Several months ago I cracked open the box for this Shadows of Brimstone: Gateways Into Madness set, mostly so I could knock them out quickly and make some space by disposing of the box. Naturally, the whole plan backfired. The Organic gateways have huge gaps in them that will need filling as well as lots of mold line trimming. Basically, a huge pain in the arse to get ready for painting. These Torii Gates I primed and started painting. In brown. But they looked pretty mid, to be quite honest. So I decided to repaint them. Later.
A couple of weeks ago, I started working on them again in the background, motivated by Dave Stone’s current Season of Scenery Challenge. Got the reddish brown happening eventually, and then due to lack of enthusiasm took over a week to paint in the lantern-windows with a somewhat glowy effect.
Finally this last weekend I got them all done finally. Getting reddish wood on this scale to have effective highlights and shading was actually pretty difficult, but the finished product fits pretty solidly into the category of “good enough for the tabletop” for me.
A I was getting to the last stages of getting these done, I realised that I could use these in Marvel Crisis Protocol for a Japanese-themed area – whether that be a park, or a village or city, or a “Little Tokyo” cultual enclave in a Western city. So I may actually have a reasonably likely use case for these pieces. Huh!