First experiments with casting...Part 2

So its now the morning, and the plaster appears to have set, so i set about popping the plaster from its mould... And hit on the first problem! It would seem that both of the mixes that i used were slightly the wrong consistency.

The thicker consistency plaster doesnt look like it set properly, whilst the thinner plaster had an odd "oily" texture to it (it felt wet, but in a very odd way - the same way that olive oil feels!). Here is a picture of the two plasters still in the mould

You can clearly see how the thicker plaster has become lumpy. The thinner mix looked a lot better, just some small amounts of shrinkage around the edges.

I flexed the mould slightly to release the plaster and immediately found a problem with the thinner plaster - it cracked!

After popping out the thinner plaster, i then moved on to the thicker mixed wall - and again it cracked. I was left with two broken walls!

After cleaning up the thicker wall (the thinner one didnt seem to need it), I was left with the four major sections. As a first go at casting, they are not too bad. I dont think they are good enough for the main walls for the diorama tho, Im not sure that they have the structural integrity that i need, but not to worry they will be recycled for use as small parts of masonry or possibly part of the upper level!
So now i'm back off in to the kitchen to mix up some more plaster and retry my moulds... More updates to follow

First experiments with casting...Part 1

For a diorama that im working on at the moment i needed a corner of a building. Normally i would have made this from foam board and plasticard, but because i wanted to do some specific damage results the foam card would be no good.

So i decided to have a go at casting some "walls" using normal plaster of paris. The idea that i came up with is to use the plaster sections as the basis for the wall and then build on top of them using my normal plasticard.

I've cast small things before, but nothing that required me to build my own mould nor that require perfectly flat edges, so i decided that it would be worth documenting the process from mould to final "wall"

The first thing that i did was to cut two squares in to a piece of PVC foam (if you havent seen PVC foam, its the same as Foam board but the card is replaced with plasticard). I then cut around the gaps in the PVC foam, and glued this new square to an even bigger square! Easier shown than described, especially at 2am! - Here a picture of what the final mould was:

Next i mixed up my plaster. I actually ended up doing this in two batches, as i wasnt sure what consistency to make the plaster.

The first batch that i mixed up was thick -about the consistency of yoghurt. It didnt flow well in to the corners and felt sort of 'lumpy' going in.

The second mix that i did was much runnier - about the consistency of thick milk. This flowed a lot better in to the gaps, although i did find that at lot of water ran to the top very quickly...

In the picture above, the top most mould has the thicker plaster, the one at the bottom has the thinner...

After about ten minutes, i scraped the top of each mould using a piece of thick plasticard. I then wiped down the edges and set the plaster aside to dry.  So now the mould are sitting in the corner of the room drying. Ill post another update in the morning to let you all see how they turn out!

Real life rhino...

Not gonna say much about this... I'm sure you all know about THQ's real life rhino... So, just enjoy the video

FtW Dice

So my dice turned up from Ron! They look really great, are nicely weighted and hopefully will bring me some much needed luck!
Big thanks to Ron for organising these!

Blood Bowl Pitch Tutorial

I'm a big fan of Blood Bowl. I really do consider it to be one of GW's finest moments - Games are fast and furious and always fun. One thing ive always been dissappointed about tho, is playing on the Cardboard pitch - It always felt lacking to me. So i finally decided to bite the bullet and build myself a pitch!

The first step was planning. In reality i've spent over a year now considering various ways to put together a pitch. The key problems are marking the squares, so that the grid is the same size as the standard pitch. Many options were considered, including marking out spaces with map pins, using tile spacers in each corner, as well as more esoteric options, such as using square monster bases!

The first practical stage was to gather together all of the materials required. Last thing i wanted was to run out of the necessary parts half way through! You can see all the flocks / static grasses and glues that i used in the photo below:

 

I used two types of glue. The first is normal PVA glue. Generally this was watered to about 75% water to give a very thin consistency similar to skimmed milk. The second glue is Woodland Scenics scenic cement. This is a very thin, ultra tacky glue which can be sprayed from a spray gun, or used on a brush. I'm a very big fan of this glue - although normally used for model railways, the sticking power for use with scenic materials is immense. You use it in two passes. The first sticks the scatter material down. The second is applied after the first is dry and is simply to seal the flock or scatter material in place. Because the glue dries absolutely clear and matt you get a good hard finish, but without any adverse changes to the flock colouring...

