Things Get Built - Ollyver from Twisted

I haven't posted much stuff, and it's for a few reasons. I'm not going to go into huge detail her because, mainly, it's boring. The main reasons are:

1) Work is destroying my time - I now do a week of a set shift, then move onto another time slot for a week, then back to another. I am not used to shift work like this, and it's messed with my sense of time and energy, so I'm not too motivated.

2) I'm prepping for surgery - I have some long overdue arm surgery coming up that will see me out of action for a few weeks. I've been trying to get this sorted for about 8 months now, so as the time gets closer, I start to freak out and plan ahead a bit. That's eating into my free time, as are strangely timed trips to various parts of the city for related tasks.

3) I've been building stuff. In prep for my time off, I've been building stuff to paint while I recover. I'm planning a bigger blog post on this, but "cleaned some bases" isn't much of an update till you see it all together. 

So this is one of the things I built: Ollyver from the Twisted range. It was meant to be part of the OzPainters challenge, but with all of the above I haven't have a mindset to paint at all, so this is as far as it got. I had a few different things planned, but this is what I ended up going with.

I see the Dickensian faction as roaming the streets of London, generally up to varying levels of no good. I was born in London, so I take that kind of personally, but it also means that I feel them as being on my turf. It's weird like that. I kind of liked the idea of Ollyver leaping out of the shadows at night time and scaring people. So I needed some kind of base. Ollyver is on a 40mm base, but for a display piece I bumped it to 50mm, mainly so I could have a street lamp in there.

I planned out where the main elements would be. The MDF is cut from a round base topper I got Aetherworks to cut for me a while ago. I actually used the wrong size, but the curve on the edge is so small a gap son one will notice much. I hope. 

The lamp is from Wyrd's lamp kit. I chose one I could attache some plasticard to easily to use for a street sign. I then blutack end everything in place to check the rough composition to make sure I was happy with it. Yep! I like how it goes so far!

I cleaned the lamp, and added strips of plasticard to the MDF to acts as paving slabs. I pinned the lamp in pace, then glued down the MDF, then realised my mistake...

I'd flipped the MDF at some point, so his position on the base in relation to the lamp was different! Argh! It's such a tiny change, but it makes so much difference! Anyway, I added a thin strip of plasticard to the lamp after carefully cutting and sanding it to act as a street sign. I then started adding green stuff lumps to form cobbles. As a thought, I quickly cleaned Ollyver's gruel bowl and pressed it onto the cobbles for a but more detail.

The cobbles are done! This actually too a few hours alone, and was starting to drive me mad. Worse, halfway through you start to get better at making cobbles, so I had to fight the urge to redo some areas... 

I'd pressed Ollyver into place a few time on the way, so some cobbles are already deformed to all him to stand there.

And now with Ollyver in place!

I sketched some text onto the sign so I had some reference to the size of the lettering before I started painting, so I had some reassurance I had cut it to the right size. It's a sign for Gloucester Place, a street in London both Dickens and I lived on (not at the same time), so I thought it added a bit more of a personal touch.

The plan is to have some lighting effects (not too strong) from the lamp, and keep the base mostly dark, but his face brightest so it stands out. Time will tell though when I eventually get round to it.