Gokufan's Celestial Genesis: Jingwei

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Project Entry by gokufan

Base

February 14, 2020

Tutoring 3

Skill 4

Idea 3

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Sorry for the long gap between updates! Not starting the blog until after finishing the mini makes it hard for me to remember to do them.

Anyway, on to the base. I want to thank Oliver Spaeth’s patreon for some excellent tutorials that I followed for the first time with this base. If you like it, he has excellent step by step guides on making bases about 50 times as cool as this one.

I started by picking up some dead bark off the ground in the woods near my house. I recommend drying it out at a low temperature in the oven for a few hours so it doesn’t start rotting after you finish the base.

I broke up the bark into some pleasing shapes and attached them to a wooden cube. I then filled in some of the gaps with milliput, and attempted to give it a bit of a natural looking texture. I also carved down some of the edges and raised up others with milliput. I wasgoing for a nature base here so I didn’t want the edges of the base to be straight lines. (One of my big lessons learned here was to do a better job of this next time).

After the milliput dried I sanded the edges to get the bark and milliput nice and planar with the sides of the cube.

Base constructed

I envisioned her floating over some alien hills and vegetation, so I went for a blue and orange (as opposed to brown and green) scheme to sell the “alien” part of the concept.

From there I zenithal primed the base with my airbrush.

Then using the airbrush and drybrushing I gave the base a desaturated blue color all over.

From there I used some pigment powders to seperate the milliput “dirt” from the bark “rocks”.

Finally, I made some orange grass out of jute. This was my first time trying this and I did a pretty crummy job, to be honest.

Looks, well, not great. The grass is badly made and bunched up in weird shapes, and the "dirt" has a wadded up chewing gum look to it.

I tore off the grass and went much harder with the drybrushing on the rocks and pigments on the dirt to try and get a more natural look. Much better

Then I sculpted Tarquin and Jimothy here to spruce it up a bit. They're inspired by the Eye of Kilrog spell from Warcraft 2

I used some fine clump flock soaked in super glue, painted with bluegreen ink, and then drybrushed with grey to create some moss/lichenish vegetation.

Finally, I took another crack at the jute grass clumps... and failed again. But on my third try I produced some pretty passable clumps, in my opinion. The trick is to thin the paint even more than you think you need to. It should basically be paint colored water.

And with the base finished, that’s it for the process on this mini. My next and final update will have glamor shots, my thoughts on the process, and the terrible, fatal mistake I made with the concept! See you then.