For application of the scatter materials I used a Noch grass applicator and a spray gun, again from Woodland Scenics. For areas where i wanted extreme control i would load up the end of the steel ruler in the picture and gently tap over the area to be covered.

The other important thing to mention was the material i used for the base itself - this was Dow Corning Blue Board ("Blue foam"). The board is approx 0.75" thick. I bought a big sheet of the stuff (2' x 4') and then cut down the board to a suitable size (obviously having measured the squares on the main blood bowl pitch)

Sooo... Firing up the airbrush i dived in. The first job was to airbrush the entire board in GW Goblin Green, leaving patches clear where mud would be. These remaining areas then recieved a coat of Vallejo "Earth" again via the airbrush to give basic deliniation to the dirt / grass areas.

 

 

You can probably see in the above images that the airbrush coat doesnt completely cover the blue foam underneath, but tbh its really not that important. The green is just there so that any areas that start to shed scatter materials after some time wont show through as stark blue.

Once the basic areas were mapped out, i then masked off the pitch area (it doesnt show on the photos, but this area was actually marked on the board in light pencil), and applied spray glue to the dirt areas. Dont worry about being too neat for this, grass / mud is not regular in nature, so hard edges are very rare. Try to feather the glue spray across the boundries.

 

Once you have applied your "dirt" scatter material to the glue (I used GW sand as a base) allow it to dry fully. Once it has dried apply another coat of the Scatter Cement and now leave it over night. Although doing it this way does take time (about 2 weeks in my case) you will end up with a very strong board surface to play along.

I continued applying scatter materials in this way, working from the darkest grasses up to the lightest, making sure that I feathered the edges of the areas the scatter covered. Finally the scattering is done:

After having applied all of the scatter material, and letting it dry thoroughly, I masked the main pitch off and applied a uniform flock to outer area to delimit the pitch from the "table". Once that was dry,
i then went back with my initial sand and dirt materials and applied an extra coat in the end zones and along the edges, where most of the combat usually happens. This gives those areas a more recently churned up feeling

 

The next stage is to begin to mark the pitch out. To achieve this i took a packet of small panel pins and working from one corner moved around the outside of the pitch pushing a pin in to the foam at each junction. I ended up with a pitch surrounded by panel pins at regular 30 mm spacings

I then took some thin cotton thread and passed it between alternate pins giving a grid. This was the worst part of the whole project in all honesty - It relies on you keeping tension in the string at all times the moment you release the tension the whole lot collapses and you have to unthread a big chunk and redo it....

 

  

Once the grid was marked i grabbed a new sharp flat brush and using thinned Vallejo white paint began to mark the intersections of the squares, the end zones and wide zones. This was slow work. I tended to work on blocks of four squares at a time, complete them and then move on. I found the best technique to use it to dab the paint on. If you pull the brush around the paint smears and lifts the flock from under it...

Once the markings were finished, I removed the cotton, leaving a (hopefully) perfectly marked grid...

 

  

 

The pitch was then given a very heavy coat of the scenic cement to seal it in place. Heavy = about half a bottle sprayed on! I left this for about 48 to dry completely.

In the mean time, i moved on to the score board. The score board was built from some scrap balsa wood i had lying around and an old fridge magnet. The first stage was to cut a main piece of balsa wood and sand the edges off to be rounded:

 

I then cut two strips of the same balsa wood and filed them so that they curved in opposite directions. These were glued to the score board to provide the legs and two small balsa triangles were glued to the front of the legs for stability. This whole assembly was then glued to a spare strip of foam board to provide a base

Whilst the glue on that was drying i cut out 12 squares from a thin piece of balsa. The whole lot, plus the score board were then undercoated with Vallejo "Earth" and dry brushed with Vallejo "Kahki". The base was painted in Goblin Green and then flocked with the same flock as was used on the board surround. Notice in the later photos that i also did the edges of the foam board aswell to make sure that they blended in with the pitch.

