I recently have been looking to pimp out my Kingdom Death: Monster game with some custom terrain pieces. I have already worked up quite a strong ("painterly" as someone else put it) abstract lighting theme with my miniatures which I think works really well for the artwork in this game and helps with the immersion.

I saw a few people start to make custom terrain and thought I would have a go myself.

To start with I ordered some Soft Clay so I could get my sculpt on. Keep in mind I have never sculpted from scratch before so if I can do it you can too! I also had some cheap modelling tools I usually use for green stuffing.

So step one was to draw the schematic, I sketched this onto a large A3 sheet of paper directly from the Kingdom Death card tokens they give you.

Once sketched out I proceeded to fill the design with soft clay, I took a reference photo to match up too. I tried to get the proportions in line with a normal face guessing my way at this point.

Next up I started to fill out the features whilst keeping to the original drawing I had made. I was really just feeling my way around, a true sculptor would probably have fell about laughing at me but I just did what felt right.

Now I started to really play with the material and tools I had. Blending all the joins, getting my fingers in there and just playing around until I felt it looked right. I did this for each major feature then moved on to the next.

Once I got this far I decided to start to add some weathering to the model so I just started hacking away, creating some deep cracks and other small scratches all along the face of the model. The final results was something like this.

Then it was just a case of popping it in the oven at 110 degrees for 30 minutes and hey presto! Now just to do it all again for the second one! Once I had them both finished I cut two pieces of foamcore I had lying around to match the Kingdom Death stone faces card token. After green stuffing the surface I used my base stamp to stamp the faces. I made the stamp a reverse cast of the survivor bases they give you in the core box. Once ready I glued the faces onto the foam core and even added some more decoration in the form of some chopped up cork.

I then primed both pieces and painted the base a charcoal near black then washed with a heavy black wash. The rest was just a case of dry brushing through grey to white to bring out the detail.

Finally I added some strong OSL on the one piece that has the small lantern next to the face. To start with I made passes with pure white away from the lamp only catching the areas that the light would hit. Then I used my preferred yellow using the same technique over the white areas and beyond. Finally using pure white to blend where it was closest to the light source. This has a way of creating very abstract light sources which suit this game really well.

And there we have it. My first outing into sculpting, it was very enjoyable and I look forward to tackling more sculpts for my terrain projects. Next up is the Kingdom Death Pillars! Stay tuned for more.