So as luck would have it, in the month of March where my green color scheme would likely be the most appropriate I decided I would paint up that portion of my army that has the least amount of green in it, that’s right! The trees!
You would think some green foliage would work its way in there, but nah, it’s all about the pink cherry blossoms in this case. For this month I decided to do up a unit of forest shamblers and a forest warden, but I also decided to take it a step further and instead decided to do the Awoken Guardians legendary unit, and I wanted them to look a little bit different from the other forest shamblers available on the market today, namely a little twisted.
The only problem with wanting to be different is that it can sometimes be a real pain when it comes to finding appropriate models that fit the vision that you have for them. What I had in mind was a slightly darker, more twisted version of treemen than what is normally available, and most of the living trees you can find in most developers run into one of three problems with that idea: 1. Too small (thought about GW dryads), 2. Not creepy enough (Sorry Mantic… love you!) or 3. Too big.
So after a few weeks of searching, I started looking down at my toolbox for my hobby supplies and I see my roll of green stuff sitting there and a little voice in the back of my head starts saying… “ya know… we could always do our own trees….” But I scoffed at this idea, not least because I am no sculptor and am definitely nothing of the artist that it would take to craft miniatures that would look good on the tabletop. So I pushed on with my search.
I couldn’t get the thought out of my head, though. I kept reasoning that I was trying to push myself with this army to get myself to try things I hadn’t done in the past. With my Dragon Lord I pushed myself to use an airbrush and to ask for help in detailing and highlighting it up to be a much more impressive looking model than I had done before. So why shouldn’t I try this? What’s the worst that could happen? I make a crappy lump of green stuff and go back to the search for ready made treemen models? I’d only be out hours and hours of time working on it and frustration, not to mention my kids learning some very adult vocabulary as they listened to Dad vent his frustration at the weird little green blobs in front of him…
What could go wrong… right?
So I grabbed my tape of yellow and blue and set to work. I started off by making the roots for the feet and then inserting paper clips in to help form a type of skeleton and to base the rest of the body off, like so:
I then built on it like you see in all those time lapse sculpture videos you end up looking up while trying to figure out how to sculpt happy little trees and either end up with Bob Ross or Patrick Swayze (I swear the extrapolations for my YouTube que are waaaay more exciting than the reality behind them…) This went something like this in stages:
In order to create the bark like texture on the models, I used a dental pick that you can pick up in any big box store like Walmart or any craft store where there’s pottery equipment you can find something similar. I’ve also used a jewelry pick used for threading beads on wire to great effects. I wish I could give a more technical breakdown of what I did, but I basically just kept poking and prodding until the green stuff looked like bark to me and then let it sit. It was a long, slow process that took several days to build up any amount of growth because I would have to do a section and then let it dry overnight before adding new layers. The faces took even longer because I had to add the features layer by layer.
Once the sculpting was finished the actual process of painting them went pretty quick. They had a simple wood color that went from dark to light brown with some ivory highlights. Then I took some cherry blossom foliage that I had purchased from ScenicExpress.com (if you haven’t gone to this website then you need to go, like, right now) in order to tie the trees into my zen garden that I’m trying to convey with the rest of my army, so that the final product looked like this:
Once I had finished the horde, I realized they needed somebody to watch over them and with the CoK 19 changes to the Forest Warden, I figured he’d be the best choice possible. When I was sculpting him I thought of an idea of a gardener taking care of his area and what kind of implements that he might use. I was also wanting to keep with the creepy/twisted vibe for this guy, and I was thinking of giving him the Orcish Skullpole on top of it so I sculpted him accordingly with some extra bits, such as a toy skull, a broken paintbrush handle, and more green stuff to give him a gardening ho and a rather disapproving glare:
The theme seemed to work out great and I’m really pleased with how they turned out altogether. Plus the grand total was something like 295 points (215 for the Awoken Guardians and 80 for the Forest Warden with the Skullpole) so I was able to hit all the right spots for my 3 more bragging rights points for the army for this month.
As this project progresses I’m getting more and more excited for my army to see the tabletop. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to play and visually it’s looking better than any of my previous armies. I’ve been pushing myself with this one and thus far have been very happy with the results.
Next month will be more dragons (or drakkons as the case may be) before I move on to some cavalry as we pass the halfway mark with this project. I’ll look forward to hearing your comments and what you think of the project so far!
