DIY scatter flock, 54mm Samurai and more resin casting

Milliput ground effects

 A mixed bag this week.  I was a little light on painting due to illness but managed to do a wide range of other activities.  First off was doing some of the ground work for my 54mm Samurai.  I used some Milliput and filled out the blank area on the base.  Just some gentle ground variations to make it a little less boring.  Then I filled in the cracks between the resin cobblestone piece and the wooden base with the leftover Milliput.  I also painted up the back of the wall piece in good old flat black.

Next up was some mold making and resin casting.  I made up a couple of molds for some pots I had purchased recently as I wanted quite a number of them for a market diorama I have in the back of my head.  Also using the left over Pinkysil silicon I did a quick mold of a tree piece I had made but didn’t use for my 54mm Prince of Novograd.  This was pretty much the case of “got left over silicon, quick find something small in 1 minute to make a mold”.  The macro shot shows what amazing detail you can get out of a home cast.  It will make a great fallen log on a base.

Resin log love

As my wife prepares for the next cosplay adventure I’ve been spraying various toy weapons to make them look less toy like.  Many plastic swords are now black and/or gunmetal.  I even got break out my old Paasche model H airbrush as the larger nozzles it has are great for mass coverage of larger items.

DIY scatter/flock

Many moons ago I saw a youtube video made by RubbishInRubbishOut about making your own flock/scatter material out of sawdust and cheap acrylic paint.  Having done a large amount of woodwork recently I had some sawdust to play with.  First I used some flyscreen and sifted the sawdust to remove the big chunks.  Then using the cheapest paint I have (the $2 for 100ml type from the discount store) I added just enough water to make it liquid.  Then I just kept adding sawdust and mixing the two until there were no more clumps of paint.  I found that once the sawdust doesn’t feel wet to touch you are pretty much at the right ratio of sawdust to paint.  Any more and you end up with bits of sawdust that don’t get coloured.

To be honest I hadn’t really expected it to be that easy or to work so well.  I made up five batches just to experiment.  The beauty of this is that you can use just a tiny amount of paint and only produce a small amount of coloured scatter.  No more buying a huge bag that you will never use.  Mind you I already have those huge bags so this was more an exercise in producing odd colours of scatter to add some variety to the basing materials cupboard.  Any colour of scatter I like now.

54mm Samurai

Any finally, I got a bit of mr samurai done.  I put a hold on the breastplate for now.  Not happy with it but sick of doing it.  I worked on the yellow areas a bit and they are tracking ok so far.  The shades down are reasonable and I need to work the highlights some more.  The ankle areas aren’t right so I will need to have another go there.  But in all the yellow worked better then I expected given how little I paint yellow.

54mm Samurai

54mm Samurai with Naginata and base work

Continuing on from last week I did the eyes on the figure.  I surprised myself by only having to do them twice.  They are quite recessed so I was pretty chuffed that I didn’t muck them up and need 5+ attempts.  I’m sure I’ll go back to them and try again before the figure is done.

54m Samurai

Next I started on the breastplate and face mask.  Since these are base coated in VMC Hull Red they are the darkest part of the figure.  Originally I was only going to highlight them up to the Warlock Purple (i.e. what the coat is base coated in) but that wasn’t enough.  The area still looked too dark.  So I increased the highlights some more on the point areas.  Also to add contrast I darkened down some of the shade areas with Hull Red and black.  Originally I wasn’t going to do any shades but by darkening an area the colour next to that area looks lighter in colour.

When I had enough of that I did some work on the base.  Firstly I’m using the base I originally made for my 54mm Prince of Novograd.  The large black facing of the base I think will work better with the bright colours of the samurai.  I envisioned the samurai standing in front of a castle gateway so using one of my J’s Work molds and Easycast resin made a small area of cobblestone road.  Then the stone wall corner I had made sits at an angle to the base and the road comes out of the suggested gateway and covers approx half of the base.  Never have things like a wall or road parallel to the base edges as it makes it look very dull.

Base with wall area at back

For the stone wall this is made of plastic card.  To add some strength to it I chopped down a piece of wood and glued that onto the card with PVA glue.  Some Milliput was used to bulk up the back of the wood.  Then i used thin (0.25mm) styrene card to cover off the sides as that will paint much better than Milliput or bare wood.

Plastic card hides all sins

So next week I need to move onto some other area as I could easily keep fiddling with the breastplate for a another 3-4 hours without really changing it.  So I’m thinking the yellow will be next.

54mm Men at Arms Samurai with Naginata started

54mm Samurai

This week was the start of painting on my 54mm Samurai.  I had played around with some colour combos before so the first thing I did was to do a colour chart.  I had read about this from numerous sources and decided it was time for me to get serious and try one.  Normally I just write do the colours I’m using and make up the shade/highlight recipes on the fly.  Can be an issue when you forget what you did a month ago.

The principle of the colour chart is that you work out all your shading and highlighting before you start on the figure.  Then when you are painting you should compare back to your original colour chart to make sure you are staying on track.  This stops you from having one way to shade a colour at the start of the project and another when you end (never done that myself of course).

Colour chart

So for the thee main colours I highlighted up and shaded down in approx. five steps in each direction.  For the green I had multiple attempts to see what worked and what didn’t.  In the end I went for a mixture of olive green and blue as the shade and white as the highlight.  For the yellow I first tried an off white as the highlight but that made things too dull so I swapped to gloss white which worked much better.  I want the yellow highlights to really be eye popping.  For the purple I used my standard highlight colour of an old Ral Partha fluorescent magenta and shaded down with a dark red brown (VMC Hull Red).  The small dashes above the colours in the middle of the page are to show the base colour.

