Here’s my entry: the Rotting Ancient Shrine – the third Eyetoad Challenge of the Weald
The Challenge Rules
The rules are as follows. Roll 3d6 which determine the topic of your entry. The entry will be a piece of terrain with a diameter of less than 12cm. Another limitation (or motivation) is that you need to include a piece of nature which you found.
So my kid took a dice and rolled three times: 3 for Rotting, 5 for Ancient and 6 for Shrine. Next I went outside and found a nicely shaped piece of wood in my pile of chopped wood. And then I started staring at that piece of wood. For quite a while. Slowly turning it in my hands, inspecting it from all sides when creativity hit me. Given the topic I new I need something rotting, but didn’t know how to deal with that yet. So I start with Ancient Shrine. My interpretation was a an old shrine used by different worshippers with different habits.
One of these groups would have set up grave stones. Luckily I had these amazing 3D-printable gravestones which accidentally also had a version with tentacles growing. Which was a fit for the Rotting part. Another group, probably taking over after the gravestone group would place holy relics in beautifully shaped containers. Yet another group, the latest maybe, would use the place to sacrifice whatever beings. Until the rot came. In the form of tentacles growing from below the tree. This is also when the mushrooms started growing.
Building and Painting
First step was placing the piece of wood. The majority of the building process was printing parts from various vendors. Gravestones, cages, relics. Of course I’ve printed a lot more than I needed in the end. Once every item was ready I test fitted their positions on the shrine. Some places needed some adaption (like creating crevasses and flat surface areas) that the items had a better placement.
The tentacles and mushrooms I created with Milliput. Once that was dry I primed the whole piece and tried to figure out a colour scheme. Lucky me we just had a Weald Workshop about colour theory which helped me creating my palette within a couple of minutes. That being worked out I painted the shrine. Tufts, leaves and some pigments were the final touches and I was almost ready. Why almost?
Shooting the Shrine
There’s no need to say that I never would create such a build without putting it into a Vignette28. I made the concept sketch even before I started building the shrine. And after the built was done began working on the collage. But the scene lacked the impact I was looking for. It took a bit of editing time before I realized it didn’t work out the way I had planned. Therefore I dumped all the stuff, made a new setup, took a few shots and once again learned new things in photo editing (for example how to increase the field of depth beyond the camera’s capabilities with PhotoShop’s stacking algorithm). And of course all of my own Photography tips apply here as well. So here’s the new Vignette28.
The Weald
The Weald is a fantasy skirmish game with a lively community. For inspiration head over to Instagram following the #weald28 hashtag.
