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LOTR View #3 sculpted Grond with extras by James
Here is my most momentous project to date. It is 28 mm scale, which you can see clearly in the other pics. The dimensions of the base are 13 x 25 inches. The dinosaur-like creatures and the ram itself are made from sculpey and green stuff. The two trolls pushing on the back were heavily converted GW cave trolls, and the three orc archers are GW LOTR orcs. This was a logistical nightmare, for a variety of reasons. Even the suspension of Grond from the pylons took an entire day. It turned out that I had to use jewelry wire, which got a bit pricey. However, it was the right scale, and the correct strength. Also, it allows you to remove the battering rame from the carriage if you need to move the diorama around. Painting this was painful, since there were a great deal of hard to reach areas! I had to use angled brushes to get at much of the diorama. Plus, I am used to a more 'colorful' of 'pristine' look on my minis, so creating the dirty, dark limited color range was a challenge. I basically had to remove a bunch of my paint bottles from the rack to avoid the temptation :-) The battering ram is hollow, to cut down on weight. I had to create a pretty crazy armature to do this. It was actually a spiral of heavy wire. I wrapped it in a thin layer of sculpy, and once that was baked, I added all the other details. Post-baking carving was employed very frequently for the ram :-) The carriage is secured to the base by heavy wire which was sunk all the way to the bottom of the foam base. Coease pumice-glue was used to seal everything onto the base, and give it the blasted wastes appearance of Mordor. Even that was a big switch for me. Needless to say, I had to develop many new techniques to make this thing happen!
Posted: 1 Jul 2004
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