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Wednesday 20 February 2013

A rioting invasion of soundless life...

Sorry - getting all literary again! This is a quote from one of my all time favourite books - Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In it the jungle is often personnified and described in such a way as to make it a powerful and active agent within the book -

The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence.

So what's all this got to do with little men? Well I've felt for a while that my lack of jungle scenery needs sorting out - the deciduous trees and bushs I've got will no doubt be used but on their own they're not very jungly. 

A trip to Pets at Home the other day for dog food provided me with the perfect excuse to finally raid their Fish tank section! I'm not sure if this stuff is available cheaper elsewhere but £11 netted me this bunch of foliage that will be chopped up into smaller scenic bases - pictured here with some ferns and palms I picked up at Recon from a company called Minibits



However, the star buy was this tank decorat

ion - reduced to only £4!!!



As you can possibly make out it's also hollow and the paint job on it isn't too bad at all - might get away with leaving it as is. I'll obviously have to add plenty of vegetation of course.




As for the shrine - the next consignment of blocks is nearly ready - just waiting for them to dry out completely before construction recommences. This should hopefully be enough to finish the first half of the ground floor!





I must also thank Zhu for getting the creative juices flowing with his recent musings on Amazonia and the Goddess Rigg. I now have a colour scheme for the priestesses and Rigg herself, having been a little unsatisfied with the one I've been experimenting with. If I can find a slot in the schedule I hope to get back to painting some Amazons and there's those Norsemen archers that need finishing off too...

4 comments:

  1. Look forward to this! One of my favourite authors too!
    You are a cracking chap(:

    Cheers

    Guy

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  2. Most kind of you Greywolf - I really should reread some more of his stuff, much as I'm enjoying Conan, Fighting Fantasy and various other Swords and Sorcery stuff at them moment.

    I think the statue will need a base festooned with ferns and creepers - it's be a good spawning stuff for the horde of Giant Spiders I've collected so far...

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  3. Oh, Fun fun fun fun fun! The pet store is one of my favorite places to hunt for terrain as well. The temple there is a great acquisition! Looking forward to seeing many a hair-raising adventure unfold in his shadow.

    I became obsessed with Heart of Darkness in college and probably used it as material for 10 or 12 papers, all of them badly written, I'm sure. There are still a lot of images stuck in my head...Conrad's description of Kurtz's bald head with his mouth open so wide "as if to swallow the world"...the scene on the river where Marlowe is annoyed by all these little things flying through the air and then suddenly realizes that they're "Arrows, by Jove!" The jungle description is inspiring and very appropriate.

    Very fun stuff! More, more more!

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    Replies
    1. Dammit - I was just thinking that I would hunt down my copy of the book - a nice old hardback handed down from my Mum (English lit. teacher - retired) but I just remembered that our Black Lab pup decided it was one of the tastier books in the bookcase and decided to chew it up a month or so ago!!

      I'll have to sort a replacement as I'd almost forgotten some of the other brilliant stuff you've just reminded me of. Another abiding memory of mine was the French ship pointlessly shelling the jungle and the Grove of Death.

      I too had an obsession with the book and also Apocalypse Now - in fact I was thinking of basing my continuation of the Magnificent Sven on the book/film, although it seemed to jar a little with the slightly more humorous tone I generally go for with the Warhammer stuff. Still might do so in fact once I've reacquainted myself with the source material properly and found some ways to parody it in a non-sacrilegious way ;)

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