More Fellowship Characters

Tonight I had to get my daughter from town and then we have got a new family member who needed rescuing from the rest of the family (more later) but I did manage to get two lots of miniatures cleaned up and glued to their bases.

So we now have the full fellowship as we have Boromir, Merry and Pippin to the leftR, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli to the right… and of course another couple of cats😂…

So today was the annual pony sale and we ended up with a new one. It was intentional, and not an accidental thing. So he is a little colt of only 6 months old and is rather cute…

Things went really well at the start as you can see, however he must have done something daft as the rest of the evening the other two chased him round the field. He eventually started to be allowed to get closer and he was by then giving all of the right signals so here’s hoping that tomorrow will be a better day for him.

He is Muness Magnum (from Unst) but he was called a small bean and the name Bean has stuck.. so we now have a colt called Bean.

Another Slow Evening

This evening I got nothing done, apart from some more slicing of the fellowship and the cleaning up of the dark rider from yesterday.

Regarding him, this updated print is complete, I was going to spend ages make a rein and had for some plastic rod bent and glued on, but to be honest I was going to struggle to get it done as well as I would like and then I would dislike the miniature 🥴

The other miniature is my vampire from Mordheim. If I remember correctly he was a Blood Dragon. I went for my own Warband than the ready made one that they sold at the time. I purchased the necromancer and dregs separately and made up my zombies out of the plastic sprues. I will take some photos tomorrow. To be honest the metal miniatures really need an update so I might give them an ISO Bath this weekend to get the paint off them and start fresh.

Now last night I was bemoaning my inability to take any photos of the Northern Lights as I went to bed early. This is one of my ones from last year. The red glow is Mount doom (aka the flare off at Sullom Voe).

This was taken just outside the house, so as you can see I don’t have to travel too far to see them 😉.

A Bit More Printing

Tonight I had a whole load of marking, so didn’t really get as much done as I would have wanted. On the up side my daughter helped out so that speeded things up greatly. Last night I set the printer away to do three miniatures. Gandalf, Frodo and Good ol’ Sam… they have come out rather nicely.

Please ignore the suspicious white powder (my cocaine as the kids are now calling it) it is however baking soda, as I couldn’t be bothered to wait for the superglue to set. I also printed the little cat on the centre base. The other miniatures are the ones I printed a few weeks ago and printed the bases yesterday.

I did start painting my Daimyo and retinue, but forgot to photograph it. And finally I gave an old miniature a right good clean and got the majority of the paint off it. He is one of the GW vampire knights from about 20 years ago. I thought it was time to give home a new paint job, I have considered redoing my Mordheim gangs. I have the rules and a large number of miniatures so was thinking it might actually be fun.

And finally, why is it when you go to bed early then things like this appear!

Having a Night Off… Sort of

I am absolutely knackered tonight so decided not to try and paint anything. I have rescued a print off the printer and also sliced a few more. Now interestingly this print had four bases on it and only one came off perfectly (more of that later). So this miniature is the wight prince…

Not that you can really see him in the green resin… you will have to trust me, but it is a really nice miniature.

As I said above I printed him and his base plus three more bases. I managed to sort of get a Second one off the plate, but it was pretty badly warped and then there are the other two. One was completely non existent and the second one was a lump on the bottom of the vat.

So tonight I sliced half a dozen bases and when the bottom layer was curing only four showed up on the screen, then weirdly on the second layer the other two suddenly appeared. I have another 15 minutes or so to go before they are finished so it will be interesting to see what they are like. The only thing I can think of is that the missing two weren’t actually touching the ‘build plate’ in the software.

Yey.. they worked

Luckily they came out okay, I did pull the plug on them as it was actually going to be another hour to make the wall a few mm higher…. and quite frankly I wanted to go to bed. It didn’t happen until just now as my daughter needed help with her maths homework!

I am now in the process of printing Gandalf, Frodo and Samwise (and a cat) overnight. I will show them off tomorrow.

Samurai Houses

You will be pleased to hear that there have been no injuries, wounds or anything like that today.

I did a bit of slicing for the resin printer so that took up some time, especially when I messed up the thing and forgot to save it!

Anyway so I got s bit of green on the houses and stuck some tufts on a couple of the thatched roofs…

I also got a bit more done on the stone walled buildings…

These aren’t as nice as the 3DAlien world ones and will probably be replaced when they bring out some town buildings. I still need to get more shading done on the roofs. I did some but to be honest you cannot really see where I put it. The one thing that is missing is the gates for the stone walls. The only thing I can think of is that I popped them in with some buildings when the castle went off to its new owner… my thought process was that I could probably redo them on the printer… evidently I forgot!

I got a bit of bits put on this lot and started on replacing the reins on the horse…

And finally for this evening, Tom’s River Lady and a Hobbit Costermonger…

These have literally just come out of the curing station…. I am trying the wight prince overnight so we will see how it gets on. Should be ready when I awake in the morning 😉.

