The best laid plans… and the grey pile grows

Finally coming together

Plans do tend to go astray when sick family members and life comes up.  Spent half the week out of town so pretty much a bust this week.  I spent a couple of hours reworking the shield which is getting better slowly.  I also started working on the mock up of how my knight will sit on his base.

Rather than do dry run tests on the nice stained pretty base from last week I cut out a piece of scrap wood the same size to use for trials.  That way I can drill holes (and drill again when I change my mind) in the wood to work out the positioning of items without any worry.  I have the resin rock centred on the base with the bent tree at the back and the tree stump at the front so the helmet can rest on it.

I found that for the figure to sit properly I will need to grind down some of the rock (in foot size holes) to get a nice standing position.  Also in the final piece the flat ground area will be covered in milliput to give some undulation to the ground.  Then the snow on top of that.

Inanis in box

Also this week my “Inanis” figure from the Ater range by www.deadsculpt.com arrived (this was the Ater Kickstarter project).  A very well run Kickstart project that went along with no issues at all.

The figure is a 54mm resin sci-fi figure of a humanoid who happens to have a large hole in their chest.  Well packed in a little box and wrapped up in bubble wrap.  Some very nice details and hardly any flash.  The figure is quite skinny however.  Maybe I’m just use to chunky medieval knights.  I got the figure as it’s not normally something I would paint but the example paint job I saw was quite inspiring.  Into the projects draw for him :)

Flags and shields part 2

Things picked up a bit this week as I made an effort to get back into painting.  I’m doing most of my painting at night as even during the day on the weekend there isn’t much sun due to the winter weather.

Shield of shading

Banner

After a few nights of working on the shield I had to start again (again).  The dark blue paint I’m using for shading I think is getting a bit old and separated.  It keeps leaving tide marks when it dries and that ruined my second attempt on the shield.  Changing tack I base coated most of the shield in the first shade colour (rather than the base sky blue) and started shading from there.

My idea was that all the shield would be darker (being lower down on the figure and in shadow) so it would be easier to make the first shade colour the base colour of the shield and go from there.  The highlight would only be one or two steps above the base sky blue colour used on the cloak.  It worked better and managed to avoid most tide marks.  However I’m thinking my dark blue needs to be replaced.  It’s just too watery and seems to have no binding medium left in it.

Raw wood display base

I also started on the display base.  I’m thinking of using one of the resin rocks I made with the pinkysil and easycast resin previously as the main part of the base and a few small twigs as broken tree stumps.  For the wood I got a chair leg from Bunnings and cut it half and stained it much like it did for the display base of El Torres.

After staining

Next steps are tidying up the figure of all those little mistakes and doing a full trial of the snow effects.  Also I need to do a few more glazes on the shield and lower cloak area (for the mud splatter).  The good thing about using one to the resin rocks is that I can make as many as I want as trial pieces :)

Flags and shields for 54mm knight

Slow progress this week on the painting front.  Too many other things needed to be done so I’ve only clocked up a few hours this week.  Not enough time to improve my skill level and I really noticed that my colour blending was really out compared to a few weeks ago.  Practice it or lose it..

Start of a banner

For the shield and banner I went for a chevron pattern with the blue on the outside and the white in the middle.  To get a good line I used my airbrush and some masking tape to get a nice clean line.  However I’m just using normal old masking tape.  Not good.  You need to rip it on and off the desk a few times to remove some of the stickiness.  I didn’t and pulled off all the paint and undercoat back to bare metal.  Sigh.  Undercoat again and try again.

I’m happy with the shape of the chevron on the banner so now need to clean up the blending as it’s way too dramatic and you can see the lines between colours.  I did much better on the helmet front previously which is annoying.

Nope - start again time

For the shield after seeing the pictures I’m going to start again.  The chevron is too wide and there is some lumpy undercoat going on there.  So I will sand some areas back, respray the blue and make the white chevron narrower.  I’m finding shading a bit flat area much harder than the small areas.  I found this doing blue man with his long straight legs.  That took me a number of times (each time pretty much starting from scratch) before I got into the blend groove.  Rounded and folded shapes I find easier to shade.  Plus the shape itself helps out.






