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Cracking open the Paint

Tonight my son decreed that he was going to start painting again, to which I said not a problem…I hadn’t realised he meant right then. So I had a mad mooch for something that was undercoated and he chose the court wizard. My middle one decided on one of the milk maids and I cracked on with the ones I started ages ago.

You could really tell that I hadn’t used the Contrast paints for a good while as the tops had well and truly got sealed shut. Nevertheless we cracked on.

Being the cunning devil that he is, he informed me that he liked developing a back story for his models and his wizard had been dabbling in the dark arts and had developed a blackened face because of this. Nothing at all to do with painting flesh on when the black hadn’t dried.

I managed to get some more finished and got the lady painted too…

Sod all detail on them, but they will do. I will try and get some more sprayed tomorrow and then get them painted. I actually enjoyed doing these, i think it was a sense of accomplishment, I have dotted around so much of late that nothing has got finished, I also rather like the bright colours on the posh ones.

I had a major panic at work today. I actually thought I had lost my new child. Thirty seconds of searching and then I asked her sister if she had gone home early. Yes, she replied, because it’s Thursday (one of her finish early days). I had got it into my head that it was Wednesday… this didn’t wear off as I was gaming on Thursday… I bet you can see where this is going! At least I got some figures done instead 😂

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Parcel from Japan and a Still Day

On my way to work this morning I stopped off to snap the reflections across the head of the voe…

Days like these are rare (thankfully) so it keeps the midges at bay. Last night was a bloody nightmare. They were everywhere and unfortunately one of the kids left the door to the porch open. The ceiling was black, the white walls were black. I gave them a spray with window cleaner (that’s all I had that was handy) and the floor became black. It doesn’t help that I am allergic to the nasty little sods. In all honesty it is one of the reasons that we chose Shetland over the highlands.

I got home to a nice parcel all the way from Japan…

I ordered these (note singular object in the photo…the other is on its way) back in the dark ages before total lockdown. It is a really nice looking model. The second one is 1:700 scale.

To be honest I didn’t actually realise how big it was going to be.

I am probably out gaming tomorrow if my mate is up to it. If not I am really going to try and get some things painted. I have the wooden fences to paint as well as, finishing the houses and stone walls … not to mention the printed castle. Regarding that, I am seriously considering giving it away. As I now have a similar sized one.

Tonight there was no drawing, printing or painting. So I really need to get back into things…

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Drawings Old and New

Tonight I was mooching about looking for an RPG and came across some of my old sketches. As my middle child is well into her art then she wanted to look at them, to cut a long story short… we did some drawing this evening instead of me painting… so my sketches from 30 odd years ago…

And my art from this evening…

I decided to ease myself back in gently. She was wanting to draw all sorts of complicated things. To be honest I quite enjoyed it, so didn’t miss painting the castle at all. No doubt she will want to do some more tomorrow… you have been warned 😂.

My youngest drew a wolf the other week to join in With the art at the time…I don’t know why but this makes me smile every time I look at it…

A new character in Peppa Pig perhaps?
Wolf from his sister…
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Castles, Spectres and a Vortex

So tonight I decided to get some paint on the castle. Not very Mapuche but at least it is a start…

As you can see, I went for white. It will really make it stand out. Black would have looked cool, but this way it will be a striking centrepiece. For the roofs I am going to go blue instead of red that I usually do for the tiles. There is also going to be a fair bit of gold as well.

The other thing, apart from rehanging the conservatory door, was to get the spectre bases printed, well actually cleaned as I printed them yesterday. What with one thing and another I never actually managed to get it done last night.

This cleaning thing certainly gets the old water spinning. I used water with detergent in as I was a bit short of ISO. So I shoved the bases in here and gave it 18 minutes of swooshing about. Naively I took the scalpel to the bases to remove them from the the plate after the cleaning. The hollow parts spewed liquid resin all over the place… In my naive little mind they were built up in layers starting from the bottom working up, I don’t know where I thought the liquid resin on the inside was going to escape from. Somehow, I failed to comprehend the fact that I was washing the liquid resin off the outside, so perhaps I should of considered the inside too..but hey after a long day… who knows where my solitary brain cell was hiding. hopefully I won’t do that again!

