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Dead of Winter (aka Serial Killer's Winter Wonderland)
I painted this scene as an entry for Round 1 of the fourth season of Iron Painter. Iron Painter is a very unique painting contest run at Wyrd Games. Each round the painters are paired with a random opponent and everyone has two weeks to paint something to fit a specific theme. After the entries are judged, only one of each pair progresses forward to the next round. The theme for this round was Dead of Winter. I haven't worked much with winter bases, so this was a great opportunity to so. I had fun painting the figure trapped under the ice, which was only my second experiment with dead skin. For the snowman, I thought he'd be creepier as a combination of bones and traditional snowman elements. He's made of pieces from various minis and GS, with the snow parts painted white then coated with Woodland Scenics snow. The coal buttons are small pieces of talus. The icicles are made from two part 5 minute epoxy glue. It gets a little stringy around minute 4, and I anchored it on toothpicks then stretched it out to get the icicle shapes. I worked pretty hard on the ice and frost on the base. I used Future floor wax with a tiny bit of white ink for the pool, having had prior bad experiences with Woodland Scenics Realistic Water and shrinkage. Future also had shrinkage problems, so I guess I'll have to look into some kind of resin if I try this again. The Future was definitely not sufficiently set when I started to work on the frost, but the deadline was looming. I have read numerous posts over the years of people getting undesired frosting effects when using matte sealers and flatteners, so I thought I'd try using that property to make frost. I mixed up batches of various proportions of Reaper's brush-on sealer and anti-shine additives. Straight anti-shine comes out just about pure white after it dries, so it looked a little more realistic mixed a little with the sealer or water.
Posted: 7 Nov 2007
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