The Nut Bowl League

Friday, July 07, 2006

Making of: Awards

I thought it would be fun to make some awards for the league, the two most obvious one to do would be one for most casualties and another for most touchdowns.

awards



The centre piece for the touchdown award is just a ball that came from Heresy. You get them together with some of the fantasy football miniatures that they sell. For the casualties award, I use an arm that came from the GW zombies plastic box. To match the fake grass of the ball, I blobbed a bit of greenstuff on the base, sculpted some grass then plonked the arm on (to get a negative impression of the arm). After the green is cured, I removed it and dabbed a bit of superglue and stuck the arm back on to improve its stickage.

The base that I stuck the ball and arm to is a 20mm circle base, which I filled the slot with an expoy putty, then sandpapered flat. This is followed by a 30mm display type slotted base. Both bases are now readily available form several places including eM-4, Hasslefree and Heresy.

Lastly I wanted the award to have a big base so I went hunting, door knobs, counters, wooden wheels, whatever. Eventually I found this chinese chess set that had just the right sized playing pieces.

award2Then I stuck some moulded plastic letters to the playing pieces to spell out the award. I bought these from Slater originally to use the numbers on the side of the bases for my next team if I get round to doing another one... Since I only wanted the numbers, might as well use the alphabets for something! The one I used is the 3mm one, just lucky that there is a 3mm border around the base!

All the seperate pieces are then sprayed black. I decided to spray them seperately because I thought that it might be easier to get coverage over the little letters and also it would probably be easier to pick them out in paint later on. After the spray I discovered that I didn't do that good a job filling the slot so I patched up the few holes with wood filler then painted it black.

award3The individual pieces are then painted up where needed. The letters were picked out with Vallejo Game Colour 47 Wolf Grey. I didn't want to use white as I thought it would be too powerful and end up a bit flat, so I went for a pale bluish grey instead.

The metalic paint on the award models were first coated with Vallejo Model Colour (VMC) 864 Natural Steel. I watered it down a bit and painted 2 layers onto it to get a good coverage. Then I covered it with a wash made up of water, VMC 854 Brown Glaze, Tamiya Clear Orange, and an old Citadel Colour Armour Wash (they no longer produce it, but the formula is the same if you get a Coat d' Arms paint). Then I gave a second weaker wash on the 'grass' part to darken it. Then I use the original paint, Natural Steel, watered down to paint lightly over the raised part of the ball and hand. And lastly, gave the highest point a dab with watered down VMC 997 Silver to make it a bit more shiney.

award4When all the paints are dry, they are then stuck together. I use the equivalent of liquid nails. Leave it overnight for the glue to harden and the paint to dry completely. Then a matt varnish will finish the job. All done!

Epiloge: Stupid crappy varnish misted so I had to repaint the 'metal' bits... The misting created an odd effect on the black though that is sort of interesting. Stangely it did not affect the putty/wall filler I used to fill up the slot as much as the other bits making it look a bit funny. Maybe its to do with the acrylic paint I used to paint over the wood filler.

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