was awesome, but you know what I mean.

Then I remembered the Woodland Scenics flock stuff I bought ages ago at Brookhurst Hobbies in Garden Grove. I really miss that place. They had a bigger range of Vallejo paints than Amazon and more Reaper figures than I could paint in a lifetime. Anyway, I've literally never used the flock, but now it was about to finally serve its purpose. I've never been a huge fan of flock (is it even still called that?) since my painting days back the late 80s. I dabbed some tacky glue onto the model, pressed on a little bit of flock, and left it to dry. 

Just typing flock all the time reminds me of one of my fave Calvin and Hobbes strips:

Shit, now I really miss Calvin and Hobbes.

I dug out my other, slightly brighter green flock and added some of that. I didn't want to overdo it but at the same time I was having fun, but I know it's easy to overdo this kind of effect so I finally forced myself to stop.

Once the tacky glue had thoroughly dried I blew off as much of the loose flock as the lungs of a fomer smoker could handle. I thought the colour of the vegetation was too uniform so I mixed Yellow Green and Jungle Green and gently dabbed some on the flock with a toothpick to vary it a bit. 

I finished all that on Monday, and today I decided to add some more vegetation:  

I used some stuff that's supposed to be long grass to add some weeds, which is another thing you see on real ruins. There's a some on the upper left and right, and a longer bit on the lower right. It looks OK but was an absolute bastard to apply so I stopped after doing three spots. Finally, I used a sponge to lightly dab on some Green Yellow to simulate lichen across the bottom bricks.

Part of me sort of wishes I'd used autumn colours for the vegetation, but I need to stop second-guessing myself because I'm well happy with the way these ruins turned out.

So, another piece of scenery done? That's two in just over a week. I wish it was August right now, I'd be cleaning up in Dave's Summer of Scenery challenge. This model was pretty straightforward to paint, and the tutorial I found worked really well, despite my reservations about using Khaki and Gold Brown and doing the shading before the highlighting. It'll certainly work as a background for my fantasy and Chaos minis, but I'll need a backdrop to go behind the arch as an out-of-focus dog food tin full of brushes isn't very Slaanesh.