TMM 010: Nurgle Diorama & AU Progress

I've just finished my first Nurgle Diaries diorama. I've tried to make a Mordheim/Fairy Tale/Bosch aesthetic using lots of desaturated colour and using some surreal imagery. My favorite thing is when people say "I just keep finding more little details the longer I look" and that's sort of the goal with these dios.

The star of the show is a bandsaw I'm borrowing which made cutting all the thick chunks of terrain plastic so much faster and safer. I think I'd have spent most of my day cutting terrain up without this and instead it took 15 minutes. It's a tool I've always wanted to try and incorporate into my hobby, but as it's a few hundred bucks of investment I've never been willing to take the plunge. If I had one of these at the start of nurgle diaries I think I'd have saved hours and hours and hours while putting far fewer dust particles in the air for sure. This is a fantastic tool for getting through big resin models, the notoriously hard Wizkids models and the Dungeons and Lasers terrain pieces that are made weirdly thick. A lot of scratch building potential here too for cutting raw materials for terrain making as well.

I'll keep experimenting with this borrowed one, it's a big investment.

I've been a massive advocate for oil paints for making washes in miniature work. They're cheap, make magical-like transformations and one tube will last a lifetime. But! Water-based paints are just more convenient, especially trying to hit deadlines where drying time is a big factor. Lately I've been using Citadel's Contrast paints as an oil paint alternative, it's not quite the same, but I've discovered a something that gets you pretty close.

Typically I apply Contrast paint thick on a white model and then I wipe it back a bit with a wet brush, q-tip or rag. If you want a watercolour-ish type of look you can manipulate it with lots of water on the model itself and when it's dry you get nice soft pastel colours (this is the nurgle diaries look).

However at this point I could never get it right, any further dark contrast layers would stain the layers underneath instead of just going in the cracks and crevices. With oils this is no problem as you can easily remove unwanted paint and it always seems to just go where you want it anyway.

But here's the trick for Contrast. Satin varnish. Lay down some satin varnish right before you do your dark washes over the first color layer and they become as manipulable as the first layer only going where you want them to go, they won't stain the first layer and mistakes are really easy to clean up.

Another tip is mixing Contrast colors on the model. I only really use about five Contrast paints for entire projects: purple, green, yellow, orange and brown and mix them together on the model for more variations of those colours. All the shading can be down with brown and purple and a combination of the two for really dark shadows.

In the Arcane Ugly Discord server in the Update Workshop channel are two new additions to the (in development) Interesting Things chapter, the Pentadecimal Transportation System and Magical Tattoos.

I've been going through all the Arcane Ugly videos and making sure I hit every goal I had working on the system.

The Pentadecimal Transportation System (powered by libraries) is a teleportation network that makes drop-in-drop-out/mixed group play easier and gives it some narrative thanks for some knowledge-hungry Librarians.

Magical Tattoos got overhauled to make them as wild and dangerous as originally designed and I've also added a new collective of weird tattoo artists called Ink Weavers. The existing Tattoo treasure items will be replaced with rare tattoo variants that do more than just augment stats.

In the discord we are currently discussing making Intelligence have more in-game mechanics such as potion-making, trap disarming, language learning… any ideas would be most welcome.

In the We Make a Dungeon channel a living Dungeon is being made by the Arcane Ugly community with so much progress being made. Each participant is focusing on one organ of a creature that Adventures must work though. A few are done already, jump in and give some feedback!

Tarot cards are still coming along nicely. Here are Luke’s (Nerd Craft HQ) latest creations.

This eclectic mix of books is frequently referenced making Arcane Ugly.

Secrets of the Gnomes is whimsical, silly and really shows how you can stretch one idea into absurdity. I think sometimes my best ideas come right after I've got all the easy ideas out of my system and this book is essentially that condensed. I like it because it helps me get in that mind scape.

World Mythology I use for referencing its images to try to get a diverse range of art styles happening in Arcane Ugly.

Mind, Magic and Mysteries has been particularly useful making Arcane Ugly because I want to incorporate and reference as much esoterica as I can and this has acted as great checklist.

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Get your questions in for the January Q&A! Ask away about anything Trent, Miscast, Arcane Ugly, creative or totally unrelated.

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