Tag Archives: Grendel

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains

by

9

Another blast from the past today. Well, not that long ago in some ways and a long bloody time in another.

These scenery pieces, more of the Grendel stuff I picked up in the mid-1990’s sat like so many others in storage for pretty much 20 years until 2013, when I finally got them out and finished them. Sometime around the 8th of August when I finally tallied up a bunch of stuff finished in the weeks before then.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains – Front-on.

As with so many of these old scenic pieces, they’re still available in Scotia Grendel’s website: 10010 – Skull Fountains. Amusingly the description on the webstore suggests that to make them particularly evil, you can paint the water as blood(!) I don’t think painting the liquid as water ever actually occurred to me. The paint was the usual greys for stone without any additional brown weathering along with an attempt for a kind of brushed-steel look with a minimal amount of rust, provided by my early experiments with MIG enamel washes. The blood was painted via a mix of GW and Vallejo reds and a touch of orange, with clear red and gloss varnish added after the rest of the pieces were matt sprayed.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains – Side-on.

As you can see, they’re drop-moulded and so the back side of them are completely flat and lacking in detail. You can butt them up against a wall, or either side of a dungeon archway or whatever. If you want something less dungeon-ey and more wargame table-y that’s free-standing, I guess you can always butt them up together like I have above.

Scotia Grendel Skull Fountains

A little scene to provide scale for the Skull Fountains.

Edit – After getting a request for scale shots on Dakka, I went out and added this one. They’re a fair bit bigger than they look when in the isolated shots.

Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep & Ruined Gothic Archway

by

2

No figures to show off today. The painting’s been going well, but I’ve got to get out and take some more photos soon. In lieu of anything new, here’s some scenery that I painted a long, long time ago and photographed last year.

Scotia Grendel Ruined Gothic Archway

I bought both of the sets mentioned up top around the same time, but I vastly preferred this entranceway “Ruined Gothic Archway” to the “proper” one that came with the set, so this is the one that I ended up painting up to go with the walls. Much more “Gothic” and since the main game this stuff was used for over the years was 40k…

Rear View of Ruined Gothic Cathedral

Imagine my surprise and pleasure at seeing that the rear of the arch piece was void of all detail whatsoever – just a smooth resin piece from a one-piece pour mold. The base was fine, but I decided that I had to do something about the lack of detail on the upper. I scraped out the stonework with a hobby knife, and did my best to weather and stress the stonework using the tools I had at my disposal in the mid-1990’s. So probably the end of a file and a hammer, by the look of things.

Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep wall sections

As can be expected, these walls from the Ruined Keep have seen a lot of action over the years in no end of configurations. Another of the unpleasant surprises from the Grendel Kit once I opened it was the fact that all of those windows were sealed. As in cast-solid. It took my pin vice, a hobby knife and no small amount of time to cut them all out.

Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep ruined towers

As you can imagine, these “ruined towers” have seen a lot less action. Mostly due to being shorter than a Space Marine in height, so not exactly much of a ruined tower in any of their cases. Three or four steps hardly makes a tower, after all…

Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep with Gothic Archway – “Closed” layout.

Here’s the typical “closed” layout I’ve used in games for the entire set. It really could use some more wall sections to look a bit more reasonable.

Scotia Grendel Ruined Keep with Gothic Archway – “Open” layout.

And here’s the “Open” layout that gets used much more often, as it allows models to move through the ruins while taking cover from their enemies. Now that I’ve been gathering and painting a lot more scenery in the last couple of years, I could do a lot more interesting things with these. For example combining them with the WHFB Gothic Graveyard kit, as well as other things I’ve picked up and painted, like those Confrontation brick walls. I need to get some Hirst Arts molds as well, the Graveyard scenery kit looks promising.