There is nothing more satisfying than vanquishing your enemies upon the alter of war, unfortunately after a while even the greatest generals amongst us begin to tire of the standard 'line up' and 'duke it out' style of scenario and fortunately GW doth provide with missions like 'Take and Hold' and 'Sabotage' (yes there are others besides Cleanse and Pitched Battle), but to show your genius these require a rather large terrain feature so given my extreme Eldar bias, what better to make than an Eldar Warp Gate.

Using the images in the Eldar codex and the Craftworld Codex for inspiration I made some sketches (I think Jes' jobs safe) of what I wanted the project to finally look like. (I do this for every project, and strangely enough the end result never looks like the initial concept sketch). I used these concept sketches to make templates for the major structures before applying them to my chosen material (ok I'm using wood, but I'd recommend using foam board about 2cm thick, as it's easier to work with).

The blocks were then cut out and the edges and surfaces smoothed over with fine polyfiller, at this point I sketched the 'vein' lines on the blocks and marked out the positions of the gems.

I then created the rounded base for the model (and the area to fight over) using 1/2cm thick MDF, beloved material of the DIY makeover shows which seam to be perpetually on TV these days when there isn't a 'reality' program.

Being as it was a rather plain surface I Eldar'd (tarted) the base up a bit with a cardboard over lay, in a loosely inspired yin-yang symbol come turtle shell effect, which was a nightmare to cut out, but the end effect is well worth it.

The next step was to acquire some metal wire and suitable gem stones (from shops populated by hippies or accessory shops populated by young girls [a hazardous undertaking if you don't have the girlfriend in tow!]. After experimenting with different types of wire (to make the veins) I concluded that the easiest to use was solder wire (a soft lead composite) as it is easily bent into shape with bare hands and relatively cheap (electronics shops eg Maplins), once cut to length the wire was placed in the appropriate positions and glued in place. The gems are left unattached at present as the model will be easier to paint without them. Leaving the model looking like this:

NB: I sanded a small piece of circular dowel and attached it to the structure to add some more dimension and clipped the small circular vein endings from a GW plastic sprue.

With all the modeling done I primed the whole thing with a coat of chaos black aerosol spray before applying a basecoat of masonry paint, I say masonry paint, what I mean is normal paint with sand mixed in, (I'd experiment with the mixture first so you get the right consistency before applying it for real).

Then came the mildly boring task of washing between the gaps and in the joints with a dark brown/red colouring to match both the 'traditional' wraithbone aging and the colour of my board. For those interested I used Bestial brown and Dark flesh watered down by a stupid amount and applied twice (a thicker amount was used around the veins). At this point it was not looking very pretty (hence no photo) so I dry brushed over it with the original paint colour (coffee cream I believe) and painting the raised tiles on the base so they contrasted. Finally I painted the veins in Boltgun metal more for aesthetics than fluff consistence.

As I say you don't have to paint it like mine as quite frankly you might hate it, but it's worth doing some paint tests to see if the colours work first. In addition you may want to add some transfers of decals to yours, I did stick some GW ones on, but IMO they were too thick and didn't look that great hence I unstuck them.

And there we have it.