I picked up ShadowSpire the other month to bring with me to my annual “guys’ weekend” along with an extra warband (for a total of three warbands).
My painting discipline went roughly like this:
I will paint for two hours each night to paint all three of these warbands in time for the weekend.
I will paint for two hours every other night to get them all done in time for the weekend, but I’ll probably have to paint all next Saturday too.
I will paint for an hour or so each night and I’ll get two warbands done in time for the weekend.
I will get one warband done in time for the weekend.
I may finish most of the figures in this one warband in time for the weekend.
I will have everything base-coated in time for the weekend.
Some of the figures will be primed.
As it turns out, I did get one and a half warbands painted in time for the weekend. Here’s the one that actually got finished, the Sepulchral Guard:
I was REALLY impressed by the quality of the GW plastic minis, each one with a custom base. Having grown up with Ral Partha leads as a kid, it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come.
These are the first minis I’ve painted in close to a decade. I’m not in any danger of winning another Golden Deamon, I fear.
Nice work! I love the purple. All of the war bands are great quality. Even the skaven, who I didn’t like at first, turned out to be one of my favorites to paint.
After 40k 8th edition was released last year I spent the fall working on painting up the Death Guard. I had no interest in them until I saw the sculpts from that box. Every model is different and interesting and a joy to paint.
It’s one of those SD Gundam, RX-78-2. Using this to trial using a dremel with a polishing wheel attached to clean nibs after sprue removal, as my preference is generally clean building.
I couldn’t decide whether this was a figures project or a maker project, so I didn’t know where to put it. Cue the “why_not_both?.gif”
Looks like Discorse is annoyed that I’m trying to post the same thing in two places… good for spam-avoidance, but annoying for me. Let’s see if it’ll let me if I enclose it in summary breaks:
Summary
I painted up a squad or two of ShadeSpire figures and of course I didn’t want them just rattling around the box. Similarly, tossing them in a big padded figures carrier seemed “off” somehow since you kind of need their cards to travel alongside them.
But hey, what’s the use of having access to a 100W cutting laser if you’re not using it every red second of the day? Honestly, I’m daily pissed off that I don’t have access to ill-tempered sea bass.
So there are a slew of websites out there where you enter in the dimensions of the box you want to create and it’ll spit out vector graphics for you to feed into the laser’s CNC controller. I modified those plans in Illustrator to be a box with a lid, added an extra interior wall for a card-holder, and finally added some graphics. Add some birch plywood (1/8") and some power, and voila:
The interior has some foam shipping material hot-glued in there as well as a removable top-pad. It holds the figures in pretty snugly.
Summary
I did screw up a bit… or as I like to say, “enhanced the quality of the next build”. The boxes were snug enough where it was tough to pull off the top, so I manually added a finger-cut to the lid; the next box will have that in the plans. I also didn’t figure on the plywood having different-colored sides… since the inner box has some sides that are directional, not everything is uniform. Finally, I should add a finger-groove to the card-holder side for easier removal of the cards – right now you pretty much have to flip the box and dump them out.
Overall, a fun, low-effort project that I plan to replicate for the other two warbands I have for the game. It’ll make transport a little easier and/or add to the sale price if we end up cooling on the game.
Quick project for the Mario obsessed 5yo. He loves all the bad guy bosses, particularly Boom Boom, sadly for which no Amiibo exists. Dude at work just got himself a Creality CR10S 3D printer, however, so I set him to work with a game model extracted from Super Mario 3D World.
First print was a fail, not realising I should have ‘cleaned’ the model up in a modelling program first to cull the extraneous objects that make up the several game states the character can present in-game - this caused big dramas trying to close and slice the model.
Bit of faffing around in Blender had that sorted and the second print went smoothly. I skipped any serious labour in smoothing the print, primed, hand painted, panel-lined and matte clear coated over a few days. Bit rushed towards the end as my son was desperate to get his hands on it so I let him handle it between coats and had a couple of ground drops while clear coating due to rushing and poor preparation on my part. Still, turned out pretty cool and he loves it.
Just got to get the War Council to approve the acquisition of my own 3D printer now…
The FBX I downloaded did not really seem to have a proper skeletal armature, so I don’t think I could have done it with out some serious 3D work I would not have been up to. I didn’t mind this anyway, since in some of the games, Boom Boom spins around with his arms out like that, so Damon is cool with it as is. I was going to mount him on a bearing or Beyblade launcher to allow him spin, but couldn’t come up with a solid method without a lot of faffing about.
Still just base painting and decals (and the interior cabin is still undone). No weathering whatsoever. Although with Ma.K. models you can get careless when painting (like I did) to get some initial weathering done. I love it, since it’s much more relaxing than painting clean Gundams.
It will probably be several months until I get another day to work on this.
Been really getting into Bolt Action this past year. Rules-wise, its not the most historically accurate wargame out there, but its still a lot of fun. I also enjoy playing it more than Warhammer 40k or Warmachine (both of which I’ve almost completely lost interest of last year). The models aren’t anywhere near GW standards, but I feel more relaxed when painting them.
Heres a StuG and some late-war German infantry. I added some weathering to the tank treads later.
I also just ordered a bunch of Flames of War stuff from Battlefront’s recent late-war sale. Haven’t played that yet, but a bunch of guys near me are into it. Looking forward to diving more into historical miniature wargaming in 2019!
Nice work @cpugeek13! I hadn’t seen their minis before, but they look like a ton of fun to paint. I’ve been loving Battlefront’s Team Yankee stuff. Nice quality models at a great scale.
My most recent project is USS Lassen (DDG-82) from Trumpeter. I work in the ocean engineering field these days and thought it would make a nice addition to my office. I forgot how much effort real models are compared to minis! :)
I am having google-fu issues. I am looking for model master cement, but with the very thin (metal) nozzle. I have seen it, but I can’t find an Amazon link for it.
I am really into model trains. I belong to a very large club on the North Shore. My dad was a model railroader, as was his father before him.
My dad died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer. About 3 years ago, I got back into the hobby. I now had two fairly large train collections when I merged his collection and mine. Last night when I went up to the club, I grabbed a bin of cars I hadn’t run in a while. It didn’t hit me until I was running that it was Father’s Day, and the bin of cars I took was mostly his collection.
I have enclosed a few pictures. The locos are all mine, but the covered hoppers are his. I couldn’t upload a video file of the train.
That’s a cool story - very sweet to read on Fathers’ Day.
I used to do a fair amount of diorama and landscape modeling back when I was into WH40K figures, and I though I was pretty damned good… until a friend took me to a model train convention. That was humbling.
