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More Work on the Houses

Tonight I did a pile more work on the houses. Most of it you probably can’t see on the photo, but in all honesty I am really chuffed with these.

A huge thank you to David who suggested a bit of brown wash for the raised area and Woah! How right he was. The raised bits have all but disappeared! If you compare this photo and the following one you will see what I mean.

So today 3DALIENWORLDS brought out the teahouse set, which I purchased along with a few others…

So I went for the:

Teahouse

Canal set

Lanterns

Bridges

Zen Garden

Torii gates

And a sashimono set.

I was going to get something on the printer this evening but ended up spending about two hours trying to help my daughter with her maths home learning.

I have a plan for a small shrine using some of these…

Awesome artistic talent on show!

I got the idea from a video on YouTube. Walking in the Nikkō village from the Edo period. It was great for colours etc. The guy filming it walked into a shrine that was up some steps with a small hedge around it. On the right was a small building and on the left some form of fence with ‘offerings’ on it. Not sure what they were, but they had some form of text on it. At the back was a golden statue on a plinth. it will give it a try with my sets I have got as well as the new ones.

Tomorrow I will get some more things sprayed, ready to go for the weekend.

On a totally different note, I thought I would share the picture my daughter drew on the iPad. She did a tribute to the NHS. I am really proud of her because she spent hours doing this…

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Village Houses…Nearly There

Tonight I carried on with pressing print and painting the houses.

It was mainly dry brushing and adding the green but I am definitely getting there with these.

The one thing that niggles me about these is that I cocked up the Greenstuff. My intention was to use a wire brush to add in straw type marks and I forgot and undercoated them before remembering. I did some work with a scalpel that helped but it didn’t completely blend things together.

If I wasn’t as stingy I would redo them as they really are lovely sculpts and it is my error and not that of the designers. The main fault was printing when it was too cold leading to the edges against the build plate curling slightly.

Hopefully I will get these finished tomorrow. Martin said my Samurai went in the post this morning so I should have them by the weekend.

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Further work on the Village

Tonight I did a bit more work on the village…

There isn’t really much obvious difference between this photo and the last one (apart from the white walls), everything was given a wash to bring out the detail a bit. I will drybrush the roofs again to add some highlights.

I got some more walls printed…

Start of a shrine?

Not sure what to do with this yet. Some kind of shrine would seem suitable for the walls. I will have a think. I am printing off another long wall as I type this. I will print a second one and make it two wide at least 😉

Hopefully tomorrow I will get on with the buildings and then onto the samurai.

Quick question time… the cavalry are based as bases of bow and bases of hand weapons. The monks are single pose and the peasants are multi weapon with the odd head swap. So the question is.. do I put different samurai on the bases, eg three different ones or do I put all the katana on one and the naginata on another and the yumi on another or mix them all up?

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Stone Walls and Gate

Nothing painted tonight as we didn’t eat up until 8.00 and by time we watched a movie it was gone 22.00. So instead I chased Predators around a jungle on the console. I actually managed to survive a couple of times and escaped in the chopper.

Anyway, today I decided to have a go at printing the stone walls and I am really pleased with these too…

I still have gates to add as well as printing a whole lot more walls. I am considering getting another couple of sets of these as there really are some awesome sets available. As well as the Samurai sets, they also do Necron, Tau and Eldar (I think). I am so pleased that I found this company through a free wall sample on Thingiverse.

I decided to show you how the bits go together. There is a wall base and a wall top. In the corner the top is in two bits…

The doors are from the wooden gate.

Like the wooden wall everything is designed to go together. The corner pieces cannot go our of line because of the recess and corresponding lump. The ends have holes as I can print ‘dowels’ to connect them and keep them together in a game. As mine will be static and fastened to a base then I will be using glue.

I will use the wooden fences for the farm and the stone ones for some form of shrine I think. I have got a discord painting session tomorrow evening so hopefully something will get painted.

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Wooden Wall Entrance

I got absolutely nothing painted tonight as I spent so long putting the gate house together in 3D builder. It was being, what is technically called, a right Bastard. Spreading stuff all over the place. But eventually I won.

I decided to go for the tiled roof to match the rest, and it looks like this now…

Actually this is it just balanced on 😉

I have made a teeny courtyard to show what things look like so far…

I still have the gates to do, but will get them sliced tomorrow. Like the walls, the gate could be without a roof. It comes with a stout wooden beam across the uprights as well.

If I had one wish for this set it would be the half sized bits too. I am sure I can mess about with the builder software and come up with something.

