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Treebeard Diorama
Around 2 years ago my girlfriend mentioned how much she liked the Treebeard miniature from Games Workshop, when we were painting some miniatures for the shop I work for, so the shop could get a GW premium store. I managed it to convinced her to first finish her Fellowship of the Ring miniatures, before starting a new, bigger mini and shortly after I thought, hey; I could paint her the Treebeard and give it to her as a Christmas present. But just painting Treebeard how he is - out of the box - is boring, everyone can do that. So I thought lets build some stuff around it, like some kinda forest, or well, at least some trees and some rocks and a tiny river would be also great. I was really enthusiastic about it - at that time. Have I mentioned I never build any terrain - ever - nor did I had any kinda experience with creating water, and overall I painted like 40 miniatures; half of them were some annoying little Moria Goblins. So in mid Novermber 2009 I started, and finished it in quite a hurry 4 days before Christmas after pulling night shift after night shift to get it finished in time; if I would have known how much time this "little project" would take, I most likely would have never started it or just made a small base. I used some Polystyrol as a base, the trees are from the GW forest, I really liked the style of them, the base of the GW forest is build into the base of the whole diorama, some of the trees and the tree stump are extended with Fimo, most rocks are also from Polystyrol and gypsum. To create the river I made 4 small "test rivers" to try different materials for water, colour, rocks and stuff; for the final version I used the GW water effects, it was the most easy to handle stuff I could find. The river turned out okish, although I don't like the colour much. Also since I was in a hurry with the whole diorama, Merry got quite some starring eyes which really look bad, but after it took me at least 10 tries to get that face more or less proper and another 20 for the eyes removing the paint and trying again and again, what drove me nearly insane I thought fuck it you little hobbit, no time for your stupid eyes, lets move on, I've got mountains to build! The "forest" also didn't turned out as wild as I wanted to have him, but well, maybe next time I have a bit more money to invest it into fancy model train bushes and stuff. Overall I think it turned out okish, considering its the first bigger project I have done, I learned quite a lot doing it and I hope you like it. Comments are always welcome...
Posted: 18 Jul 2010
