Designing Shroomy Hollow

In my previous posts I've mentioned the Age of Sigmar event which I'm planning for a local gaming centre (The Outpost).  Putting on a big elaborate event takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you're doing it all yourself!  For this project I've produced enough original art to fill a book, let alone the new miniatures and terrain I've been churning out!

Some of these images have been used to produce cards and unit profiles, some for maps and others for new unit concepts.  I've shown you snippets of each of the cards and maps but thought I'd use this post specifically to show some images which are being translated into gaming miniatures and terrain for the event.

Although I don't want to give the game away (pun most definitely intended!), I hope that you'll get a good idea of where I'm going with these pictures and sculpts!

I sketched out a number of huge Mushrooms for the Shroomy Hollow terrain pieces.  The intention was to create a sort of conjured 'Shroom-forest' where a Fungoid Cave-Shaman mixes potions and grows his special shroom crops.  For this reason, the biggest ones had to have a sort of tent shape to the trunk

In order to make the huge Shrooms both structurally sound (as they are intended as terrain pieces) and light, I first sculpted the basic shapes using kitchen foil.  This is a versatile material for quickly mocking up maquettes or bulking out larger models.  As I would be sculpting the final piece in medium and soft grade sculpy, so also needed it to be heat proof.

The next stage was to coat the foil core with sculpey to create an even and smooth outer skin which I would then be able to start sculpting details onto.  I try to keep my sculpy to approximately 2mm thick as this gives just enough thickness to prevent cracking once fired whilst not going crazy with an expensive polymer clay!

Next is the fun stage which is adding details!  The main Shroom bodies are medium grade grey sculpy which is great for structure, but I use soft pink sculpy for some of the details as it's much easier to add without deforming the rest of the sculpt.

As I'm sure you can see from the images, I also used ball bearings for some of the surface boils.  Some of the larger ones would later be removed prior to firing so that I could replace them with lighter plastic balls.  This was to prevent the piece from becoming too top heavy - Sculpy is very light once fired and could topple with the weight of the bearings.

 The whole mushroom has the pleasing silhouette of a gloomspite goblin; I deliberately sculpted the spiky parts on the mushroom's peak to resemble gnarly goblin snouts as well.  The tinfoil packing at the bottom was removed after firing to leave a nice opening for storing arcane potions and implements!

Here's the final sculpt after firing.  Annoyingly, the shroom was so tall that the uneven temperature in the oven burned a couple of the highest spike tips.  Luckily this didn't actually cause any shrinkage or deformation, so this flaw will be hidden once painted.

You can better see the singed peaks in these images as well as some of the details I've sculpted into the cap.  Overall I think this huge Shroom (approximately a foot tall) is a great battlefield centrepiece and I'm very please with it!

This is one of the smaller mushrooms post-firing.  The large Shroom took me a couple of days to produce, but this little fella was done in an hour!

They speak of a huge Dankhold Troggoth who stalks the depths... could this be him?!