One Thin Coat

Nothing at all to do with a well known paint maker. Most of my painting now is one thin coat using either Contrast, Speedpaint or Xpress paint, or a mixture of all three.

This evening whilst on puppy duty I decided to have an easy win so i decided to get these done.

Well the industrial drums that is. The other is pretty much done. So after a bit off a head scratch I really felt that Red would cause me some problems with the rust later on, a bit like here:

My original concept idea was that different containers would be colour coded, but after that initial idea i changed my mind, sadly after doing the above with a dry brush if red. I then remembered that the original industrial piece was yellow so that decided it. All would be yellow. 

I was concerned that the red underpainting was a mistake, but in the words of my favourite artist… “there are no mistakes, only happy little accidents.”

The red, with the white over it has really enhanced the look I was wanting. It has given a mottled, grungy look thar makes me think of old metal that isn’t going to hold the contents inside for much longer.

My happy little accident has really helped. They look even better now that the paint has dried.

On one of them I have missed covering a bit of red and that in itself looks like there is a bit of a leak forming. In other places it actually looks a bit rust like.

The original title for this post was going to be ‘Two Thin Coats’ a bit click batey I know, but in fact one thin coat will evidently do the trick.

Alien Isolation- spoilers

Well, as I suspected, the xenomorph that I managed to drop into the gas giant wasn’t the only one. I always wondered how I could leave it behind at a transit station, only to find it dropping out of a vent on the other side. I was convinced after finding a couple of people with holes where their chests should be.

I have just interfaced with the main frame to find that a) W.Y. have a directive in place to preserve any specimen  and b) I am expendable. I am not being paranoid… it says so in the directive. The Working Joe’s have turned hostile as they are now following said directive too.  I am now on the hunt for a hive. I couldnt put it better thsn Frost who so eloquently stated… “What are the hell we supposed to use man – harsh language? Yes when I arrived at the Mainframe I had to relinquish all of my weapons. Thankfully the jury rigged stuff I made didn’t count.

As I said in an earlier post, this game has really got me thinking about running an RPG set on the station. The beauty of it is, I have a full cast of characters as well as maps and other exciting things like that.

Working on the Dohyo

This evening I was on puppy duty, This is basically following each other around waiting for one or the other to need the toilet. Quite a bit of it was Maggie was asleep on me so I couldn’t move.

I therefore didn’t get as much done as I wanted, but managed more than I expected…

Still a bit to go but definitely getting there.

Now doing a bit of research into what the thing was called I found out some new boring facts.

Firstly they are sacred spaces and offerings are buried in the centre. I knew they had a link to shinto but not that much. Secondly, I  never knew women were forbidden… now I know why there are no female Sumo wrestlers 🤼‍♂️. Thirdly, knew they threw something white around before the bout, evidently it is salt.

There you go, boring facts that may help you win a pub quiz or trivial pursuit.

Back with the FDM

Well I picked up some filament in a charity shop really cheaply, I wish I had got the other three rolls, but didn’t. By time I got back they had gone.

Sadly they weren’t in grey, I hot the most staid of them with green.

Here is my first print with it

It’s just shy of 7 inches tall and printed  in four or five bits. I cannot actually remember.

Printer Overdrive

Well I have gone a bit bonkers printing things. I am certainly running through my resin backlog.

I eventually managed to print the large chemical mixer thing…

I also did the walkways and a leaky drain.

The  drum above is the second attempt… the following shows us boys and girls why we need to ensure that we fasten the build plate properly!

The following are a couple of pipes. They were part of four things on the plate. The chemical barrel pallets both failed, which led to a lot of swearing. The vat was full so it took a few shenanigans to get the cured lumps of the FEP.

Chemical Plant II

This evening I sorted out the new chemical tank. This one is a little more complex than the other one. It has screens and buttons etc, but it is still going to work well.

I have sprayed it black ready for the white dry brush tomorrow.

I am printing a second one right now. My plan is to have at lest two joined by a walkway. Three would be better but I am not sure if I can be bothered to paint three.

Rust Bucket

Well this evening I added the rust to the industrial terrain piece.

I really tried to get the rust where it would get rusty.

The sign is one of the ones I printed last week.

Hopefully I will actually achieve more tomorrow.

MDF Terrain

As I mentioned the other day, I purchased some MDF stuff to make some sort of on table terrain.

Well I started building it, following the instructions downloaded from their website. Two problems I hit were the instructions as well as user error reading said instructions. First off I downloaded the wrong set, luckily the first bit was identical to mine. Secondly I stuck some bits on the bottom upside down. Then I ran into problems with the main bit of the fuel tank. In the instructions it clearly states to glue the bottoms in first which I did. I then had to fasten 12 pieces into the top, three of which had 3 tabs to fit into 3 holes.

I then had this problem…

Okay in the grand scheme of things it is not a huge problem, but it is like this on a lot of the pieces.

I really felt like the cylindrical thing wasn’t really so I started making changes using cereal card.

These are meant to have a ladder of sorts up three of the sides, but they just looked too out of scale. This also is covered up by the cardboard.

I think I have been spoiled in the past by some of the MDF terrain I have had. These are actually okay kits for the money. These were the cheapest I could find below £30. For some of the other ones, for something similar it was double or more than double hhe price.

Has it put me off, not really. It’s a relatively new material to me so there are bound to be teething troubles. In fact the second tower took a quarter of the time to build than the first.

I never did get the scouts painted, I did do some more pallets of sacks as well as some liquid bowser and covered bags to act as scatter.

A Painted Machine

So this evening I decided to crack on with the walker and got on quite a long way…

Still the metalwork to do followed by the muck and rust.

No while painting these I came across a rather ‘orrible realisation.

Well if you remember ages and ages ago when I first got into Speedpaints there was a problem with reactivation. So when I got Speedpaints 2.0 I gave one of my school leavers my 1.0 with the caveat that they would reactivate. Fast forward ten months and I am painting my miniatures…. remember this painted dude in the foreground?

Well that yellow paldron kept reactivating whenever I put white over it as I decided to go with yellow. I did think it was a bit odd… This evening I may have worked out why!

Note the bottle on the left has that 2.0 visible and the one on the right doesn’t… the blue arrived last week. The red was my upgrade in the past. I am now confused… did I give my upgrades to my leaver or is the 2.0 a new thing on the bottles. I really cannot workbout how i managed it if i did…If anyone knows about the 2.0 please let me know. Since typing this, I did a bit of checking around and it would seem the first run of 2.0 were using original labels, so I did seem to have given away the 1.0. Which then begs the question…why the reactivation?

Combined Harvester Done

Well it was moral support day for my daughter. She revised and I painted. I managed to get this terrain piece finished.

I decided to go a bit mental with the rust. Well it has been sitting in the field a good while.

If truth be told I am a bit Happy with this.

I got a parcel today, six new Speedpaints and a carry case to put them in… I also decided to shove the spare bottles that i had lying around in it too. Somehow I found a lot.

I kind of thought it would have my Contrast paints in there as well as my Speedpaint metallics… so much for that plan.  To be fair some of these need to be put back into the shed as I haven’t used them un months… probably years since I used the washes.

I also got some terrain bits too…

Yeah I know I could probably find the files to print something similar or indeed actually craft it myself, but this seemed cheap so I went for it instead.