November 8, 2009 at 2:23 am
· Filed under miniature sculpting, miniatures, modeling, modeling - gaming - hobby ·Tagged conversions, Dremel Stylus, modeling, Modeling Tools, Modifying Miniatures, Review, Sculpting Tools
Quite a while ago I posted a bit about how I acquired a Dremel Stylus for my modeling kit. I was pretty stoked about this device when I got it, but didn’t get a whole lot of chance to use it… until recently.
I have been using this thing a ton lately. The chaos giant for my WHFB army required a huge amount of drilling, grinding, and cutting to accomplish what was needed for the extensive conversion that I have planned. Some of my Flames of War tanks needed some modification on their resin hulls (Eeek! Grinding resin!! If you do this, do it outside, and wear a face mask. Resin particles are super evil for your lungs). The chaos knights plastic kit has way too much ‘heavy metal’ going on in detail-land for me, so I wanted to remove some of this efficiently. The Stylus took care of these jobs with no problem.
The types of things I have the Stylus doing are pretty light-weight. I recommend that you avoid this tool for heavy work, as normal dremels can burn out if you put them to hard metals, or even large amounts of woodwork (or so I have heard). I have taken it to the body of a large metal mini in the past with pretty good results.
The ergonomic shape of the stylus is where this thing wins hands down. I have had other grinders in the past, and they were fine for house-hold tasks, but for mini work, they were cumbersome enough that I often just wouldn’t bother using them. My only complaint about the Stylus is that the two bit holders that it comes with are too large for some smaller bits, such as pin-vise drill bits. Smaller ones may be available, but I haven’t poked around for them yet. The other gripe about the stylus that other people have, is the price tag. I got mine for a shade over $100 after shipping. Honestly, if you can afford it, the price is totally worth it. I should have asked Dremel for a freebie to write this review! Hmmm…
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November 2, 2009 at 3:51 am
· Filed under Uncategorized
I just posted a new article on sculpting fur in the hobby article area. Check it out!
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October 30, 2009 at 5:46 pm
· Filed under miniature sculpting, miniatures, modeling, sculpting ·Tagged sculpting
I’ve been experimenting with mixing different types of two part putty to get different surfaces depending on what I was trying to accomplish. Pro sculptors in the miniature industry have been mixing greenstuff with the more rigid brownstuff for a while. What I have been trying out is mixing apoxie-sculpt with greenstuff. Rigidity in putty translates into a material that is easier to carve, and sand.
Recently I was creating some masks for my Chaos Marauder Cav models, and I started initially with greenstuff. I was running into some problems when I was trying to use a xacto knife to trim up, and do some carving on the putty. Greenstuff is pretty flexible once it is set up, and this was causing me some problems. When you are doing carving, you generally want a fair bit of resistance from the material you are carving. This allows you to control how much material you are taking off at any point. Less is more in this situation. Usually, taking off too much material is a bigger problem than too little. When I was growing up my father taught me to carve things out of wood. I learned quickly that while balsa wood was super easy to carve, I could get finer details from bass wood. The situation is similar with 2 part epoxy putty.
I have been using apoxie-sculpt a bunch to create the base for larger models for a while now. I have never been that thrilled with the stuff for finer scale, or the detail layer of my sculpting as its a bit too soft, and very, very sticky until it sets up some. I found that if I mix greenstuff and apoxie at a 3:1ish ratio that I get some very cool properties to work with…
- More rigid when set up which is good for carving
- Lighter color which makes seeing the detail that you are applying a lot easier. Greenstuff on its own is pretty dark, and can take a lot of moving around to see what is actually occurring on the surface of your sculpt.
- Workable consistency of Greenstuff. GS wins when it comes to general workable properties over other putty that I have tried. At this ratio, the workability is essentially the same as uncut GS.
I think that I will have to play with different mixes of putty based on what I need. If I am doing press mold casts, I figure that I will stick with uncut GS. The flexibility helps a lot with fixing set bits to models. Weapons, armor, or other situations where I need cleaner edges, or less organic shapes, I will start to add in apoxie-sculpt. I have yet to apply a dremel grinder to mixed putty. I figure it will work pretty well, but will have to do some tests.
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October 29, 2009 at 4:27 am
· Filed under modeling - gaming - hobby ·Tagged Chaos, conversions, miniatures, Sculpting and Painting, Warhammer, work in progress
Tentacles!
I did a bit of work on the modified Chaos Spawn this week. Work life has kept me away from my modeling bench somewhat, but I was able to resolve the missing leg on this critter, as well as the feelers coming out of its face. I am pretty happy with the use of guitar wire for this. I will have to carry this over to some of the other monstrosities that I have planned.