On the side I have started underpainting the two hills I purchased at Cancon this year.  I do a grass green base coat and then flock over the top.  However with the hills from Fernvale Scenics they suck up paint like a black hole.  These hills have had four coats of paint.  Not sure if it's the flexible resin or all the pores in the resin but paint just disappears on them.  These are now green enough for a layering of scatter material and static grass.

Roving over the hills we go

Snow effect for miniature figures

For my current 54mm knight figure I’ve been thinking of putting him on a snow base.  I have never tried doing any kind of snow effects before and had only heard about some of the older techniques (e.g. baking soda on PVA glue which apparently goes yellow).

Always buy stuff on special, regardless

Luckily for me I already had a snow and ice starter kit.  This was a $5 special from Hobbyco.  It was a “SceneArama” brand kit which is what Woodland Scenics sell their school kits under.

It came with

* snow paste - aka Flex Paste with is a little like gesso and PVA glue.  When put in mounds they retain their shape
* Snow Flakes - basically white scatter material
* Ice effects - Woodland Scenics realistic water.  You make lines of it on release paper (wax paper) to make icicles.

Snow paste and flakes on the top, paste + water on the bottom

The standard way to make snow drifts is to mix the paste and flakes together and apply as snow drifts.  You can also mix the paste with water and then sprinkle the flakes over that.  In both cases you just get a really lumpy white mound which doesn’t look much like snow.  Sad face on that one.

Woodland Scenics snow flakes by themselves

Noch snowflakes - aka white static grass with glitter

The second group of products I tried was the Noch brand, with the Starter Set Snowflakes.  This set has

* Snow glue - looks like PVA and white paint.  Much thinner than the Woodland Scenics Flex Paste and self levels
* Snowflakes - white static grass with glitter mixed in
* a static grass shaker.  The idea is you shake the static grass inside to build up a static charge and then sprinkle out the grass.

Shaker bottle

Firstly the snow glue is much whiter than the Woodland Scenics flex paste and looks better as thick snow cover.  The snowflakes material is ok, but kind of makes everything fuzzy rather than snowy.  The glitter (to add light sparkle) I think is fine in the train world where the scale is much smaller but on figures it just doesn’t look right.  Especially as glitter is either green or purple in colour normally so you are wondering why your snow cover has purple spots in it.  I did find that the best effect was to start with the snow glue, add the Woodland Scenics snowflakes scatter, then when that was dry add another layer of snow glue and add the Noch snowflakes static grass.  These multiples layers helped with the realism.  However the glitter was still an issue.

Below are some example of the end results of the above

All the experiments together

Woodland Scenics flex paste and snowflakes

Noah Snow glue and snow flake static grass.  Note the glitter

Noah snow glue, Woodland Scenics snowflakes, Noch white static grass

Normally I always go for railroad modelling supplies for terrain making.  Pretty much all the gaming terrain supplies are just rebadged railroad brands with inflated prices and reduced quantities.  However I tried two gaming ones and I’m pretty happy with both which surprised me.

AP snow with PVA glue

The first was the Army Paint Battlefields Snow.  This has some weight to it so I’m wondering if it is some kind of painted fine sand.  You put down some PVA glue and add the snow grains to it.  It looks pretty good at just that.  The size of the particles are smaller than the Woodland Scenics snowflakes particles.  With a bit of static grass over the top it looks even better.  It also comes in a handy square container with a clip on lid.

The second was from 4Ground.  This was their Snow static grass.  Basically just the same as the Noch white static grass but with no glitter.  Why wasn’t this at my LGS the first time I went looking!  I’m thinking the Noch static grass isn’t going to see much love.

So my current snow design is the Noch snow glue with AP snow and Woodland scenics snowflakes, finally covered in 4Ground white static grass.  If you don’t want to have a cupboard full of snow products and just want to snow up some 28mm bases I would recommend PVA glue, white paint and the AP snow.

Noah white static grass sprayed down with a thin PVA/water spray.  Aka alien fungus

Finally on a “well that looks cool” note I found that if you sprinkle on the white static grass and then spray over it with a PVA/water mixture from a squirt bottle all the static grass lays down and moulds to the terrain surface.  When it dries it looks like some great Mirkwood spider webs.  Ie where the entire ground is covered with webs.  Or some kind of bad alien fungus.