How to: Easy Fantasy Pedestal Mounted Stone Statues

The first step of this fantasy pedestal mounted stone statues tutorial is to gather the needed supplies. To create the pedestal for the actual statue you will need some square and circle shapes of the desired measurements. These can be either cut from foamboard but more ideal is to use cheap lasercut wooden bases which can be cheaply bought through loads of online sellers such as Sally 4th, Warbases, Litko to name some of my personal favorites. 

Next to these bases you will also need some other shapes to create the height of the pedestal for this purpose I used some wine corks and pieces of an old wooden toy playset. Then you also need some basic hobby materials such as texturing materials and wood glue along with some basic hobby tools.

The next step is to create some interesting pedestals using the chosen variety of wooden lasercut bases and other shapes. For this tutorial, I have decided to create two circle shaped pedestals along with a square shaped pedestal. When you have created the desired pedestal you can simply glue the shapes together using some woodglue. Before I glued the pieces together I have scratched both sides with a sharp Stanley knife to allow for a stronger bond between the pieces as you can see in the picture.

When you have created the basic shape, you can now further decorate the pedestal using some more wooden pieces or some thin cartonboard. I decided to further decorate the square pedestal, first using some thin rectangle wooden shapes followed by some cartonboard decorative patterns.

After the pedestals have been finished you can now add the actual statues. I choose for some left-over plastic miniatures from the bits box. Adding these statues is quite straightforward by glueing the based miniatures on the pedestal using some Army Painter Superglue. I just made sure I used the miniatures with round bases on the cirle shaped pedestals while using square based miniatures on the square based pedestal.

The statues are now ready to be painted. The first step of every painting process is to basecoat the entire piece with an undercoat. Because the final color of the statues will be dark grey I opted for a black undercoat applied with a spraycan. The next step is to add some rubble in the form of coarse sand and different sizes of small stones. To apply the rubble piles you simple generously add woodglue to the desired places and then glue in the stones starting with the larger ones followed by the smaller ones. Then you cover the entire piece in rough sand and let it dry overnight. The excess of sand and stones is then shaken off and collected back in their storage containers.

The following step is add some texture to the actual pedestal and statue by using some textured paint. For this step I mixed some fine white sand in the dark grey which will also be the main color. This mix is then painted onto the pedestal and statue and left to dry overnight. The amount of sand in the mix is entirely up to you but I prefer not to add to much sand as it's otherwise to hard to paint on the terrain piece. Then you paint the entire piece with the same dark grey as used in the texured paint untill the piece is fully painted. The last step is then to drybrush the entire statue and pedestal with a lighter grey to highlight the added textures and statues. This is the last step I took but you can also decide to add some snow as decribed in the previous easy snowy pine forest bases tutorial of which you can find a link below.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and you will be trying some the techniques as described above in your own attempts to create some cheap but good looking wargame terrain! This particular tutorial is part of my Fantasy Frostgrave Terrain Tutorial Series of which you can find the first part here Easy Snowy Pine Forest Bases Tutorial

Even more tutorials can be found here