This post was originally published on my patreon on 7th May 2019. Hi everyone :) As I suspect you all know, I live in Scotland. I really love living here for a number of reasons, but the amazing history all around me, and the beautiful natural environment are definitely right up there! This weekend just gone was a long weekend, yesterday was a public holiday, so my wife and I went for a day out exploring. We headed to the 'Kingdom of Fife' (yes, that's really what it's called!), and started the day in Falkland. Falkland is the home of a pleasure palace which was a favourite of Mary Queen of Scots, and is brilliant inspiration for castles, towers and all sorts of fantasy buildings. Not only is it great for references for painting, but it's useful for thinking about planning and mapping out towns. The village has a square at the centre, with this structure in the middle. It has fountains on each side and lions on each corner. From the square there are narrow roads running in each direction, built long before there were cars coming through. Another interesting note was that the roads were far from straight, but instead followed the hills and valleys around. The Romans (who were famous for their straight roads) never made it this far North in the UK, instead the roads were built to stay at the same elevation to prevent the people (and horses) travelling them from having to go up and down hills a lot. Here's one of the small alleys which leads away from the village square. Clearly there are things down there which wouldn't be there in a fantasy setting, but you really get the feel of what the village would have been like hundreds of years ago. Finally, I took a photo of a statue which was standing in the church grounds. I'm always interested in statues, but this one I particularly liked the name on it. This is a statue of Onesiphorous Tyndall-Bruce, and if that's not a great name for an NPC in your D&D campaign I don't know what is!
Part two of Inspiration from Scotland will be coming in a couple of days. I hope you're having a great week :) Goblin Squire
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Hi everyone :) Today I’m going to talk through the work I did on this fountain, which is from the Reaper Bones Kickstarter 4, focussing on the water effect and the leaves. Given the state of the stonework and the statue, I decided that it didn’t make much sense for it to look like it was in good condition. I painted the tarnish effect on the spout of the fountain and the moss or mould on the stonework, and having done that I didn’t want the water to look clean.
I’ve found that there’s a bit of a knack to getting good, clean leaf shapes from it, but once you do it gives a really nice effect. I actually punched the shapes out of real leaves as well, so there’s no added cost there (even if it takes you a few tries). It’s a bit of a niche item, and I’m not suggesting that every miniature painter needs a leaf cutter, but if you’re interested in including leaves in your work you could do much worse than picking one of these up.
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