The spectres do look rather snazzy on their bases… I really like the one floating around the cairn. Part of me wants to paint up the cairn in greys and browns, dry brush the spectre so that some of the green still shows through and then add a flickering LED into the hollow cairn so that there is an ethereal glow from the ghost. But we all know I will never, ever, ever get around to it 😂

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Spectres on the Prowl

Today, I mostly spent on building the conservatory, after shopping and helping out my mother in law to chop down branches the. To be Frank I was absolutely buggered. I then had to inform my line manager that one of my staff was going for a Covid test… all in all a busy day.

I did however manage to print off some spectres from the Patreon I just supported… These are great as they are pre supported.

I also gave the wash and cure station a go….

The biggest problem I have with it is that There isn’t a way to fasten the build plate onto the support arm, for this first run through I ran the cleaner for about 12 minutes and the curing for about 18. I will stick the models outside tomorrow, just in case they need a bit more curing.

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Ships and A Castle

I decided to fire the printer up today and printed myself some Ancient galleys on the filament Printer. I did two of the larger ones and two of the smaller ones.

I stuck them next to some 6mm Baccus miniatures to give you an idea of scale. Part of me is now wondering whether or not to give an actual 1:300 scale version and the get some miniatures to go with them. Actually have marines on the decks etc. The one thing that is missing on these is the Corvus. Okay these were only on Roman vessels and for not that long, but they would look cool.

The other thing I did today was to get the castle sprayed. Funnily enough, today one of my Facebook groups shared a YouTube video all about Samurai castles…Samurai Castles

I now have to decide whether to go for black or white walls…

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Japanese Town

I got on with some more painting of the town tonight. Mainly adding the wood to the buildings and getting a wash on the tiled roof of the wall.

Some the woodwork could certainly do with a bit of a tidy up, but at least I cracked out the paintbrushes.

I have half a dozen houses still to do, but things are getting closer to finishing.

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A Mountain Update…

Well I just got the last two off the printer and they have come out fine. There was some stringing between the peaks but to be honest it was to be expected with the increase in temperature. So that is now one of everything printed. The increase to 10% infil on the mountains certainly made a difference to the rigidity of them.

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Ain’t No Mountain High Enough

Tonight I was a bit pooped so just sorted out my mountain hexes. By sorting out please read filling in all of the gaps. I kind of forgot that the temperature had fallen a fair bit so I think it caused some lines. I don’t think it was a blockage as the lines really only appeared in certain places.

I used the tried and tested superglue and bicarbonate to add a solid top layer. The one thing I noticed was that I was missing a mountain tile. This is being printed as I type this (along with the volcano). I have bumped the temperature up by 10 degrees to see if that will make any difference, if it doesn’t then I reckon I do have a blockage. Once these two are done then I reckon I have got one of each tile that I intend to use.

On the resin front, it is still sitting idle but I do have a pile of new miniatures from the new Patreon that I need to download and get going with. I thought I might as well wait until my wash and cure device arrived, that way It will be a heck of a lot easier to clean them up, not to mention cure.

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A Road to Nowhere

The printer has been busy again and I have printed all fifteen road tiles.

Not that you can see them really. This has got a nice selection of roads and some towns and buildings built in.

The set comes with the tiles for villages and town hexes…

Although they are great, I really think they are too large, but the roads set has smaller ones which fit much better scale wise (still very large if the tiles are a few miles across).

These will become my towns and villages on the map. The full tiled versions will become cities I suppose. My plan is to use these for my RPG’s as well as wargames campaign maps. The biggest surprise for me is that each tile tells me which one it is. I was coming up with extremely complicated ways to to record the tile numbers and tonight I noticed this…

Yep village in the woods is tile AR10, the inn is AR11 and the castle on the hill is AR12!

Doh!

I think I have half a dozen mountains to print and then I have one of each tile (that I want). Then I just have to wait for the stretch goals and print some more of these ones that I want.