A Couple New Sculpts

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.

The Electric Wizard Comes to the Wastes

Check it:

A Couple Painted Baddies

Sticking with the "A Couple" string of posts, here are "A Couple" of bad guys from my Christmas acquisitions. These were the first figures I had painted since my Orc Blood Bowl team, so my hand was a little shaky. I worked quickly, focusing on having fun and experimenting rather than agonizing over every little detail.

These figures mark a lot of "firsts" for me. They are the first true fantasy dedicated figures I've painted since I was 15. They are also the first figures to go in a warband for Song of Blades and Heroes or Skulldred. So sentimental value, for sure.

More interestingly, these were the first figures which I tried basing on washers, the first where I tried puddle effects on the bases, and the first where I tried superglue instead of PVA to adhere the sand. They were also the first figures on which I tried using Liquitex matte medium for blending, and the first figures on which I tried Non-Metallic Metal and Object Source Lighting techniques.

So these are very important figures for me. Even if they don't look that good.

What's fun is tracking the improvement across the two pieces. I painted the skeleton on the left first, and you can see how sloppy the OSL is compared to the hand on the Sorcerer. Likewise, the NMM is pretty odd looking on the skeleton, partly because I was working from a midnight blue base, and partly because I did not take enough time in the blending details. The NMM on the Sorcerer has a more believable color, but does not look very metallic. Which I'm fine with. I think it conveys a nice, grubby metal.

I am really liking the washer bases. The low profile with the black rim really appeals to me. I need to work on the puddle effect, though. The idea here is to make a blanche-style soggy base with puddles reflecting a luridly colored sky. It did not work at all on the skeleton because I tried it as an afterthought, on top of the sand. It worked much better for the sorcerer because I left blank spots on the washer when I glued on the texture (gel formula super glue is perfect for this kind of control). I still need to work on the illusion of depth, though.

Finally, while I had the paints out, I figured I'd whip out a measuring stick for SoBH/ Skulldred. (If you aren't familiar with these systems, they both deal with movement in fixed increments, rather than measurements.) So I cut down a length of sprue and painted bands for short, medium, and long movement. Since Skulldred uses base-widths rather than the odd increments of millimeters in SoBH, I decided to just go with that. I don't understand why SoBH is different, but I don't think it will break the game and this way I only have to paint one.

Look out for more painted figs, and maybe someday even a batrep. Any tips, criticisms, advice, questions, &c are always welcome. Just drop a card in the box below:

A Couple Burly Conversions

As promised, here are the other two converted dwarf warriors. Pretty much the same stuff as before, but this  time I was a little more adventurous.

I wanted a heavily armored dwarf, so I gave this guy some BURLY SHOULDER ARMOR. This armor is important if you spend a lot of time in fantasy battles because if you don't have it, your opponent can cut you. RIGHT IN THE SHOULDER. They are a little lumpy due to my lack of patience in trying to create a hard edge in Apoxie Sculpt/ Green Stuff.

I also wanted him to have a shield, but the ones supplied on the plastic dwarf sprue were definitely not burly enough. (If you couldn't tell already, "burliness" is a real theme in this post.) So I added a little extra around the edges...

...Plus some wood-grain for the back. Nothing fancy.

Now THIS guy took some work. Obviously, the two handed hammer needed something. What was it? Oh yeah. BURLINESS. I mixed up some Apoxie Sculpt and G.S., formed a rough cube, let it cure, and then ran it over fine-grit sand paper to get the sharpish edges.

Unfortunately, the arms provided on the sprue were not burly enough to accommodate a two handed pose with said hammer. (Weird that they would provide a piece that doesn't fit, but whatever...) I had to severely elongate the model's left arm to make this pose work. I lengthened the arm with a bit of paper clip, and then sculpted a simple vambrace over it. Never mind that it doesn't match! I didn't have much patience after all the chopping, as I also had to dislocate the shoulder because the arm was THAT short. This left a gaping hole where the arm socket was.

...which led me to the decision to burly up his cloak a little bit. I decided to do some matted fur so I could practice my texture sculpting. And there it is. I think I did a pretty good job of using the fur cloak to fill the gap in the shoulder, though there is an angle on one side where it looks a little weird. Oh well. I wanted idiosyncrasy.

Seriously, though, I really like it. And I'm excited to have a couple of heavy hitters for my little band of lost dwarves.

And here's dwarf number one again, after an unfortunate paint job and an even less fortunate strip job, in which the winged crests of his helm were lost forever (God! What a fiddly kit!). So I sculpted him up some nice, asymmetric horns. Perhaps not burly, but certainly unique.

Which brings me at last to this distinctly non-dwarven bit of putty magic. This is one of the used figures I picked up for Christmas. He was missing an arm, and I thought it would be no problem to sculpt him another (I was wrong, it was very difficult) but then the horns on the dwarf above gave me the idea for the weird, twisty claw thing. HETERODOXY! He will probably have the "Mutant" special rule from Song of Gold and Darkness. Unless you can provide a better idea, by using the fancy button below.

A Couple Stout Conversions

About a year ago, I bought a box of used plastic Citadel dwarf warriors from the discount shelf at the Dice Dojo ($17! Sweet!) At the time, I had just discovered Blood Bowl and was looking for cheap ways to make teams.

I separated out all of the pieces I would use for the team (I will have to convert/sculpt a pair of Troll Slayers, Runners, and, of course, the death roller. If you're patient, you might just see that project some day.) I found that I had enough left over to make a small party of dwarven adventurers.

What you may not know about this particular plastic set, and what I found out shortly after sitting down to assemble it, is that it is total crap. It seems like none of the pieces fit together as intended. The bodies come in two pieces, front and back-- or more accurately, beard and legs-- and I had to spend at least 15 minutes shaving and filing each piece in order to get them to fit together. And even then there were gaps. Big ones. Between the hair and the helmet, the beard and the body, the arms and the sockets... a total mess.

                                     

Fortunately, I dislike having figures that too closely resemble one another. So it became an opportunity to practice my putty work. To fill the cracks between the helmet and the top of the warrior's back, I sculpted longer, knottier hair. To cover the gaps in the shoulders, I sculpted armor (or more hair.) To cover the seams running down the sides, I sculpted extra folds in the cloaks (or even more hair.)

These are just the first two. There are two more to come, so keep an eye out. And let me know what you think!

Pilgrims to the Hidden City

How once those cities shone high in the gloom,

As patient embers...yes. A muted furnace for many souls.

What comfort came to the hearts of the pilgrims

When they saw far off the glittering collective, and knew peace.

But now the hidden city is lost again. 

Perhaps it is buried in dust, and the fiery domes are cracked.

Or perhaps it waits over the next rise,

Or in the shadow of that sneering mountain, or in the basin of some dry sea.

Hard-Core Foam-core: Part Last

Light on the text today. This post is mostly just a picture dump of the painted results of my recent foam-core scenery. I am more than a touch pleased. 

These were primed gray, then hit with an overall black wash, as well as some brown and green in places. I then dry-brushed the stone up to a light gray; based the ground and wood with chocolate brown and mixed in white to dry-brush;  I then added some basing mix, a couple of bits of lichen coated in ground foam, and I was done.

I am quite a fan of the egg-shell ivy, though the color did come out a little garish. I tried, for the first time, using inks on it. The only problem was that the ink was 5+ years old and had formed into a sludgy, pigmented gloop. It took a good many washes of brown to tone that down.

I then went and drybrushed a little too heavily with the white, making for an overall unrealistic paint job. But I'm content with the vibrancy. I think it reads as ivy and draws the eye in a way that the more drab colors on the rest of the piece do not. It almost says: "The ruin is dead, but the land is alive." I might go back and touch it up one day. I might not.

Here's a picture to show how the pieces go together, inspired by those old citadel plastic ruins:

And finally, a pic of the foam core pillars after paint. Not half bad, even though you can still see the join in the foam.

Let me know what you think!