'Water Feature' from EvanH: The Temple at Feroda

I'll be honest here, I was going to just paint a Water Elemental and submit that, but it was nowhere near as good as my earlier Fire Elemental. It ended up looking more like an angry Mr Whippy cone.

So I went back to work on some terrain while pondering my next move for this bonus round. Just some ruins for possible use in Frostgrave, maybe. You know where you are with terrain; it doesn't surprise you. Or at least that's what I thought...

Somewhere along the line, the walls of Frostgrave morphed into something altogether more Bronze Age, like something from ancient Mesopotamia, or even RuneQuest's world of Glorantha. Once that last thought was in my head, it was all over. It just attached itself to the theme and ran along under its own steam.

So here we see part of the Zola Fel Temple at Feroda, once situated at the mouth of the River of Cradles in Prax, now left high and dry after the River God withdrew his bounty from the settlement. The River God's own temple is now nowhere near the river, but some of its frescoes remain.

Motifs of fish, dragonflies, and bulrushes decorate the now sandblasted external walls of the temple, Years of exposure to the desert winds have left them in a sorry state.

The interior walls feature a design of lotus plants along with the fish and dragonfly motifs. Paintings of the river's bounty in a land without a river. Frescoes featuring water, now isolated in a wasteland.

As to the build, the core of the ruins was shaped from extruded polystyrene foam, covered with tissue paper and PVA glue to provide a more durable surface for spraying the basecoat. My usual desert basing mix of sand and slate chips was applied, along with a token skull to signal the ruin's long-abandoned state. And also, because skullz.

I decided to apply a patchy layer of filler to mimic the broken stucco of the temple walls, while the painting of the frescoes was influenced by Minoan and Egyptian imagery. Weathering powders were dusted over the whole model to give it a bit more of a distressed finish.

The dimensions of the piece are 8 x 4 x 4, which comes in at just over half a cubesworth, so 10 points for this submission would seem appropriate.

It's a less literal interpretation of the theme than I had originally intended, but My Good Lady Wife approves, and that's good enough for me!

More terrain down the track, maybe some more of the temple, who knows?

Stay tuned!

Ev