Terrain Challenge: Summoning Portal

For the portal I wanted to use ink washes on the clear perspex but wasn’t really sure how it would end up looking. As I didn’t have any spares of the perspex and was unsure how well it would clean if I needed to redo elements I decided to try a few test pieces on plastic packaging – casings for grass tufts in this instance.

The example at the top of the above photo was the result of mixing Army painter inks with flow improver and brushing on. The one at the bottom of the above pic was done by brushing flow improver in a thin coat all over the plastic sheet, then dropping on pure AP inks and tipping the plastic to allow them to move and swirl about a little. Regrettably most of the colour leaked out of the plastic package as it was drying so most of the effect was lost. While the effect was interesting, it was a little too subtle for what I was aiming for. Would keep this technique up my sleeve though and incorporate it into the finished product later on.

With the first couple of tests completed I could see that I would need something with more pigment. For test 3 I brushed on a much thinner backing of flow improver and switched to Vallejo inks, which seem to have much more pigment. I probably went a bit far with the number of drops of ink on the third test…

Once the plastic was loaded up, tilted it again to get the ink to move around and swirl and mix a little.

Left it to dry overnight and in the morning found this was the result (when viewed through the other side of the plastic packaging):

So closer to what I was aiming for. I did still want something a little more controlled (although this would work great for fires of Tzeentch or similar) but now had a much better idea for how to plan for the ‘production’ portal pieces.