Ballroom Blitz

I have the attention span of half a dead goldfish at the best of times. And today, I had the plastic dome thing from an individual Flake ice cream on the table next to me. And Darren is playing a weekend of Those Dark Places soon. Seems obvious, right?

With my scavenging instincts sharper than a truffle hog on RedBull, I dove once more into the bits box. I was going to make a rusty, broken up, dangerous bio-dome. Yeah. How cool is that!

It took me 2 hours, a load of weathering powder, and almost an entire bottle of Nuln Oil, but I did it.

I wanted to make sure I had a nice, flat surface to work on, so I cut pieces of Plasticard (also found in the carnage of the store room bits box) to size, and stuck ’em on top of the stairs. I made a mini flight to connect the main stairs to the balcony level atop the walls, and added some side panels to cover the messy cork.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to this one, Gerry!

Anyway, today, I dragged out this project from its dusty shelf in the store room at work, and got back on it. I decided I wanted a grand flight of stairs leading into the ballroom for the Beast to stand on looking all impressive and stuff.

I had a rummage through the bits boxes, and came up with a nice sheet of thick cork tile. Happy with my find, I set it one side and went a-burrowing again. This time, I found some old wooden castle walls that never actually saw a terrain board since I bought the damn things. That’s the ballroom walls sorted, then.

I played around until I found a position I liked (ooh-err missus), and then set about measuring the gap to cut the cork to size. I wanted at least the first few steps to be usable terrain, so I made sure the treads were large enough  to accommodate the base of a mini. I curved the fronts to make an interesting shape, and cut two for each step to make them tall enough when glued together.

When I discovered Moonstone last year, there were so many models I wanted to paint. We got a demo kit in for the shop, and I was tasked with painting the goblins, so they kind of automatically became my troupe. I loved them, and I love playing them, but there were still models left that I wanted to paint. So I’ve decided to create a little diorama for them, based on the idea of a creepy masquerade ball. The models I wanted for it are:

• The Beast
• The Duchess
• Creep
• The Revenant

So I smiled nicely at Darren and promptly took those boxes off the shelves.

First up, I wanted some nice bases for them. I wanted them to look like they were actually in a ballroom. I grabbed the Green Stuff and filled the top of the base with a nice, even coverage of it. Then, I took a craft knife and scored out a chequered pattern on the top. As it started to dry, I kept going back and cleaning up the scoring, until I had well defined squares on each base. Once completely dry, I painted them in traditional black and white.

I also found a couple of candle sconces in a random bits box, so I painted those up too. They’ll look great in the ballroom.