I took a bit more care with these photos as well. I remembered to shoot in RAW mode, and took the time to play with their exposures in photoshop. What I need is better lights, and some kind of stands so that I can position them more easily.
In the front shot of the spawn you can see a very rough region under it’s chin where the sculpting is particularly unrefined. This is my next target with this thing. That, and some sort of hook/claw/feet for the ends of its legs as well will pretty much wrap up the modeling on this piece.
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October 18, 2009 at 7:20 pm
· Filed under miniatures ·Tagged Chaos, Chaos Cultists, miniatures, Sculpting and Painting, Warhammer, work in progress
This is the latest progress on my Slanneshi army. The 1st group of cultists is almost done with its modeling, 2 spawn are almost there as well.
The champion has received a sword and a shield.
This is the full block of 20 cultists. The standard bearer is the next modeling work I need to do on this unit.
This is a conventional GW kit chaos spawn. See, I can have non-converted stuff in my army!
This spawn has a lot more custom work done to it, and some more to go.
Other units that are under way are a block of more dogs, Chaos Warriors, Mutated Chosen, and a Slanneshi Giant.
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October 14, 2009 at 11:01 pm
· Filed under gaming, miniatures, modeling, table top games, table top gaming, wargames, warhammer fantasy battle ·Tagged Warh
This podcast has been what I have been listening to at work lately. It has an excellent balance of game talk, tournament scene, and painting for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. If you are into hobby podcasts I recommend it. The forum on the site is excellent as well. Check it out!
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October 12, 2009 at 5:12 pm
· Filed under Uncategorized
I have noticed lately that the scenic base article has gotten a ton of attention lately. This is fantastic, and I was thinking about adding a follow up article that covers some more advanced ideas. What I would like to do is to open this up, and to have people submit some questions that I will attempt to weave the answers to into the article. If you have some basing, or other sculpting questions, go ahead and comment them to this post or email them to me at ahschmidt *a*t* gmail *d*o*t* com!
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October 11, 2009 at 8:07 pm
· Filed under modeling - gaming - hobby ·Tagged Chaos, Chaos Cult, Chaos Cultists, miniatures, Sculpting and Painting, Warhammer, WHFP
I have applied the next layer of detail on these models. Hooks for the flails, greenstuff patching, flail positioning, and applied sand to the bases. This unit is coming together nicely. In the not too distant future I will be posting an article about how I made the hooks for the flails.
My chaos hounds are on their way as well. Based, some conversion, patched (more or less) and primed. I have 10 more of these puppies in the works as well.
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October 6, 2009 at 4:15 pm
· Filed under modeling - gaming - hobby ·Tagged Chaos, Chaos Cult, Chaos Cultists, miniatures, Sculpting and Painting, Warhammer, WHFP
Here are some shots of my Chaos Cultists for my WHFB Warriors of Chaos army. These guys represent chaos marauders. I’ve never been into the body-building-metal-viking-guy look, so I wanted to come up with a different way to handle this unit. I also like the idea that many of Slanneshi followers come from cults around the warhammer world.
I used the Empire Flagellents kit to base these models on. The bare heads from the marauder horse, with some flayed skin masks made from greenstuff adds the gory character I wanted this unit to have – I like my chaos to be creepy. The flails are somewhat customized as well to fit the look I am going for when this unit is done, which the GW flails don’t usually capture.
Slannesh cultist unit WIP
The flail cords are made from steel wire twisted with a power drill. I wanted to have more dynamic poses for these weapons than I felt the models originally came with.
This model will become the unit champion. Hand weapon and shield will be his equipment to help him stand out from the guys with flails.
This is the unit’s musician. I forgot to cut out an area in his mask for his mouth to show, I will have to do that so the notion that he has a war-horn isn’t too weird.
Next steps… Heads on the flails, cord positioning, greenstuff gap-filling, flash trimming, some further details here and there.
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October 6, 2009 at 4:51 am
· Filed under miniature sculpting ·Tagged Chaos, Chaos Cultists, miniatures, wargaming, Warhammer, WFB, work in progress
…most likely tomorrow.
I have been making some fine progress on my Chaos army of Slannesh. As usual, I seem to have made the models for this project more complex than I probably needed to, but I think that these are going to be sick when they are done.
On the workbench now is a unit of 10 (soon to be 20) Cultists of Slannesh (my interpretation of Chaos Marauders), 30 Chaos Warriors of Slannesh, 2 chaos spawn, and 10 chaos puppies. The dogs are finished, and ready to paint. The cultists are next up, and I will be posting images here as they progress. Stay tuned!
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