Diorama: Base, Weapons

I started by painting one of my plasticard swords today. It's a rough job, as I decided part way through that it just wasn't working. The gold isn't terrible, and that gives me hope that with enough time and practice I could get it. Start with a sword that's less chunky, for one thing...that looks kinda like  a Fisher Price starter blade in shape.

But, the cock is ticking, and I don't think I have that kind of time. So I went back through my Bones collection and found these weapons:

I could put the sword with the Tyranid sword, or maybe just put the club up across the top by itself. I'm going to work with these a while and see.

Then I went on to texturing the base. I got myself a sample image to work from and then tried to replicate it.The blocks are all variations. They all have the same lighter streaks, The leftmost has dark blue speckles in the streaks and brown speckles in the base color. The next to the right has just bleu speckles. The next to the right has no speckles. Each of those tiles has a heavy glaze of the base color on the left half. The rightmost til has both black and blue speckles again, and a lighter glaze on the left side.

I'm pretty happy with the results. At least one of these will work for me, I just have to decide what look I like best.

I had a little time left so I went on to painting the back. Base coat of beige, then fading to the darker orange. I futzed with it for a while...the final would need to be smoother. Tomorrow I might try with the airbrush to see if I can get a smoother gradient. I also tried putting a couple of cracks in it. Not awesome, but promising. Overall I'm pretty happy with it all.