Tonight was tedious in the extreme. Painting teeny tiny faces and weapons white on 6mm miniatures.
Tomorrow I will need to get them all painted too. I am thinking the Ashigaru helmets will be a different colour just to break up the blue a bit. Yumi will be red, teppo brown and the naginata light brown and silver. The sashimono will be black with white. The helmets will also not blend in with the black too.
I now have three more days at work, not that I am counting 😂
I must admit that I am a little bit excited about the resin printer. I am also going to be working with the children with resin too. They want to make things out of it, so I might as well start them young 😉 (with all safety measures in place of course).
So those of you who have read my blog regularly will know I love my Ender 3 Printer. Yes it has Wobblies every so often and I have to take it apart and put it back together again once in a while. But I have now had it 18 months and it is still pretty much as it came (apart from a new bed plate and also an aluminium extruded.
Yesterday I took a next step on my journey and pressed ‘purchase’ on a resin printer. Will I be getting rid of the Ender? Hell No. it would be like getting rid of your old dog because you got a new puppy!
So I am now preparing for another learning curve. The interesting thing about the resin printer is that height determines the time of the build. So printing one thing takes the same amount of time as ten, if they are all on the plate together. The down side with resin is the fumes, so I will have
to think of where to put the printer. Probably my toy shed. It was originally set up for me to do things in, so it will probably work in there… just a long way to walk…
So after much backwards and forwards between brands I eventually went for the Proton Zero, cheapest of the ones I was looking at.
Tonight I even painted some things…
I decided that all of my Ashigaru would be employed by the same daimyo therefore they would be all wearing the same coloured armour. The samurai would all be wearing their own clan armour so they can be more colourful. The one thing I like about the Banzai rules is that the edges to the bases are different colours to help with weapon and troop type identification.
Woah, I have just reached a milestone I never, ever, ever thought I would reach. WordPress has just informed me that I have just done my one thousandth post.
Although I decided early on that I was going to blog regularly, I never thought that this would ever happen. The one important thing is that I wouldn’t have managed it without you fine people reading it and commenting. Before this blog, the longest I ever managed was two weeks with one post a week. On that blog I had the grand total of Zero followers.
I therefore want to say a big thank you to everyone who has come and commented or liked or even just popped in to wonder what this weird blog was all about. The other thing my stats told me was that I have written at least one post every day for the last 325 days.
I will probably need a lie down once I hit the 365th day 😂 The following photos were the first on the blog. One even has the blog name on it 😂.
So after yesterday’s warping weirdness, I set upon them with my good lady’s hairdryer. I blasted them on nuclear heat for a while then held them flat on a cold ceramic tile, then into the freezer for a couple of minutes to remove any residual heat.
I think it may have worked, only time will tell.
Now for the random Shetland fact… did you know more flights are cancelled in the summer months than the winter months… the reason being….
Yep, it’s the fog/low cloud (not the Goose, I know we have ninja pyromaniac starlings, but less so with the Geese… to my knowledge no goose has ever nested under a bonnet). We can often be clear, but if Orkney has it then they won’t fly as it is the emergency runway.
The hidden dangers in Shetland are real, I still don’t know how I avoided the fate of at least one other person every year… yes we have a secret lurker, just waiting for the unwary… we are talking about the dreaded …
Starling
Yep, here he is, like a little bright ninja saboteur! He causes more fires in cars than any other thing I can think of…
Little blighter had shoved this lot under my bonnet…
Luckily I had left my lights on yesterday and couldn’t drive the car this morning. I only found it when I went to jump start it this afternoon.
So be warned people, starlings are everywhere waiting for their chance to strike.
So last night, I needed to go out and lock the hens up to keep them safe from ferrets or otters. So I toddled off outside and decided to take quick video at midnight.
The Ipad struggled a bit with the light levels, but it definitely gives you an impression of what it is like up here. Midnight and we had blackbirds doing their evening chorus.
