Brothership II: The Leggggs

 

It has been slow going on the Brothership project. One of the most infuriating and also satisfying things about scratch-building is that it is really, really hard to 1) make the pieces you have match the vision of the finished project and 2) make the vision of the finished project match the pieces you have. 

You can't exactly iterate on an idea, as once you start committing with glue/drilling/cutting it's hard to turn back, so the vision has to be pretty well-formed. However, the vision must be formed in a conceptual space rather than a physical one. Sure, you can sketch (and I did), but in my experience, progress tends to come as a burst of inspiration after several idle hours of holding different pieces of trash next to each other and going: "hmmmmmm." 

It's therefore a fine art deciding when to commit to actually building a build (or part thereof). But once you do, and the vision and the pieces converge on one another, there are few rewards in the entire hobby to rival that feeling of satisfaction

This wasn't really the case with the main cannon. That was just a frustrating challenge of making a rotatable element out of something very heavy (the head of a bicycle pump). It's not the most elegant, but I got there in the end.

It emphatically is the case for the legs of this beast. These each on their own are possibly the most intricate things I've ever scratch-built.

They are pinned eight ways to Sunday, with external stabilizing pins disquised as pistons using small sections of coffee straw.

Symmetry, as ever with trash bashing, is a real challenge. But I'm pretty happy with this result even if it's a bit wonky.

Luckily, the legs don't need to be strong enough to hold the entire weight of the ship. (This fucker's heavy and I'm not looking forward to devising the flight stand system). The main cannon acts as the third leg and bears most of the weight of the model, and the legs provide balance.

And with cannon and legs out of the way at last, I am free to finally address the third most technically challenging part of this build, the rotatable VTOL rockets. They look like this right now:

I've already had a few skirmishes with them and ultimately discovered that magnets alone are not sufficient to keep them from rotating out of position from their own weight. This means that I will need to build a way to stabilize the magnet attachment point in a couple of different fixed positions.

After that, all that is left to do, in order of difficulty:

• Detail the main thruster
• Devise a sturdy enough flight stand
• Add a million wires, cables, guitar strings, etc.
• Add additional plating and greebles to cover mistakes
• Paint
• Get it on the table

Hopefully I will be able to report more progress soon.

Until then, feel free to let me know what you think by assembling a comment out of whatever you have lying around and lots of glue.

A Bit of Converting for Mordheim

 It looks like we're going to be doing a short Mordheim campaign at the ol game club, and I would dearly like to play a Cult of Possessed warband. That means I need mutants, which I'm using as an excuse to get some models from the very bottom of the leadpile built and painted. I don't remember at this point where I got either of them. Their history is lost in the legends of ancient lead.

This one is a very lumpy sculpt that has always pleased me with its sheer vibiness. He got a scorpion tail mutation.

This next one is an actual, honest-to-god Mordheim mini, albeit technically intended for the Carnival of Chaos faction (lest you think I was about to correctly use an official mini for a games workshop game XD). But he was missing a hand, which I gather is pretty common for this mini. So he got a giant claw courtesy of the Shadowlord instead. I tried to go for a more mandibular look on the sculpt here.

It'll be thrilling to finally get some paint on these guys and put them on the table.

Lang Knecht

Here's another one from the Archives of Unpublished Hobby Photos, one of the few sculpts I have actually finished!

I call him a Langknecht. A twisted and mutated warrior of the wyrdwold. I finished him in, I think, 2021? I had ambitions to sculpt him some friends, and maybe I still will some day.

I also have ambitions of molding and dropcasting him in pewter, but the RTV mold rubber I purchased at the time for the purpose is now over three years old, and that stuff is supposed to have a limited shelf-life, so I'm afraid to use it.

If anyone out there reading this has experience using old two part silicone/rubber, I'd appreciate a comment! Even if it's just tips on disposing of it.

Or you can, you know, tell me what you think of the sculpt :)

 

Brothership I

It's a very special feeling when you open up your "cool trash" drawer and realize that finally, after years of collecting, you have enough for a really cool scratchbuild.

Usually there's a key piece that I'm building around, and in this case, it was this weird sunbeam thermostat thingy that I found on the side of the street three years ago. It looked up at me and screamed: "Spaceship! Make me into a spaceship!" And it has continued to yell that at me periodically ever since.

But it needed the right pieces. The worst feeling is to embark on a build and realize a little way in that you weren't patient enough, that you just needed more pieces.

I'm pretty sure I've hit that point now, with a plugin diffuser, an old car diagnostic doohickey, the end of a knackered bicycle pump, the usual odds and ends, and, of course, the pieces that give this project it's working name: parts from Brother printer cartridges.

