I referenced my Wooden Pillars a few months back, and now I’m here to do a full spotlight of how I achieved that wooden texture effect. The aim was to get the resin pillars looking more like the ones in the Nexus core box.
I’ll let you be the judge of how I did, all said and done.
First off, these had already been given an old, bare-bones coat of paint, sometime during the pandemic. I didn’t like the look of it very much, but I used it as a base and just painted over it without stripping it all away.
I started from the bottom up and decided I wanted the bases to pop a bit more against the grey-green of the metallic-sheet style Nexus board. To this end, I coated the previous stone-like colors in a couple layers of Vallejo Desert Sand.
I then lathered the things heavily with The Army Painter SP 2.0 Ochre Clay.
Afterwards, I gave them a quick dry brush with the Desert Sand.
This really brought out not only the inherent texture of the resin, but also some of the build-up from the previous layers, which turned out looking much better than I could’ve hoped for.
Then, I started building up the outer hues of the wood itself.
I was aiming for a more vivid miniature overall, so something with a lot of rich pigment, like the Speedpaints, were again my go-to. Ruddy fur is the absolute tits!
I started building up the layers and letting the paint settle in the cracks and also adding more layers towards the stem of the pole, where the build-up of guts and blood would accumulate over time and effectively nourish the wood.
Shut up, that makes sense.
I eventually opted against caking these in blood as, just like with the crates, there’s already a bloody pillar variant for them in the box set.
Once the Ruddy Fur was on there proper, I started working on wood grain.
To this end, I once again employed Vallejo Desert Yellow, mixed with some Citadel Mournfang Brown. The CMB started off as the first layer, and is a nice highlight that sort of blends in with the Ruddy Fur (though bear in mind I already had a burnt umber brownish base to start from). I then kept adding more and more VDY to the mix to really bring up the texture across the pillars.
I used a couple reference pictures for these, but generally I just did what felt fun, adding some skewed, concentric ovals here and there for where limbs would have popped out of the trunk at one point. Lots of mostly parallel lines, wiggles and woggles (that’s a professional term), and generally trying to rough up the soft look of the resin.
It was a really nice experience, if the most time consuming of the process, but I didn’t mind it one bit as it gave spectacular results once it was all done.
After the final highlights and another Vallejo drybrush were applied, I was happy enough with how it all looked (highlighted below in an over-exposed edit because it was the only proper one I took of the step…).
I then set to work on the flags, or rather cloth pieces that hang on the pillars.
I decided to keep the colours I’d used as bases and just highlight up as I went.
VDY was used again for the yellow cloth, Vallejo Yellow Green for the green, The Army Painter Warlock Purple (don’t believe the hype, this shit is totally pink, y’all!) for one of the red cloths, and some Citadel Evil Sunz Scarlet, lightly mixed with the VDY for the other one, for a more orange hue.
The ropes were also given a quick dry brush of VDY. Can you tell this is one of my favourite colours ever?
I then went to work on the spikes, which had originally been painted with some Citadel Balthasar Gold. I dry brushed the tips with some White Scar for maximum shine-through effect, and picked up my SP Talos Bronze and went to town on them.
The way this paint works is by creating a metallic silver highlight at certain points, but I didn’t find it shining particularly strongly on this conical shape, so I dry brushed some Ironbreaker afterwards. I also did a couple nicks and touch-ups with Ironbreaker for the base rings.
Finally, I highlighted the skulls, picking out the edges and the topmost features with Citadel Ushabti Bone, mixed with more and more White Scar as I went along to smaller areas. Then I took some shit pictures of the process, which honestly can’t be shared here in good faith without people throwing rotten eggs my way.
Have a finished pic, instead.
All in all, I think I did about four or five highlighting passes from pure Ushabti to pretty much pure White Scar.
The end result is a far cry from their initial look and a rather striking rendition on the tabletop, very much in line with what I’d had in mind for them when I first started the repaint. There’s always room for doing more, whether in highlights or technical paint/painting, but I’ll leave them as-is for now and revisit them in another three years’ time, after the next pandemic…
…which gives me ample room to repaint the base box pillars, as well, especially since the shafts of the plastic ones in the base game are done in much more distinct and abundant texture than these old resin ones provide.
Let me know what you think of the painted-on texture and how you would like to do up your own resin/STL copies that you’re definitely going to get now that you’ve seen what an amateur like me can do. I’m sure it’ll be stellar!
Hope it inspires!
Cozzy