Season of Scenery: Cavern pools and mushroom trees

Here's some more scenery for this year's challenge!

The pool I posted a couple of weeks ago was my second attempt at a resin pour (the first will be posted soon, honest). Since then I've done two more, both using 3D printed scenery from, you guessed it, Etsy.

Both of these pieces are PLA prints, meaning they're a lot rougher in terms of texture than resin prints. Although I generally avoid PLA prints, it works really well for rocky cavern terrain.

This pretty basic piece was the third resin job I did. It's a decent model and is perfect for an underground pool, and I like that it has the path going up around the side, although I wouldn't recommend diving into the water. Sci-fi smuggler Jessica Blaze is there for scale despite looking a bit incongruous in such a setting.

Before painting the model I had to make a border/rim around one side between the smaller pool and the bottom of the ramp to contain the resin. I used a few layers of hot glue and sprinkled it with sand to add some texture.

The resin print was sprayed with black primer and then overbrushed/drybrushed with various grey craft paints including Pewter Grey, Grey, Country Grey and Granite Grey. I used White to highlight the bottom of the pools to be sure they'd show up through the tinted resin.

The path looked very flat, so I gave it a once-over with thinned homemade black wash and it really helped bring out the rocky texture. I ended up giving the entire model a wash to tie it all together, and then painted a few mushrooms and stuck them on.

Resin time! The two-part resin was mixed in a small plastic cup and I added a few drops of Drakenhof Nightshade to add a blue tint. Once I made sure the resin looked good, I slowly poured it into the smaller pool first and then the larger pool. I placed a tall plastic container over the whole thing to keep dust and dog hairs off and left it for three days to allow the resin to set.

While that model dried I kicked off with this bit more ambitious one. Once again Jessica gives a good idea of the size of this piece, which has multiple pools on different levels. 

It was painted the same way as the other one, but I did forget to highlight the bottom of the pools enough and so the texture doesn't show through the resin as well. 

The integral mushrooms were quickly painted with Electric Blue, Flat Red and Hexed Lichen, and the weird vase-like plants in one of the pools were given a coat of Brown Orange and highlighted with Wild Rider Red and Fire Dragon Bright.

I mixed a lot more resin for this one, too much as it turned out but I didn't want to end up running out and having to match the tint of a new batch. This time I added Coelia Greenshade for a more blue-green look and poured it into the pools, starting with the bottom one as I knew I'd have to tilt the model to get the resin to flow into all the nooks and crannies. 

With that one filled it was just a case of working my way up to the top pool. The smaller ones were filled by scooping up resin with the end of a coffee stirrer stick and letting it drip into the hollow.

Apart from having to wait three days for the resin to dry, both these models were very easy to paint and ended up looking great. 

Mushroom trees

I bought these just after getting my first set of night goblins. I thought they looked pretty cool and would work very well as fantasy terrain. Again these are PLA prints, meaning there's a lot of print lines on them. But as with the pools, the lines just add texture and allow for some quick and easy drybrushing.

I kicked off with a basecoat of grey spray primer before painting the tops of the trees with Violet. Some fairly heavy drybrushing with Hexed Lichen and then Purple, and then a lighter drybrush with a mix of White and Purple, brought out the details. The raised bumps were just painted Off-White and White.

The trunks were given a couple of coats of thinned Forest Flesh and a wash with Seraphim Sepia. I drybrushed some more Forest Flesh to bring out the texture, then added Ivory to it for the second highlights.

Their bases were covered with Mod Podge, flock and a couple of small stones, and I cracked out the purple flowers to add some more colour. I painted two small mushrooms and glued them in place, and they were done!

More scenery is on its way soon!