Temple Complete!

 There's still varnishing left to be done (pending a low humidity day!) but I'm happy to report that I've finished the Temple kit from Things From The Basement. In truth, I got it to a basically playable state on Saturday - over the course of about 10 hours I got everything piece spray painted with its base colors and assembled, including coating the base with homemade texture paint (eyeballed mixture of PVA glue, paint and sand), plus outlining a path with some gravel, and priming, base coating and drybrushing it. Once the drybrushing was finished on the base, I could glue the Temple down, paint the rocks, and apply fine model railroad ballast between the two lines of rocks to create a gravel pathway. 

 The slow part was flocking the base! First (once the gravel was totally dry and had had PVA layered over top to seal it), I applied some patches of Woodland Scenics green "blended turf" fine flock, as well as some small bushes on either side of the stairs. I let that dry for probably about 12 hours. Once totally dry, I went over the flock and bushes with thinned-down PVA to seal it in, and let that dry for 24 hours. 

 Once totally dry, I applied some tufts in a couple dry, brown and pale green colors. I like the way these stick out above the snow, and also applying just a tiny bit of PVA to the tips of the strands so glue adheres to them looks really good to me. 

With the tufts set in place, I splodged on some irregular patches of PVA, making sure not to completely cover any of the green patches, and applied Army Painter snow. 

 Thinking about what a pain in the ass it is to completely clear snow off my own porch, I added some snow to the rear corners around the railings. I think it's a good touch. 

Part of me wants to add some icicles to the roof, but those are in danger of breaking when I take the roof off to play inside; maybe attach them to the overhang of the porch? Something to think about. 

 Overall, I'm really happy with how it turned out and look forward to seeing it on the gaming table. 

In other hobby news...

I was finally able to pick up the bags of Wargames Factory zombies from my friend Dave. It's actually less than I'd been expected; there were a bunch of old Bolt Action Wehrmacht sprues mixed in and some of the Zombie Vixens are really worse for wear. I did assemble and prime a dozen male zombies, so I can start painting those tomorrow. As such, I'm only going to add 12 to my "Miniatures Acquired" tally for now.

 

Miniatures Acquired: 204

Miniatures Painted: 198

Terrain Acquired: 3

Terrain Painted: 9

Scatter Acquired: 8

Scatter Painted: 12