The Temple of Blood Army board/ terrain piece--lots of pics!

Yes, I know it has been many weeks since I last posted.

A big part of that had to do with Adepticon, which was last weekend. In addition to teaching our 3 painting classes, I participated in the WFB championships on Saturday. I had done the Adepticon primer tournament a month or so before to get ready for it.

There were 156 armies total in the tournament (78 tables), which is a tad bit larger than the biggest tourney I have ever done (48 players). I knew that there would be all sorts of amazing armies there, and I was right! Some really incredible stuff.

I spent many weeks working on the rest of my army, but the biggest time sponge was the army board. I wanted to do the Temple of Blood as a useable piece of terrain for a 4 part campaign, so that added many levels of complexity to the project! I had to continually change the dimensions so that it would be a workable game element.

As it turns out, I not only won Best Painted, but I managed to win Player's Choice. That was helped by the combination of army board as terrain piece, my story about the army, the temple, and my general, and some other artwork. I also printed out some pictures of all my scratch sculpted pieces, of which there were many.

I don't know how these pictures will look here. Every time I think I have it right, I don't





























The army was 2000 points. I will post some info on how it was made, along with IP images. There's a lot here to absorb!

 

very nice - looks like a lot of work went in to that

 

Yes, it took about 8 days of continuous work.

It seems that the pictures ended up smaller, as I feared. Oh well.

Anyway, the board is made mostly of foam core, along with matt board, heavy paper stock and sculpey. The glyphs that can be seen all over the temple were sculpted years ago, and then cast with a jewler's moulding compound.

I cast several dozen pieces to put on the temple. The serpent columns were also sculpted years ago, and cast the same way. I also use that design for objective markers.

The red around the base of the temple is a blood moat, which flows from the blood pool. It counts as dangerous terrain, and can only be crossed safely by using one of the 3 causeways. I will tell you guys about the rules later. I also have to include the story of The Temple of Blood and the Legend of Stiki Wikitt!!

 

It isn't the first time I see your work but it's the first time I'll comment it: awesome work man!

Terrain looks splendid, the army is awesome (especially the stegadons!) and I must say that seeing your army with all that terrain inspires me with my project. I don't think I'll ever be able to paint up to your standard but I sure hope to be able to put together a nice looking force by september (I give myself a lot of time, don't want to rush things and I don't know how fast I'll paint since it's been years since the last time).

Congrats on your work, congrats on winning those awards and hopefully you start posting here regularly again .

 

8 DAYS !!!

Simply Amazing...


And an incredible army to boot.

 

Thanks for all the kind words!

At some point I will also have to post the individual pictures of the scratch sculpted EOtG's which were finally painted to 100% Also, the skink/kroxigor units and skink skirmisher unit got all their vegetation, etc.

Now I have to work on sculpting more terradons and salamanders for the multi-part campaign using this board. I also need to sculpt some riderless carnasaurs and swarm bases.

While it was a lot of work to make this (and the kitchen is still covered in static grass!), I am definitely glad I went through with the project I am making extensions for the middle levels so that large combats can be fought on each level. Companion structures, such as spawning pools, warp gates, and minor temples would be next on the list for terrain.

 

Good to see you back on the board, Wappellious, and as always absolutely amazing work! Congratulations on your awards.

We have limited the width of all images to 640 pixels on the board to stop any stretching out the pages, which is why they got shrank. If you want to, you can just post the direct photobucket links and people can see them full size there.

Any plans for skink priest conversions filling up the Temple?

 

Those all look amazing great work

 

WOW... That is amazing! What was your list for the tournament? I see 3 skrox units, some skirmishers, a salamander and 2 EotG, but what was it and how did you perform?

 

Thanks for the advice on the picture sizes. It does make a big difference when you see the larger images!

This was a 2000 point tournament, with 4 scenarios. They used WPS for initial matchups and soft scores. I was a 15.3, I believe, on the WPS scale.

For me, the tournament itself was plagued with some rotten luck and crazy events. I had won all 3 of my primer tournament games a month before with the same list, so I felt like I would not embarrass myself. The games were special scenarios, with pre-set terrain on every table. It was more condusive to my army, with lots of fast units that could shoot down the big nasties people might bring, and there were lots of places to hide my EOtG's to keep them from being shot down on turn 1, as usual.

Those scenarios suited my army very well, but certain special rules bit me in the rear.

For instance, in my first game, I was under the impression that the largest unit within 12 inches of a special feature would control it, not the closest unit above US 5! I heard from at least 4 or 5 other players who thought the same thing.

Instead of a draw with 20 battle points, I went to a draw with only 11 battle points! The other player was a few inches closer with 7 skirmishing archers who I could not kill or make run away.

Also, most of my opponents were not used to playing objective based games. I kept continually advising them when I should have kept my mouth shut! In my 3rd game, I scattered for the objectives on my last turn. I felt bad for the other player, who was about to lose big time. I left the 150 point salamander unit for him to kill on his last turn.

That was a mistake, as he killed that unit. I also forgot to count the extra 200 VP's I should have gotten for controlling the objectives! I ended up with a draw by 46 points, instead of a 400+ point victory. Yup, that's how I roll.

I went up against Brettonians, two nearly identical Dark Elf armies, and a Chaos mortals army.

Live and learn!

 

Stunning as always, Wappellicious.

 

you got pics of the other armies that were there?

Sanjay

 

How did you do the images inside the EotG portals? That's a cool concept and it really brings out the feel of the Old Ones' lost technology and alien heritage.

Overall very masterful work.

 

I agree with the above post. Would love to see some close-ups on the EoTG's and the steggies

 

I will be taking individual pictures of the two engines soon. You can see the WIP images of how they were scratch built in an earlier thread in this section.

They were entirely scratch built with sculpey, brown stuff and apoxy sculpt.

The two portals are double sided, indicating that they can be used to travel great distances through time and space. For many years, I was aan illustrator and 2D artist, and spacescapes were one of my favorite subjects. I could not resist painting a few on the portals!

 

Look here.

 

Thanks for posting the link!

I still have to put new photos up of the EOtG's, since they were not actually finished in those photos yet. I spent about 3-4 more hours on the greenish stegadon!

Cheers!

 

That's pretty amazing stuff! Can't believe those are freehanded... amazing.

 

Amazing work wappellious. =)

One of the things I've been curious about and the reason for me joining these boards actually, (first post =D ) was to ask you how you approached the broken up ground on the bases of the individual units.

I've been working on my bases and used sculpey, which I flattened out into thin sheets and baked. The sheets turned out ok, though a little...rubbery. I cut them apart into squares using scissors and glued them onto the bases, breaking them in different places and using sand to fill in the gaps, so it would look like broken up slabs of temple pavement on the ground.

Yours look amazing and I was hoping you'd be kind enough to share your process. =)

Thanks and again, awesome army and display board!

 

The key is in the type of sculpey used. We use the white sculpey for our broken up/carved tile bases. It is much softer, breaks very easily, and is easy to carve. The pink Super Sculpey, and the millions of small packages of Sculpey III.

The other bonus is that the regular Sculpey is the cheapest version