Finally i painted white lettering on to the score board and numbers on to the "score cards"

Next i took the fridge magnets and cut 12 squares from it, just smaller than the "score cards". Each score card then had a magnet stuck to its back. Similarly i cut two slightly larger pieces that were stuck to the score board. The later were painted with Vallejo Earth and had "0" painted on them (so when there is no score you dont put a score card on). To change the score you simply take the old one off and put a new one on. The magents grip each other just enough to hold the score card in place, but not enough to make it hard to remove. Here is the finished Score board:

All in all i think the project went really well - the board looks great, it has room for placing dugouts (of which more in a later post) and a magnetic scoreboard!
Here are some pictures of my undead team taking to the field. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial... Comments and questions welcome as always

 

  

 

Painting Vs. Army Building

So in my last post, i talked quickly about the difference between 'Painting' and 'Army Building' - i wanted to expand a little on what i was saying in that post.

For me, the hobby started (oh some 20+ years ago now!!) when i saw a copy of White Dwarf for the first time - I was fascinated by the Goblins they had in the issue (as part of 'Eavy Metal). Over time i learned about the games and started to play some of them (well, truth be told, as many of them as i could lay my grubby mits on!).

However, in all that time, i never properly 'built' an army! I had large number of models (11,000 Pts of Warhammer undead at one stage, sadly lost in a house move), but they never gelled in the way the armies did in the pages of White Dwarf. Basically i was running in to several problems:

• Because I'm mainly a painter (i only get to play a few times a year, due to work and other commitments, and painting is what always fascinated me about the hobby) I always try to finish models to a display standard. I either get disappointed when i realise that i cant keep that level of detail up for the whole army or i let the standard slip.
• I always find that i end up either over complicating the paint scheme, or becoming distracted by another colour scheme for the army, leaving it looking like a rag tag group, rather than a co-ordinated whole.
  
• I find that i become bored in the middle of units, and so nothing ever gets finished properly (Usually i get to move on to something new fairly quickly when painting single minis, whereas units tend to take me much longer)

Recently tho, I started to realise that building an army is not about each miniature, the skill is in producing a reasonably painted, but unified looking group - the quality in the army comes from just this unification, even though each model is not the best paint job possible. "The whole is greater than the sum of its part", some might say.

So thats what i set out to do with my tau. The first thing i did was to spend some time looking at as many colour schemes as i could on the internet; I took an image of a tau from the GW website, loaded it in to photoshop and tried to airbrush new colours in to the image, to give myself an idea of what it would look like etc.

Once a new colour scheme had been established, i tried to figure out the quickest way of applying it - obviously the simplest paint job would be the quickest, and the simplest paint job is just basic flat colours. By avoiding high lights and shadowing (as well as all the intermediate washes, glazes etc) I instantly found that I had massively reduced the painting time per model, but that the units looked nearly as good as if i had done all the extra work

The other thing that i did when building my tau was to put away my paint set! I have a rather silly paint collection (i hate not having the colour i need when i need it!), and because it sits just by my right hand, its easy to think "I'll just grab a new colour" - by physically removing the paint set and just having the 4 colours i was using, i managed to reduce my "paint lust" to a minimal level.

So now i seem to have found a way to build an army that gives good results! The only thing i have found now is that i get "army fatigue" - basically i get really tired of painting the same thing and start to lose interest in painting. At this point I grab a cool single miniature (or five) and get painting on that, putting in as much detail as i can, experimenting with paint combinations etc.

What is everyone elses experience? And what tricks do you use to keep your army on the straight and narrow?

Tolk'fre Tau

It occurred to me this morning whilst doing some hoovering (gets you good brownie points with the wife!) that i hadnt actually put up any pictures of my Tau army. So here we go - the entire army in one post!

The original idea behind my Tau was to put together a 1000 point army as quickly and simply as possible. With previous armies i had always fallen in to the trap of trying to paint every model up to a display standard - this just doesnt work, mainly because its not unknown for me to spend upwards of 15 hours on a single model! Multiply that up and it means that you never finish a squad!
So for Tau, i chose a very simple paint scheme - Each model was undercoated with Citadel White Primer, then airbrushed with white Vallejo acrylic for a flat base coat. Each model then had certain key areas blocked in with Vallejo Cold Grey and finally the piping and edges were given a thinned coat of Stonewall grey. Tints were blocked in with Vallejo Scab Red. Each unit took about 6 hours of work, including sticking together and basing.

Now that the army is painted, and i've had some time to let it grow on me, i think the paint scheme looks good - although individual models are not even close to even my worst single miniatures, as a whole the army looks good. At some point in the future i'm gonna do a longer post on this subject (Painting vs. Army Building), but for the moment, enjoy the pictures..

HQ

 

Elites 

 

Troops 1

 

Troops 2

 

Heavy