In the hither Northwest, where mountain hames perch 'midst the bluffs of the groaning vale, and the trails are marked by cairns of unknown heritage, there are some who insist that not all stones are as they seem.
These are regarded by their neighbors as—at best—eccentric. Ever are they moonlight-rambling up the trails and passes with leathern satchels of bizarre tools: tiny hammers, calipers, bits of colored chalk.
When happens a likely-looking boulder, these instruments they will use to tickle and to prod the belly of the stone. If one were to ask, for instance, 'Dear Rooblin, why is it that you so vex the stones?' He might reply: 'because this stone, THIS stone is just pretending.
'At it's heart is the wily soul of a primeval beast, forefathers of the hund, or the geit, or the ochse, that was deposited here when the world was but an icy thought in the mind of god...'
And here will they become pensive, perhaps winding and unwinding the handle of their tiny chisel in the tangles of their beard. 'I could show you...if I could but make the creature pay heed. Many is the time that I've seen a stone rouse into the form of a many-hornéd beast and slake itself at the lip of a black mountain tarn...'
Here's the thing about scratch-building starship miniatures: It's difficult. And time-consuming. And fiddly.
(https://deepspacepilots.bandcamp.com/)
Sometimes you get frustrated with trying to build your model from the various pen bits, cigarette lighters, oddments, and thingummys, and you start effing around instead.
Then you wind up with weird abominations like this:
And then you get tantalized. You find more things to press into clay that's a little too stiff to roll out evenly. You try and figure ways around the problems of symmetry.
You actually try and make a two part press mold work. These are the things you use:
This is what it looks like while the resin is curing:
This is what it looks like when you eff up pouring:
And this is what you get in the end, none of it fitting together or resembling anything usable as a miniature, but all of it promising the wonderous concretization of ideas that is the terminal point of my interest in this hobby:
So. Back to the dry-dock. But with the knowledge that the cosmos will some day yield the sweet, sweet juice of miniature space battles.
It's finally finished. I'm a little embarrassed that such a simple project took this long, but the important thing is that my gaming mat made from teddy bear fur (wip post here) is finished and ready for action.
The most grueling part of this process is trimming down the fur. Even ordering the shortest pile, I found that the fur was too thick to be able to place miniatures on reliably, especially when I factored in the extra stiffness that paint would give the fur.
The solution? Yup, go at it with a pair of scissors. If you feel like throwing an extra $15 at the project, you could invest in a pair of clippers—but that's just not where I was at. Furthermore, I found that the scissor treatment gave a rather uneven 'tufty' finish that appealed to my idea of what a matted, unkempt field should look like. And for all the tedium, I found that four evenings working at it for about a half-hour each while I watched a t.v. show saw the job done. I would recommend wearing a mitten or similar on you scissor-hand to prevent discomfort.
I took a couple of WIP pics of this stage, above and below. It's a little hard to make out, but in the image above, the trimmed section is at the bottom. In the one below, it's to the right. If you look very carefully, you might make out the difference in the fur's texture. Untrimmed, it's very smooth, trimmed, it's rough and wavy.
Unfortunately during the painting stage, I temporarily lost my camera. Luckily, however, the process is literally as easy as taking some very thin acrylics (like, skim milk consistency) and rubbing them all over the fur one patch at a time with your hands. (I used rubber gloves, but don't let me tell you what to do.)
I used a selection of three dullish greens, some brown and some yellow. I'd splash on one or two colors and then run through it with my hands until it was spread through the fur. If it needed more variation or there were portions without color, I'd splash in some different colors and repeat until I was satisfied. Once I'd covered the whole mat in this manner, I hung it up to dry.
Above is the finished, folded mat. There's no beating this thing for portability: It's light, packs small, and does not wrinkle or curl.
Here it is laid out. I put a couple of small plates face down on the table to serve as low hills.
Here's what it looks like with some scenery on. Of course, once I had it dressed up, I couldn't resist taking down my collection and organizing a little scene...
A desperate coalition defend the standing stones from dwimmer-beasts
The odds seem insurmountable.
The lines converge. Ruin is nigh.
Evil Majickers raise reinforcement from the barrows.
The doomed defence looks to be overwhelmed...
...but for the horse-thegns of the north who ride upon the wing!
Just a bit of a picture dump today, as I got all the finished Slagscape Concervation Collective models out and photographed them together. Here's some music to go with it as well (if you like the band, then by all means check them out here. They're from my home town and they're awesome.) Enjoy!
Here are a pair of new sculpts I've been working on. These are the first scratch-built minis that I've tried since my Blood Bowl Troll: http://mdarrow.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-second-string-sculpts-finished-troll.html. I was excited to try something at normal scale for 28mm (which is funny, because these came out more like 32mm) and I wanted to try out mixing Aves Apoxie Sculpt and Green Stuff, which ended up working quite well. It's less sticky and it blends very well, unlike straight G.S. which always seems to leave a seam.
Above is the first mini and its concept sketch, The Electric Wizard Comes to the Wastes: Link, loosely based on the wonderful stoner-metal album Electric Wizard. You can tell that the work is still very much in progress, what with the lack of hands, but I'm very pleased with the face, as it is very first human face I've ever sculpted. I made it roughly following this tutorial: http://www.ebobminiatures.com/sculpting/faces.htm. This is a good, simple way to start studying the art of the visage.
I'm also taking my first crack at weapon-making. (The wizard's sword, Slamdring the Foe-Slammer, and his Staff of Incandescence are mounted on wires out the sides of his cork.) That part's not going quite so well, but I'm learning a lot. It's a very fiddly business, and, as you can no doubt see by my attempt on the Evil Dead below, I have not quite figured out how to get an elegant result:
I tried to fashion this chopper out of plastic card, but that turned out to be even harder than using G.S. Furthermore, mounting it to the figure to achieve a strong bond proved to be impossible save by sculpting it into the hand itself, which came out looking...odd.
It was a good experiment, though, and I don't mind rough results on what will wind up being a rather mookish character. You have to start somewhere. I am, however, pretty pleased with the face on this one too, in spite of its being out of scale and anatomically out there. I'm discovering that I enjoy making my minis closer reflect my twisted visions than they do "reality."
What do you mean "reality?" This is fantasy, damn it.
That said, I will be trying to work on my sense of scale and the elegance of my putty work. Any and all comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
