Alexia The Longest Night Diorama

This project has been sitting in my head for years now and I'm so pleased to have finished it and realised the version I had in my imagination.

Alexia is my favourite character in the Iron kingdoms. I've always enjoyed her storyline and character, as well as thoroughly enjoyed using the various versions of her in the tabletop wargame.

The size and scope of this diorama has greatly changed since my initial planning. This is the original size I was planning for the diorama. It was originally going to sit on the plinth that eventually I used for my Riot Quest "Menace versus Maniak" diorama. (If you're curious you can find it here)

I feel at this point it's important to say a big thank you to DragonPup who sold me the Alexia model. Given that she was a mini crate exclusive, and a six month VIP model at that, I simply could not afford to subscribe for six months just for one model.

The next person I'd like to thank is my friend Andrew. When I showed him my concept for the larger size diorama once I found this display tray he immediately ran back to his car came back with some graveyard terrain he had purchased for his home table. He gave me a length of fencing, and let me choose which graveyard crypt style building I wanted.

So here is Alexia, she was by far the hardest thing to paint in this entire piece. It took me quite a while to get the white dress looking the way I wanted it, but I'm happy with how it's turned out in the end.

I always paint Alexia to have glowing green eyes to represent her Necromantic powers.

This priest zombie is by Reaper miniatures. I had always intended to use it as an RPG model but it just seemed perfect for this diorama. The idea is that he is a Morrowan priest Alexia has risen from the dead.

It was quite a pain to cut the fencing out of the crypt without destroying it. I took my time and used a very sharp hobby knife, I'm happy with how it's turned out.

I wanted to use some of the original zombie risen from Alexia's Warmachine unit, this Khadoran winter guard zombie was a lot of fun to paint and has great character. I painted it in the same style as the winter guard I painted for IKRPG encounters.

(For those curious you can find them here)

The Cygnaran trencher risen is a favourite of mine as I am a huge fan of the trencher aesthetic.
I painted it to match the colour scheme of my trencher army. 

Having painted these risen I feel the obligation to go back and repaint the Alexia and the risen unit, which apparently I painted seven years ago.

I painted them in this ghostly style to save time as the idea of painting more than 20 zombies was rather overwhelming for me at the time.

(If you want to see the nearly 7 year old blog post where I show off these and talk about painting them you can find it here)

Given the expanded scope of this diorama compared to its original conception I wanted to add some more risen. Luckily I had these skeletons coming out of the ground which are the bottom parts of GW spirit host models. I originally bought those spirit hosts to make a Cryx soul counter for Andrew.

(If you want to take a look at that you can find here)

This poor little guy has a clod of earth and grass on his back covering up the lack of detail where the ghost/spirit was originally coming out of him.

I added Morrowan sunbursts to both the crypt and the fencing. Removing GW "essential" skulls they just can't make terrain without at least a hundred of the bloody things...

I really wanted to add older gravestones leaning on the back fence. I have seen these a lot in graveyards in the UK, often this is because a plot has not been paid for anymore so the stone is placed on the boundary of the graveyard and the plot is reused.

A lot of the stones I have added plants growing over them. While I did intend to do this anyway as I like the way it looks, I chose the specific stones to cover up words cast into the gravestones by the manufacturer in English. In the setting this is based in text is runic, and I didn't want to add a stupidly large amount of work carving gravestones.

If you look closely most of the gravestones are crooked in some regard, and a lot of them have sunken ground in front of them to represent collapsed coffins, something I've seen a lot in older graveyards.

The various plants growing up the fence also serve a dual purpose. Primarily they are decorative, however, they also hide gaps in the fence where I cut skulls which were embedded onto the fence posts.
Good old GW…

It's hard to see from the photographs that I weathered the crypt and stones heavily with green towards the bottom to represent moss/algae effects, and yellow/orange to represent lichen. The roof of the crypt I decided would be heavily corroded with verdigris.

It's really hard to see inside the crypt, but I carved off the symbol that was on the sarcophagus and added another Morrowan Sunburst.

If you want to support my content consider taking a look at my Patreon which you can find here. I don't put any finished content behind a paywall but I do offer rewards to people who support me in ways like getting to vote on what content I work on in the future or outright just picking the next subject of an article as well as wip content.

This project itself was picked by my patrons!

Even if it's just $1 it really helps me out!

I have pictures of the step-by-step creation of this diorama, though at the moment I don't intend to write a blog post detailing its creation. However were there to be enough demand, or a patron out right request such an article I'd be happy to do so.

See you all next time!

Model Review: Ketos Crab & Smog Factory - Monsterpocalypse Building Expansions

Today we take a look at the Smog Factory & Ketos Crab which are building for Monsterpocalypse. 

I was sent these models to review by Privateer Press.

The Smog factory comes in seven parts, one of which is resin. 

The metal parts are drill parts which are nicely cast with minimal mould lines, they really help sell the building as one which gets deployed from underground.

The resin main part of the building is truly impressive. It has piping which twists around the main smoke stack, which really surprised me, I would have expected this to have been more than one piece honestly. 

Detail is crisp and nicely cast and there are next to no mould lines.

The Ketos Crab "building" comes in three parts, one of which is metal.

The head and attached antenna are nicely cast. The antenna can be easily bent if you wanted them posed differently.

These three resin injection ports will need clipping off, thankfully they have decided to put them on the backward facing parts so they will be hidden by being next to the shell.

The shell is fantastically detailed with giant barnacles and spines all over the place. Plenty of texture all over the shell

There is a slight mould line running down the back of the shell. Fortunately this was easy to remove with some light scraping with a hobby knife.

I really like how it looks with the crab clinging to the sky scrapper. Its a really neat look and gives a real sense of scale.

The only resin injection ports for this are on the underneath which is fantastic.

Here they are assembled.

I really like these buildings though I won't be using them for their intended purpose. 
I will be converting the Smog factory into a Cryx Necrotite mining rig, and the Crab will be doing double duty as both an objective for my Talion army, and a monster for the IKRPG! I will have to hide the sky scrapper of course but thats a problem for future me.

What do you think of these minis?

And finally I thought I would try something new! 
Using money from my generous supporters over at Patreon I purchased a rotating display stand. I like to put the money from supporters back into improving the content I make.
I'm hoping to get better at making these over time, one thing I know I want to save for is a better camera (I currently use my phone).
Please let me know what you think of this addition to my articles.
If you like it please like, comment and subscribe on Youtube it really does help with letting youtube know its a video worth suggesting to other hobbyists. (And it upsets Mike...)

If you want to support my content consider taking a look at my Patreon which you can find here. I don't put any finished content behind a paywall but I do offer rewards to people who support me in ways like getting to vote on what content I work on in the future or outright just picking the next subject of an article as well as wip content.

Even if its just $1 it really helps me out!

See you all next time!