Mortal Gods – Mystical Fountain

Those who are active in the german speaking tabletop forum Tabletopwelt.de will surely remember my ordeal with this fountain, but for all those who might not be able to speak german, I would like to summarize this little adventure again.

Since I was done with my Mortal Gods army, I had the ambitious idea to create a gaming table for Mortal Gods and what do you need for that? Right - a decent amount of terrain and preferably in keeping with the theme of the game. So I bought some nice fountains at Sarissa Precision, which were available in a pack of two, and assembled the more greek style one. In September 2022 I started to customize it a little bit.

The statue was a small conversion, consisting of a faulty casting of the Mercenary Captain from Footsore Miniatures. The mini was just too beautiful to be disposed of without a word. So I decided to breathe new life into it, adding a sword and an old shield. The goal was to use it as a statue on top of the fountain.

The basic idea for the fountain was to paint it in a marble look, a technique I had not tried before. In the process, I dared some experiments, from the dabbing technique to painting on marble lines by hand.

But I wasn't really satisfied with any of the results, so I ditched that plan and took a more familiar, slightly more comic styled approach. I painstakingly painted panel after panel of the basin, followed by the tiles around the edge of the fountain.

I had then painted the statue according to my bronze recipe, which means there was a base coat of a mix of Heavy Gold Brown and Bronze, which I then inked with a brown wash. First, I had lightly drybrushed the accents with the original color and finally re-accentuated them more heavily by hand. Further accents followed by adding silver and finally pure white.

The statue was then shaded with different colors, which consisted mainly of turquoise and gray heavily diluted with medium. To get realistic-looking patina, a little white should also be added to the mix and the statue inked with it in different places. Finally, the hard edges were re-accentuated with the last highlight.

Also the basin got a bit of fine tuning, as I inked some places sometimes more, sometimes less with green. This was to recreate the illusion algae formation, as I intended to fill the basin with a water effect.

My good friend Robert had even specially modeled a few lilies for me, since I did not find the lilies that are available from Noch for modeling to be good looking.

When it was finally time to fill the basin with water, disaster struck. As it turns out, the MDF partially absorbed the water effect and tore the paint from the corners as it dried. In addition, a strange, gold-silver effect formed in the corners.

In the end, I had no choice but to mix the water effect with some color. My heart bled in the process, as I would have preferred a translucent water effect, but the coloring managed to disguise most of the damage and created a slightly misty appearance. From then on, I referred to the whole thing as "The Mystical Fountain."

Although the result turned out differently than planned I had a lot of fun with the project, especially because the community was very involved in the progress and always supported me with advice and motivation.

In addition, I learned a lot in the process. When I tackle the next one, remember there are two supplied in the set, I will try to seal the bottom with matte varnish after painting. In doing so, I would apply this with a brush in several layers, so that nothing more of the water effect can seep into the MDF wood in the gaps.

Do you also have interesting ideas and terrain pieces for ancient settings? Let us see them and inspire us a little before we move on to the next well!

Greetings from the Chaosbunker

Dino