Due to there being so much colour on the figure (compared to my usual green and brown colour range) I blocked out all the major colour areas just to see of it all worked together.  I wanted to see if large areas of the yellow/green/purple meshed.  This was a wise idea as I found the breastplate that was going to be purple didn’t work at all.  So I dropped that down to the lowest shade of the purple (Hull Red) so the tonal match was still there.  The same for the lower groin armour piece.  That was changed to a dull brown as it was originally green.  So much colour was overwhelming so I needed to add in some neutral colour areas as a break between areas and used the brown for this.  Just need to work out the sword colours now.

I did start doing some real painting and managed to work on the very small face area.  Not much to work with as all you can see are the eyes and mouth.  Even the eyebrows are covered.  Going to need to lighten up the face guard quite a bit to pull the viewer up to the face and not get lost in the yellow forehead guard which will be the brightest point on the figure.

MOAB 2015, figure cases and finishing off the Reaper Bones Valkyrie

A good shopping week this week with a number of bargains to be had at the Bring and Buy stall at MOAB 2015.  But first a figure transport case.

Slide out trays

When I took El Torres to Canberra at the beginning of the year I transported the figure inside and old baby milk powder tin.  Quite a robust transport method but pretty daggy and hard to get the figure in and out safely.  As mentioned last week I started making a decent figure transport case.

The case is made out of 9mm (sides and top) and 12mm ply with some 3mm ply as the removable sliding side.  For strength I used 18mm square pine in each of the corners and glued and screwed the ply into the pine blocks.  This way there is something solid to hold the box together.

Slide side 'lid'

There are two slide out trays that the figure bases will be attached to (via screws) and then these trays slide into slots so they are held securely.  There is also a removable dividing wall so if I’m transporting two figures anything breaking off one figure won’t hit the other.  Also if I’m transporting something huge I can by removing the dividing wall.

The removable side slides into slots so that way I don’t have any hinges/clasps/etc that will catch on anything else.  The whole thing is painted with enamel paint on the outside and estapol varnish on the inside.  Finally a carry handle was attached.  The handle was a discount find from Ikea many years ago.  Now that I’ve got that out of my system I can stop wasting time building boxes that I will use once a year.

Reaper Bones Valkyrie

I also finished off my Valkyrie.  I could do a bit more but there are a few casting faults on the figure (esp in the arms) so I think I’m done.  Still struggling to shade metallics esp when they aren’t chainmail.

















As usual I went to MOAB for the Bring and Buy store.  After 30 minutes in the sun the store opened and the great unwashed mass descended.  I was looking for 54mm figures (or busts/etc - little chance there), maybe some 1/35 military figures and anything else that looked good.  However no 30+ year old boardgames are allowed anymore.  The cupboards are full.

I made out like a bandit.  On to the swag bag…

* Malifaux rules and 25 d6 dice - $2

Never going to play, just wanted to have a read.  Plus it came with dice.  Can’t walk past that at $2.  Or to put another way, I got 25 dice for $2.

* German machine gun team - $6

Just to add the collection.  Doubt I’ll use all of the figures but some may be used in a 1/35 diorama one day.  Never been opened.

* German flak panzer IV - $15

Since I did my Panzer II a year plus ago I’ve been wanting to do another 1/35 vehicle.  I’ve also been reading a number of old Military Modelling magazines and have skilled up quite a bit on technique so want to try another large piece.  So this was a great find as it saves me money as I don’t have to buy a full price kit.  I even had someone else ask if they could have it from me :)  Pays to line up for 30mins in the sun.  Never been opened.

* Jagpanzer IV - $12

It was raining Panzer IV variants at MOAB this year.  Again saves me buying a full price one later.  Never been opened.

* Plaster pots - $5

Nice looking pots (Hirst molds I’m pretty sure) which I purchased for 54mm scenery.  Symmetrical shapes are hard to get right by hand.

* Urmuth, scars of war - $15

I normally go over the bring and buy a number of times, just in case.  Really glad I did it this time as just before leaving I came across this.  54mm figure from Andrea. Oh yeah.

* Grondar Firebeard - $15

In the same area on the second hand table as Urmuth, another 54mm Andrea figure.  Again early glad I picked over the scraps this year.

So after such I good haul at the Bring and Buy I didn’t buy anything from the retail stores.  Now that I don’t do 28mm games much any more there isn’t that need to keep buying extra units for armies, etc.  Kind of feel a bit rude about not buying anything to be honest.

The quality of the items at the Bring and Buy store was better than previous years.  The usual huge amounts of 40K and Warhammer although I suspect there will be more Warhammer fantasy over the next few years as people start to dump their collections. Heard many complaints about the Age of Sigmar killing off Warhammer fantasy.  There was less mouldy old boardgames (sad face) and crummy 28mm scenery.  That’s right people, black spray painted foam “buildings” can be done by anyone, so your pieces aren’t going to sell at $20 each.  Lot of magazines too this year.  There was more 1/35 figures there but I had enough.  I didn’t really need more Germans.

It’s also interesting to see the trends of games go through retail and into the second hand store.  Years ago the Bring and Buy was full of LotR figures.  This year was the first scatterings of X-wing.  Like sands through the hourglass…