Today was a bit of a productive day, I have pretty much finished all of my mates birthday present. The Buddha and Tori gate have been neglected, so I gave them a bit of vegetation. I am not sure whether I like the bits on the statue, but it may grow on me. The last bit to do is the wagon with the rice bales on it..
I also managed to make a start on a 6mm Lizardmen Army, I decided to give these a go as I wanted to have some practice before I went for 6mm Samurai. I was thinking of doing a 6mm Sengoku participation game in the October games day (that is if it goes ahead).
Yeah the colours are a bit GW, but I couldn’t think of what other colour to do them. I will do a bit more tomorrow evening on these.
When I found my 6mm Samurai I noticed that they were all on cardboard bases. This got me thinking as to things that have changed over the years.
I hated basing armies as you had to cut out your own bases out of either beer mats or mounting card. It took forever and I for one could never get the bases at ninety degrees all of the time. Jump forwards a few years and voila, you pay someone pennies to cut you some out of MDF. These can really be any size that you want.
Then there was the paint, highly smelly humbrol enamels. Or oil paints. I only ever tried oil paints once on a 54mm Airfix model. I don’t think it ever dried. The enamel wasn’t much better. Now we have a plethora of paints, from airbrush paints right the way through to the oils and the enamels. Of course there is my favourite go to paint in the Contrast Paints… I really must try painting with other ones again before I forget how.
Models themselves were sometimes blobs of metal or there was plastic in the terms of Airfix. My first armies were of course these. unpainted as I didn’t have the knowledge or inclinations paint them. My first ‘real’ war games army were the old Donnington 15mm Early Germans. my mate went Imperial Roman. Compared to 15mm miniatures today they are so dated… but funnily enough here I am using them and adding to them for my HOTT army.
With regards to that, here I am with Tin soldier 15mm Aztecs and conquistadors, original army sold years ago. I seem to be rebuilding all of my armies from my youth. All I need now are Museum miniatures crusaders, Two Dragon Samurai and Essex Miniatures early imperial Roman and I am there. Oh and a pile of ACW confederate troops from Essex I think.
I suppose one of the biggest changes now is the internet. I can now talk to manufactures or sellers in real time. If I want to compare miniature sizes someone out there will have done some pictures. There are so many different manufacturers out there too, so the Magpie approach to ‘my’ hobby is really bad for my wallet. It used to be the case I went to a convention and saw some great games and go and get enthused and come away with an army of Goblin Monkey riding ninja, which would end up in the bring and buy three years later …unopened! Now I can buy them whilst sat on the toilet! YouTube let’s me watch other people painting things or even playing the rules of my ‘new game’ all great stuff.
Blogging… yep it is great. I have met (virtually) some amazing people in all parts of the world. Without this here blog I never would have had the privilege of meeting them. I can honestly say that the people that are following my blog Are extremely supportive, and I hope I am for them. I have had only a couple of problems, and that is mainly people posting dodgy links as messages, they get deleted as soon as I see them.
And finally for me especially… the elephant in the room (although I haven’t printed it yet) is my 3D Printer. I remember many years ago my mate and I talking about how great it would be to get someone to make an us an army of our choosing. We talked about how much it would cost to get a sculptor to do it and then to get someone to cast them up. We did think about Prince August moulds at the time, but it never really got off the ground. Roll forward 30 years and I am printing my own miniatures and terrain in my shed. I pay for a file and print as many as I want for pennies. It gets even better than that. I can get things free and print them for pennies.
The down side of the printer is that it is sometimes too easy and cheap and I have printed so much crap that I will never use! My next consideration is to move into resin printing and give that a bash. Maybe Christmas next year.
The one thing that I do miss is going to conventions. Yeah I could go to some in time, and I did think about going to one of the Scottish ones next year just for the hell of it … If I manage it no doubt I will come back with some Goblin, Monkey riding ninja!
There are bucket loads of other things that have changed so much, but these are the ones that really just popped into my head. So what do you reckon are the big changes
Bogenwald 