I dub this ship-to-be THE BROTHERSHIP.

The bridge/observation deck is obvious. Fitting everything around it is more challenging. I envision this as a craft that can operate both in and out of atmo, so it needs a gigantic propulsion system for leaving the gravity well. The plug-in diffuser is perfect for that. The Ifixit can be a senor array-type thing to fill the gap in front.

I'm using chip board to build out the rest of the structure. 

The larger printer piece provides secondary propulsion and a lower structure. A piece of a six-pack provides the structure for the rear hatch.

The severed wires will be where I mount the main cannon.

I wanted to use some eva foam to make armor plate cladding, but getting the forms right is tricky. To solve this, I settled on a method of using thin paper and a pencil to make a rubbing of the area of the ship that I wanted to clad. I could then draw over this to make a template for the eva.

Flipping the template gives the mirrored piece for the opposite side of the model.

Blue tape helps to dry fit the pieces into position and ensure a reasonable approximation of symmetry.

Some scrap windowscreen for texture:

Caps for turrets and protrusions:

More eva foam plating makes the door panels for the rear hatch. The port is from what I believe to be a piece of a bicycle hub. Not sure though. Found that in an alley.

Wire from a dead USB cable makes handy piping around edges.

Rubber tank treads left over from a previous scratch-bash hide some of the more obvious lid textures:

And that's the main body done! A lot left to build though. I have fun ideas for landing gear, detailing on the main booster, and most excitingly, rotatable VTOL rockets. There will be a million details to work out, but I am really pumped with how this is looking so far. More to come.

Box Castle IV: the Eight Flags of Helmrood

The devil, so they tell me, resides in the details, and one detail I knew I wanted for my castle project was flags. BIG flags.

Like most things I do, I have a slightly idiosyncratic and um interdisciplinary approach to making flags and banners. I like to use experimental illustration techniques on them, since banners are small and low-stakes.

Because I was trying to finish this project intime for the CSW Kings of War campaign finale, I thought it would be fun to have a flag representing each participating faction. Hence my take on the wolf of house Stark, Karl's Night Heron of the Black Crown, Jon's Underworld Devourer, and Michael's Mark of Slaanesh.

I started with rough ink concept sketches in my sketch book:

I then used my light table to transfer the sketches onto bristol board in pencil:

At this point, it was time to raid my ink collection. I keep a drawer full of fountain pen ink samples for this kind of work because they are vibrant and sometimes have interesting and unexpected effects. (Though any ink or even watercolor will work to create these washes.) I deliberately keep it messy, uneven, and flowing to maximize the amount of visual interest.

While these are still wet, I then go in with my secret weapon, Noodler's Eel Black fountain pen ink (the same one I used for the shadows on the box castle). The extreme granulation it exhibits is unparalleled for texture.

With just a little bit of manipulation of the ink and water, you can create shadow gradients really easily.

Once all of that is dry, now we get to go back in with the pen for the final drawing:

We also can go back to some special-effect inks, specifically I LOVE using metallic inks. They typically have an underlying color and a slight sparkle when applied thin, but when left concentrated will dry almost completely metallic.

For the heron feathers, I used a silver/red and gold/orange ink, placed in small drops, and then used a straw to blow them into streaks:

After a few layers, and then a spritz of water from a spray bottle, this is what I had:

Final drawing step is with a white gel pen:

The eyeball pennants were looking a little too plain, so I decided to go back in and add some text. (I wrote the words down next to them so I wouldn't forget how to spell XD)

I didn't need/feel like making these banners two-sided, so the backs just got a dark brown/grey wash.

Then it was time to cut them out!

It's helpful to have other small projects around when you're working on something like this, so you have something to do during the drying time. In this case, it was more doors.

And also flag stanchions. I needed a way to fly these flags in multiple positions, but also pack them away inside the castle. I opted for cocktail sticks glued into three-layer sandwiches of chipboard. The middle piece is shorter than the outer pieces, allowing the outer pieces to form a clip that fits snugly around the chipboard walls of the castle. I illustrated them to look like stones.

I also needed to make sure that the flags could rotate on their poles, so that no matter where I placed them, they could all be oriented to the same wind direction. I did this by cutting the tabs a bit long and gluing the ends to the flag itself, using a cocktail stick as a form, rather than gluing the banner directly to its pole.

Finally, to give the illusion of rippling wind, I carefully dampened the flags very lightly (I didn't want to reactivate anything) and used a pencil to bend gentle curves into the bristol board. I left them to dry on their stanchions:

 If you like these banners enough to want to use them yourself, I've scanned and mirrored them (to make them two-sided) and put them up on Drivethrurpg for pay what you want. Feel more than free to download a set for $0. Hope you like 'em!