So, I haven’t been posting much lately. This is in part due to laziness and part due to playing too much Ark Survival Evolved.
I did get this lot photographed this evening… the boat crew were printed about 3 weeks ago and the engineers and sappers about two. The latter were taken off the supports this evening and then left in the sun to cure.
This evening I also shrank down and printed some Samurai stuff from 3D Alien print. hopefully you will see a painted example tomorrow.
So I did a bit of work on the Hog this evening. I think the windows sort of work. At least you can tell what they are meant to be.
I got the door gunner with some paint on too.
I have reprinted the two I did on the FDM, this time on the resin machine.
Be warned, this is probably going to be a rambling, stream of consciousness post. Plus I started writing it a couple of weeks ago now and have edited loads. Hopefully it still makes sense.
So, as you probably know, I print and paint as well as paint purchased miniatures and terrain. As part of this I watch many, many YouTube channels. Quite a lot of them tell me to do x or y to improve my painting. Some go as far as to tell me to try something new.
The question I want to ask is ‘why’?
Now before I start, this is a personal question and I am not telling anyone what to do/not do.
I have been painting miniatures for about 35 years. Over time have I improved… yes of course I have. Over those years have I tried new things, again yes.
I am now in a happy little groove, some may see it as a rut. I love my Contrast paints and pretty much use them all the time. So much so I have ordered a set of the Vallejo xpress range. So in reality I am trying something new 😉
Now what about this question. I recently watched Dave on MS Paints asking a question about why miniatures look terrible..
He made an interesting observation, if your miniature does not look like how you envisaged it from either the box art or your favourite YouTube influencer then you have a 180 degree shift in feeling from good… to crap in a heartbeat. I actually watched a video that auto loaded the other day it was a guy painting yellow and as we all know, yellow is a sod of a colour to paint. Anyway he did a close up and there was paint (shall we say) where it shouldn’t have been and it actually made me happy. It was almost like … Yey someone like me. I didn’t read the comments as I was actually worried the keyboard warriors would be in pointing it out.
I am of the opinion that good enough is good enough for what I want. If I entered competitions then I may feel different. I am an amateur, my painting style is that of an amateur and I will probably happily carry on in this vein until I find a different way to do things.
Just to show that I have made improvements over time, both of these were painted quickly for a game.
I suppose what I am trying to say is that to my knowledge I am not deliberately going out of my way to improve. It is happening in a more organic way. Funnily enough I have almost stopped watching painting videos on YouTube.
I am actually in awe of the skill of some people. They take the same amount of time to paint an arm as I take to paint a squad (or possibly an army). The final miniature is exquisite whereas mine are definitely at the other end of the scale… I go for the one metre rule… or maybe ten metres with 28mm.
So if you have got to the end of this, you deserve a medal.
I actually got my butt into gear this evening and got some paint onto the Hog. To be honest there are so many things wrong with this miniature that it is going to become a test miniature… well unless I suddenly like it:)
I will carry on with this over the next while and see how it goes.
I am going to try and get hold of some decals to help with numbers etc.
If you remember I said that GW had sent us their Alliance box for the Geek Club.
This came with a pile of miniatures, a set of paints and probably the worst brushes I have ever seen. The ones from Wish were as good or even better. It was me using one of the brushes and not the kids.
The other thing it came with was a little booklet on what else they can get. So me being me showed them how much things cost… they know how much the resin miniatures cost so there were lots of ‘Woah’, ‘Ehhh’ and ‘HOW Much!!!’
They do want to have a go with the stuff after they have finished their current miniatures.
They also got a little piece of plasticised card that acts as a mixing palette. There were a couple of cardboard gaming boards and dice with rules to play the games. Their little booklet had some colour in pages to help decide on what colours to use.
So what do I think of the box… if I wanted to buy what was in there it would cost me loads of cash. There is a lot of plastic in there. Problem is if I wanted to play an actual game then then the kids would have to sell hundreds more.
While I realise the box is designed to get younger kids into the very expensive GW world, they were the only ones to actually respond and to offer something.
I really doubt any of them are going to be galloping off to the local toy shop, but at the end of the day if they decide to then I will support them in whatever way I can.
Today I suddenly realised that I had a can of Army Painter green. Joe brought it back for me ages ago. But well done past me for asking for it.
The Hog looks a bit better now that it is green.
Well this whole thing got me thinking, the rotor sticks out a long way forward and we will not even talk about much it would stick out sideways. So in my rather foolish brain I wondered about electronically boring out magnet holes in the rotor and the fuselage.
This would mean in game all of the rotors wouldn’t be bow/stern. There could be some variations.
Over the next few days I will work on this and see what I can come up with painting wise. I am actually going to have to use normal paint! Eek!
Well as promised I decided to prehollow out the huey before using the slicer to do it. It seems to have worked! I went to town by shoving a cylinder inside the rear compartment and then in the software subtracting it. This left a big cylindrical void that meant that it was a lighter model, but also that there are no places where the resin can pool.
The blue light you can see is a small uv light that I made to fit inside hollowed out models. This thing has more holes than a Swiss cheese. But it does allow the cleaner to get inside easily and to empty out easily too. I might cover up the holes, but there again I am going to be shoving various crew in there, so the holes won’t be as visible.
I also did some rotors on the filament machine and put them on a higher setting. They have come out very nicely.
Well some of you may remember that a while a while ago I posted that I was in chronic pain. The Doctor was investigating and narrowed it down to Poly myalgia or fibro myalgia. Well after draining about an arm full of blood over the last six weeks he has decided on the former, which thankfully is treatable.
So I am now on about an 18 month to two year course of steroids. I started on Wednesday and by Friday the pain had pretty much gone. Because I am a pillock I did too much yesterday so today I am taking it easy 😉
So, because I am going to be on steroids long term then I am going to also have to go on other medication to counteract some of the side effects.
So there you go folks, a huge thank you to the people who got in touch it really did help me realise that that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
Well if you remember I finished my dwarven warband for Mordheim. I did have to proxy a couple of miniatures for inexperienced fighters. This has now been solved by Highland Miniatures bringing out some dwarf rangers.
So here we have a pair of lightly armoured dwarves. The mounted one in the background is there because there was space on the build plate.
This evening I managed to put the Huey Hog together. This is the first of them completely finished.
Now you may have noticed that there are a pair of skids sitting there and not actually attached to the two birds on the right… well that is due to a Rookie Error.
The resin and filament machines have different tolerances. The hole for the skids to fit in is too small. They are a snug fit on the resin version. So options I have are to redo the skids on the FDM machine and/or make some more Hueys on the resin machine. Would you like to guess which way I will go?
So I was having a bit of a mooch and of the 16000 Huey’s in the Nam only 1000 were the Hog. By all accounts early on people shoved on whatever they could. Early editions only had the rocket pods that held seven folding fin rockets because the 19 versions were too heavy. The birds I have are early edition ones as the rear door has only one window in it. Later editions have two. Interestingly enough the version I have has seven rockets visible.
My plan is to have four or five flyers, but in reality for my skirmish games one or two would suffice!
Talking of doing more, this time I will hollow out the rear fuselage separately before getting it anywhere near the resin slicing software.
Bogenwald 