Seasonal Scenery

With Hallowe'en just around the corner the supermarkets have started to fill up with cheap orange and purple plastic and nylon tat. So last week, whilst stocking up on cat food, mung beans and South American Merlot I found myself adding just such an item to my shopping cart with a view to a quick and dirty terrain project.

So here's what  started with:

A one pence piece, an old CD and a plastic skull from ASDA. This little lot set me back the mighty total of £1.01.
Before starting I gave the skull a wash in warm soapy water, then rubbed it all over with a piece of sandpaper to try and reduce mold lines and give the paint and glue to follow a bit of a "key".

Then, taking my usual pleasure in smearing her majesty's fizzog with glue, I used the penny to plug the gap in the centre of the CD.

With a hot glue gun I attached the skull to the CD. I used hot glue as I'm never sure how well superglue will work with this type of plastic and I was too impatient to wait for PVA to dry.

Some spots of superglue were used to attach a few stones and some cat litter (unused. I think).

After that was all dry I used PVA to cover the CD with sand.
I then covered the whole skull with a mix of water, PVA, filler and some very fine sand. I wanted the scenery piece to look like carved stone and the bare plastic was too smooth. Obviously if you were intending to make an obsidian or marble skull you could skip this stage (though I might still cover with thinned PVA to help stop the paint peeling).

I also put a slightly thicker mix of filler and PVA into some of the more obvious mold lines.

Once this was all dry I sprayed it black. I know it looks brown in the pictures, but I used black primer.

As you'll see from the second picture I clearly hadn't been as diligent at filing and filling mold lines as I'd thought, so I added some more filler at this point to the worst of the joins.

Then it was painting time.
The stones were drybrushed up from Charadon Granite via Adeptus Battle Grey and Astronomican Grey to a final dusting of white whilst the base was painted in my usual mix of Wilko tester pots to match the rest of my scenery. Then static grass was added.

I'm pretty pleased with the end result. Not bad for a quid plus a couple of hours toil.
Should work for both Warhammer:

And any H Rider Haggard inspired Darkest African shenanigans: