Soldiers 54mm Prince of Novograd and Warlord Games Druid figure

I started work on my 54mm Soldiers figure, Prince of Novograd this week.  The first part of the figure to do was the chainmail as the dry brushing on it can easily over spray onto the rest of the figure.  After a black undercoat I dry brushed very lightly up through:

VMA Black Metal
AP Gun Metal
AP Plate Mail Metal
AP Shining Silver
VMA Aluminium

I also did a gradual highlighting with the dry brushing so as you go up the figure there is more of the lighter metallics.  So on the legs I only went from Black Metal to Plate Mail.  Under the arms up to Shining Silver and only on the tops of the arms did I get all the way up to Aluminium.

After all that I did a glaze in VMC Earth to bring things back a bit.  I find I can’t do much work at night under lights with the metallics as the high reflection factor make it very hard to judge colours.  My next step is to start working the sky/earth glazes and some more general shadow glazes over all the chainmail.

While I was dry brushing I was trying to work out what colours to do the other main parts of the figure, the cloak and surcoat.  The box art has the figure all white but I didn’t want to do that.  I considered a Crusader looks, or even something totally made up.  Not being sure of my white skill I broke out the box of misc. 28mm figures and found one to trial things on.


The figure is a Warlord Games figure from their Ancient Celts: Druids 4 pack.  I wanted to try two main things, the first was a cool white scheme, the second a dirty linen look.

On his tunic I did a very cool white with grey/blue shadows.  In the picture it comes out a lot more yellow than it is.  I need to try taking the photo again in the light cube I have.  The colours where light blue, blue grey, dull white and gloss white.

On his cloak I went of off yellow linen effect.  The colours used were

VCG Earth
VMC Tan Yellow
VMC Iraqi Sand
VGC Dead White
VMA White

I was pretty happy with the cloak, the tunic less so.  Still need some more practice on painting white.  I finished up the staff and flesh as further training and grabbed a piece of foam to base him on.  This came from a comment from the wife who mentioned that he looked better tilted back a little like he was on the side of a rock.  I agreed and liked the paint work enough that I wanted to finish him off with a fancy base.  Also, more basing practice.  Now to let the glue dry and then I’ll coat the foam in PVA glue and some texture material.  I will perhaps try using the oils again to paint up the base as I like playing with the properties of oil paints.

DIY sanding sponges for miniature figure prep work

I have always had and used a set of needle files for prepping my figures.  For the standard tabletop figure that is quite adequate (with a hobby knife as well).  However my reading of various scale model magazines has uncovered a world of various specialist filing/sanding options.  One of the most common is very fine grit sandpaper usually on some kind of semi flexible foam board.  Also prepping figures for display painting just scrapping off the mould lines isn't enough.

Knowing that anything in the hobby world probably started life as something else (like green stuff for example) I went to my local discount chemist/makeup provider (Priceline) and checked out the beauty isle.  After all finger nail buffers are really just fine sand paper.

The good thing about getting older is that you just don't care that people look at you while you check out every pack of emery boards/nail buffers in store.  Shame is for your 20s.  There was a pretty good foam strip sander/buffer which I found on metal figures worked really well.  But at $5+ and only one option to choose from I kept looking for more options.

From Hobbyco there are the various sanding sticks, foam strips, sandpaper, etc but all are quite expensive.  After all a single sheet of A4 sandpaper only costs $1-$2.  Why am I paying $10 for a couple of finger length strips.  Never pay retail!

Makeup sponges and spray

So firstly I purchased some fine grit sandpaper from the local hardware store.  They went up to 1200 grit.  For 1500/2000 grit eBay was my friend and I purchased a triple pack of 2 sheets each of 1200/1500/2000 grit for $6.50.  There were cheaper options but I knew that the Mr Hobby brand I chose was quite good.  Then it was back to Priceline Chemist for a bag of makeup sponges.  These are small 4x5cm sponges that come in a bag of 16 for less than $10 from memory.  

I then cut up some 600/800/1200/1500/2000 grit sandpaper into 4x5cm pieces and using spray adhesive glued the sandpaper and sponges together.  I found I had to put a heavy weight on top of the sponge to make sure it stuck to the sandpaper but once the glue was dry the bond was very good.  I also wrote what grit each piece was on the back of the sponge for ease of reference.

Scrape away all of your worries

Now I have a set of flexible sanding pads that I can bend in half or even cut up to odd shapes as per needed.  After using the metal files I switch to these sanding pads to clean up a figure.  Finally for display figures I use a Dremel with a brush attachment to give a metal figure a really smooth finish.

Some Flemish figures for Saga and steampunk resin casting

Just add earth..

Having a break week after finishing blue man I went back to 28mm land and did two figures (out of eight) for my Flemish unit for Saga.  These figures are Normans from Conquest Games.  I wanted to trial some different techniques of painting chainmail too.



Rather than just dry brushing all the chainmail the same way all over I did a graduated dark to light approach so the top of the figure was lighter than the bottom.  Once that was done I did a bit of earth/sky glazing and did a earth colour glaze on the bottom half and a sky blue glaze on the top.  With the chainmail done that was 75% of the figure.  I did struggle to get back to 28mm size faces but overcame that by going down a few brush sizes :)  Just need to finish off the bases and these two are done.

The wife has gotten back into sewing recently and has decided she wants to make some steampunk outfits/gear.  In my other hobby of electronics I have a large collection of misc. gears from old cdroms/etc so I volunteered them for the cause.  Steampunk costumes love gears painted up like brass.  But that got me thinking that my wife will only be able to make 2-3 pieces before the supply of gears is done and cdroms are getting hard to find.  So why not copy them…

Mould box and original gears ready to go

So out came the pinkysil and east cast resin and now we have two mould blocks of gears.  Really this was just an excuse to trial out some more mould making techniques and I did learn some new bits:

It's alive!

The big pour

 * always have a second item ready to become a mould.  That way if you have spare silicon you don’t waste it.  That is why I have a single gear in a mould by itself.  That was the surplus silicon mould and sure enough there was some pinkysil left over to make it.


* don’t change where you are pouring your silicon from halfway through a pour.  It’s a sure way to get air bubbles into the mould.  For a big mould pour in the middle as the pinkysil is quite slow flowing.

Resin casts ready for priming (sorry about the yellow light)

* always have an extra mould ready for when you are mixing resin.  I now have a very small new resin rock made from the larger rock mould from the surplus resin from the gears casting batch.









So next week is still school holidays so not much painting time as I’m taking time off to be daddy daycare.  However I will try and get going with my next 54mm figure, the Soldiers knight, Prince of Novograd.

75mm blue man is done

Dapper Dan in blue

This week I finished off the base for blue man.  There were three parts: the floor, the bar and the bar clutter.

The black spot is the pin hole for the figure

The floor was given a very light oil wash of burnt sienna to simulate grime and dirt.  I was going to do more but the single wash looked pretty much what I wanted.  I then glued down the plastic card to the wood base and cleaned up the black paint around the edges.

For the bar I did a number of oil washes (burnt sienna, burnt umber, black) before lightening up (and simulating wood spots) with burnt sienna, yellow ochre and lemon yellow .  I also did the oil spot technique of putting on various colours and then blending them back into the piece with some thinner.  For the spot colours I used some reds, blues and white.  I was finding that the top of the bar was going green however, from the tan colour over the black undercoat.  To try and counter this I did a few washes of red to neutralise the green.

9/10 doctors recommend 'W' brand...

The bar top was going to need something to break up the space and also make it obvious that this was a bar.  I made an ashtray out of the top of dollhouse wooden balustrade which I hollowed out with a drill.  I painted this a sea green with some added pearlised paint mixed in to get a bakelite look.  The cigarette was a piece of plastic card rod.  It’s slightly out of scale but it’s the only rod I had and I think it needs to be a bit larger so you can see it.

I also cut up a small rectangle of plastic and painted it up to look like a Winston cigarette packet from the 1950’s.  I couldn’t paint the full ‘Winston’ so just went for a single central ‘W’.

Finally everything was glued down and blue man was done.  I nice experiment in 75mm which didn’t take too long or cost very much.