Tom and the First of the Nine

So the printer is still working, so much so that I actually managed to do another miniature. I got the first of the nine done, unfortunately he lost a hand and rein in the printing process. Luckily a 15th Century Perry mini hand fitted just fine. I will get a Greenstuff rein added when everything has solidified.

As you can see from the above I also managed to get some paint on the bard miniature… he happens to be called Tom and lives near the old forest and has a water nymph as his wife. I still have a bit more to do on him, but he is definitely getting there.

Unfortunately yesterday when I was chopping back some bushes I got a bit of a smack in the eye. It stung like a bugger and then went away. This morning I could open the eye very easily and the pain was a bit painful to say the least. To cut a long story short then I decided I needed to rest it. Sadly my pirate patch mountain has disappeared so my wife came up with a cunning idea… wear my glasses but cover the sore eye lens… now I didn’t want to freak out my kids so I drew an eye on the tape….

Anyway lots of eye baths in salt water later this popped out…

Over the course of the day smaller bits have also come out, it is still stinging, but nowhere near to what it was this morning

The down side of having one eye covered is that depth perception is reduced… sadly stupidity cannot be blamed on it… guess what happened with the printed bases today?

6mm Samurai Houses, Printers and ships

Tonight I decided to finish the samurai village houses, by finish I mean do the wood work, still a whole lot of things to do on them but at least it is something.

I still have the tiled roof ones to do (woodwork there too) but I will try and get them going tomorrow.

On the printer front the old resin one seems to be working again. I reformatted a completely different card and tried a new sliced file on it and away it went. So here is hoping that by tomorrow morning then I will have something on the build plate. The one thing I have noticed recently is a flexible build plate being advertised for resin printers. This would be an absolute godsend as I am sick of having to use a Stanley knife blade to get things off. The FDM has been working on more hex tiles too…

And finally Boats…or rather ancient ships. If you remember yesterday I had spent ages looking for a box of cardboard ships. Evidently I have dumped the ones I had made and put the unmade sheets into an envelope… I found them today purely by chance…

You can see from the above how munch bigger things are going to need to be to make them 1/300 scale. At least I now have a measurement to play with, and we all know that I am going to print at least one to try it out🥴… prepare for the swearing 😂.

Evidently the Northern Lights have been spotted tonight. Unfortunately the bit that fastens the camera to the tripod has disappeared. My Daughter loaned me a short stubby tripod, but it meant I needed to sit it on top of things… the highlight of the evening was me swearing as to why with a 30 second exposure with a high speed ISO I wasn’t getting anything… I tried and tried and tried again then realised that I had left the lens cap on!

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

See I am a bit cultured… and in the words of Sir Samuel Vimes… We watch each other.

I suddenly remembered these chaps when I was considering what to paint…

I am going for a really simple colour scheme of green and browns, with iron metallics. They aren’t going to win any prizes, but they are going to painted and will look pretty at a distance.

It was a rather nice drive home today, so I stopped and took a photo of the view from the top of Weisdale hill.

An Eclectic Mix

This evening I pretty much jumped around a fair bit from 6mm to 28 to tiles. But I got some decisions made and actually made progress.

First up, while hunting for some MDF bases I ate across a nice square base in hardboard that I had cut for a large Arabic tent for my 10mm Arabs, but it has now changed continents from Africa to Asia and will the base for my Samurai General.

As you can see, everything is merely blue tacked down to try it out. There are still four samurai guards to add to this. This will be for the main Daimyo. In game terms I will do up a standard size base to denote the same character in the fight.

The next thing I did was to get some spray paint onto the Hexon tiles….

There are still a whole load more in the box under the back lot. I will get these sprayed over the weekend. There are probably ninety all told, with more on the way.

Finally on the painting front…

Just the bases to do on these and then that is another half dozen finished.

I spent a good proportion of this evening looking for my 6mm cardboard ships as I wondered how big a 3D printed one was going to have to be, Lo and Behold I couldn’t find the bloody things anywhere! I got a pile printed onto card, but only ever made a couple of triremes (I think). they are from the Roman Seas range from Hotz Stuff.. I got mine from RPG now… https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/20290/Roman-Seas-The-Carthaginian-Navy-Set?manufacturers_id=506

Baccus with the Samurai Again

So tonight I had a mooch in the 6mm box from Baccus and decided to try some base sizes for the command set.

I have two options…

The small one looks pretty naff and overcrowded where the larger one looks more open, but a bit narrow… these really are the only sizes of MDF bases that I have available. I think I am going to have to print something to make things fit.

I will have a look to see if I can find something nocking about, but I am not holding my breath.

Now I suppose that I could miss out the honjin screens, but that really isn’t very Japanese if I do.