The posh farm is going to be surrounded by these fences. I was thinking of having it on a slight rise and have a smaller gate out the back (for want of a better description) a path from this gate will lead down a steep rise (small cliff). There will be a well either in the compound or nearby… this is what I am thinking right now… tomorrow could be totally different 😂

Oh yeah, guess who just ordered some more Samurai miniatures! These are the ones from Battle Valour Games. I decided I needed some civilians and asked my mate Martin (who is the sole uk seller) when they would be in. As chance would have it, they had just arrived. So I ordered some civilians for my farm, the. Some Ronin, and the seven Samurai, and some bandits, and some samurai, oh yeah and some Ashigaru and peasants , not forgetting some oni… yeah! It’s not as if I don’t have sixty odd to paint right now without ordering more. These new ones are going to be for skirmish gaming…. that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it!

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Village with added Colour

Eventually I managed to make a start on painting the buildings.

Base layer going on

Still a long way to go on these but it is good to actually get a layer of paint on these.

I do like these files and as such I would recommend this company to anyone. Printing them at half size has caused me a few problems but nothing too bad.

I spent an age swearing at 3D builder this morning as it wasn’t playing.. it was putting the various bits all over the place. Eventually it dawned on me that I could reset them all to 0.0 instead of 4532 x 5432 or whatever ridiculous place it was.

I eventually got the corner pieces put together. For some reason it didn’t increase the height of the base and is still sitting at 1.5mm. This causes a headache getting it off the base plate. So to try and help I put down some blue painters tape. Tomorrow I will get it back up on 3D builder and increase the height again. You can see the damaged base on the right hand corner below.

These are the wooden fences, I can’t wait to try the stone ones. Now I am going to have to do some research and see if these fences should all have a tiled roof.

I have got eight (I think) straights and only two corners. Tomorrow I give the gate a go. The plan is to have the large farmhouse in a compound with the well and then the smaller buildings in a small hamlet or two. Luckily I found my EPVC to base them on. It is 5mm thick so very rigid. I have some 3mm too which I will have to give a go too.

Sadly I got a new game for the Console… loving it! Predator Hunting Grounds is awesome. It’s a fire team of four versus a single predator and lots of AI guerrillas too. The fire team has various missions in the 15 minutes the game lasts then the have to get to the chopper for extraction. The predator’s job is to make sure they don’t escape. It is great fun…

The down side is that everyone wants to play a predator! This means it takes ages to get onto the game… on the upside I can keep adding bits to my blog 😉 30 seconds to go….I am off to hunt some mercs!….and emmmmmmm. I evidently ran into Dutch as I didn’t make it 😂

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Wooden Fences

So after the failure to print them flat I spent a bit of time in 3D builder putting the bits together and then sliced it. To be fair I couldn’t get the filament to come back out so I pretty much dismantled the Bowden tube to allow me to get it out. I noticed that it pulled a bit of black out with it, so I gave it a bit of a poke. Have a look at the second photo below and see if you can guess which one was printed first (bear in mind 2kg of the peach filament have been through the printer since I used black.

Fail… (well apart from the roof)

So with a bit of trepidation I hit print and left things for an hour and 20 minutes and came back in to find…an amazing print.

I am really pleased with these. I relied on the Ender to be able to bridge gaps and it managed it flawlessly. Tomorrow I am going to do the corner sections and the gate. I really do love this range from 3DALIENWORLDS. I can’t wait to see what some if their up and coming ones are. They have quite a bit in the pipeline.

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Village with added Greenstuff

Tonight we ended up watching Monsters Inc as a family so no painting. But I did manage to get the Greenstuff out and attack the gaps in the houses.

It’s only when you see it like this that you realise how many actual gaps there were. I have probably wrecked the end of my finger doing this as I found it more effective than the silicone shapers. Problem with using a finger is that everything is rough on these!

The printer wasn’t turned on at all today… a very unusual occurrence. The filament is running down and I want to do some more animals with the remains before adding a whole new roll on.

When the Greenstuff is dry tomorrow I will get the buildings undercoated and start painting them up. over the next few days.

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Paddy Fields

Today I printed some more rice paddies as opposed to some Irish poet. They are pretty basic to be honest due to their size but they do the job. I also printed lots of rice to go in them still another pile to do! Can you tell I am trying to use up the remains of the roll of filament?

I also printed the end for the big house. So that is the village complete. Well apart from all of the other things I am going to print such as more rice stores and cattle etc.

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The Village Grows

No painting tonight, but some more printing done. Because I am a plonker, I built too many buildings and not enough wooden roofs… the answer make a smaller house and a bigger house with a thatched roof. Ok. I do need to print a couple of thatch ends, but I had the main centre but done anyway…

The larger house is below…

I reckon I will stop printing houses soon. I will try another veranda and shed though before I finish. Next up will be a few more paddy fields and a wooden fence or six. I am quite excited by this new project, but then again I get excited by all of my projects!