The stone itself is a stone from the garden, selected for its relatively flat face. Although you should always paint stone -- like I did with the stones around the base -- I wanted to preserve its interesting colour, so I didn't in this instance and I think it looks OK. The design is taken from a runestone in Uppland, Sweden, and heavily simplified. I am not good enough to paint the inscription so it's legible, but I assure you that it says, in Old Norse, "Ottar raised this stone for Arn, his father. Thor hallow the runes. A stone on a hill." It's a mishmash of other runic inscriptions intended to fit the length of the ribbon.
Although obviously you wouldn't get runes just painted on the stone like this, carved runestones were often painted -- you can still see the traces of colour in some cases.
The various foliage on the base comes from Woodland Scenics and Army Painter and whoever. There's some rather nice little yellow flowers at the back that you can't see very well in the shot, but I think the purple ones on the left by the rock are my favourite.
Here is the bold Nornvar (an NPC from my D&D game) posing in front of the stone.
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| It's fantasy, so her outfit is A-OK. |
I hardly ever paint this sort of stone - at least I don't base coat. I usually give it a wash and then a drybrush to accentuate the texture while keeping the underlying colours. Obviously if the stone is very porous it isn't going to take a wash well.
ReplyDeleteI'll give it a try if I do something like this again (it might make a fun ornament for some of my fantasy armies, and I have all these bases lying around!).
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