Scavenger Priest

Hail, brother Scratchbeak, why how cheerily you traipse!

Perhaps you found a trove of  calciferous shapes.

I can picture how, as you relieved them of flesh,

A smile must have crept

up your long, long face.

Follow the Cairns

Pilgrim:

Just follow the Cairns to the Groaning Vale, 

The land where the wind does cry;

Follow them thence to the Needlesheets,

Where the Mountain of Asps does lie.

But dare you not to disturb the stones, 

Lest bestir you the envy of forgotten bones,

For lonely's the soul beneath the rock--

'till a pilgrim it does descry. 

Follow the Cairns, my dear pilgrim: 

Just follow, follow the Cairns.

Just a bit of atmosphere in the form of rhyme, to get the imagination tingling. I'm going to try doing a little more of that now. Maybe the added interest will keep me posting a little more frequently, while perhaps adding some zest to otherwise fairly dry how-to articles.

Anyway, here are the final products of my little series on quick n' dirty cairn terrain pieces. You can find the previous article here.

Since that article, I have coated the CD base with sand and PVA glue, primed the pieces with gray automotive primer, and then dry-brushed the pine bark "stones" with lighter and lighter gray mixes to achieve the stone texture.

The bases were treated to a similar dry-brush method working from a base of chocolate brown. I then added a decorative lichen, soaked it in more PVA and some ground foam, and then treated the whole base with a home-made blend of dried coffee grounds, dried tea-leaves, ground foam, and home-made grass flock.

Here's the result again, from another angle.

Easy peasy. Let me know what you think!