Page Three

After our Advent bonanza, you think I might have tired of blogging about pictures of chests.

No sir! I shall never tire. 

Frostgrave demands treasure tokens; I won some kit from Secret Weapon Miniatures; there's forthcoming commission work for General Leofa and my retainer has taken the form of some modelling kit. 

Put this magical trio of happenstance together, and it unleashes a jackpot.

The boxes you see here are a resin pack from Secret Weapon. Along with them, I got some white weathering powder, some crushed glass and some water effect resin in a bottle, so I set to work experimenting. 

The boxes are pretty tiny (that's a standard GW round base there, for comparison), but have a heap of detail. The locks particularly catch my eye - they're so small! I wonder if you can order the keys separately?

And they've all got nice individual touches, from the demon-faced metal strongbox to the vine-covered one. I don't like painting scenery as a general rule (not that you'd know it, I seem to get through a fair bit), but this was fun. More like painting models, that's how much character I felt they had. 

My new snow kit was a bit experimental, and it's worked better in some places than others. Water effect applied neat and then dunked in crushed glass gives the slushy, icy effect - that's really nice. But if the crushed glass is too thin, it looks a bit odd. This half-buried rusty chest, an old Heroquest piece stuck on a slightly larger Mierce base, gives you an idea. It's a bit too reflective and grainy. 

I've never used a weathering powder, so my first attempts were very tentative. Once I'd discovered it's easy as pie to apply, I went a bit nuts. This wasn't so productive. You can just swab it on neat from the end of a brush, pretty much like a drybrush but without wiping before you apply, and then seal it on with varnish. That's easy and works well. It's also particularly nice dusted over the crushed glass effect as a finishing touch.

Here's another scratch build. Well, build's a bit strong - it's just Nagash's book, a spare bit from the kit I did last year. Now it's a special treasure marker for Frostgrave.

I've also got a solvent that you can put on first, then dust the stuff on. That looks amazing, until you go overboard! It gives you nice spots and clumps, where the powder falls off the brush as you tap it. These collapse the moment you press on them with anything, though, and then they look flat and blotchy. I lost the nice golden eagle on the top of the upper box here, for example, and the solvent dries so fast there's no going back. I need practice with it before I use it on nice models again. 

I didn't put all the stash on bases - I've saved the smaller pieces to use later. They really are small, as well. I thought about keeping them loose, but I'll lose them in no time if I do that. Anchoring them onto something larger seems like a good plan. 

These were actually finished last week, about the same time as the last Crypt Angels spree, but I held fire on posting until I got another parcel in the post. This one held a cache of tiny modelling gems.

I saw these first on the Frostgrave home site, but they were out of stock. Courtesy of Annie the Dice Bag Lady at Bad Squiddo Games, I now have a pack. There's plenty in the box and a ton of different colours, and I'm going to really have to fight the temptation to stick them all over everything I ever paint again. It helps that they're very fiddly to apply. There's a flat silver base that needs to go on the bottom, not easy when the glue-covered stick you're using to apply is slightly wider in diameter than the tiny plastic jewel.

(I'd recommend Bad Squiddo, in passing - lots of good stock at decent prices, particularly for cheap terrain. Or LED flickering explosion markers. Or SAGA warbands. Plus she put a free tea bag in the parcel. GW could learn a lot from that.)

Best used sparingly, I think. Until I get to those Dungeon Saga chests again, anyway.

Now all I need is a competent warband to actually retrieve some of these bad boys from Felstad. With my current luck, that may occur sometime next year.