Itty Bitty Motorbikecycles

08.26.2018

I seem to be at the cusp of starting things that are going to take longer than a week (or two) of my free time. I mentioned that next I would work on finishing motorcycles or starting one of the 1:48 models I'd picked up. I indeed finished the motorcycles, but they're nothing special. Instead of starting a model, I got lost searching various paint/camo schemes and wondering just how do I properly paint a model - gluing everything, masking parts, and painting was how I used to do it, but I think my skill set has risen to something more difficult. I'm not sure what that is yet.

I fired up the 3D printer for the first time in a month and printed some stuff. Most of it was disposable, just to see if some scaling would work (the answer: sometimes). At some point the extruder became clogged, and the simple fix of setting the temp really high did not work. This isn't something I wanted to muck with on a Sunday afternoon, so I'm leaving it clogged until I can talk to the Printer Cabal and gain insight on their learned ways of declogging that bastard.

The last thing I did over the weekend was start the TTCombat Gas Station I've had for a while. I thought I had gotten the deluxe (bigger) version, but I instead got only the basic. While not a big deal, the Dinogas sign & lettering are burned into the MDF so I'm not going the customized route I was planning. I'd talked to Bob (who may be reading this on his phone) about gas station color schemes and most that I know lend themselves to some green, which I want to avoid this time since all the other buildings I've made have way too much green. The Gulf station orange and blue was a good alternate, but orange and blue dinosaur doesn't really work.

A purple and orange dinosaur though....

Since no new minis were bought, progress on the overall list!

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Ninja & More Ladies

08.20.2018

After the success of Pimp & friends I wanted to continue focusing on washes with a little bit of paint for detail. With the 3 Men In Black, I had some ideas to paint dark/black better, so I found the right batch - Snake Eyes and some Ninja! Well, Snake Eyes is named Cobra, which I of course think is supremely clever. Instead of my normal white primer, I went with the traditional grey primer followed up by as even of a black wash as I could apply. From there I picked out some details on each mini with a little color, and it all seemed to work out. The ninja each got a different color accent, Power Rangers style, just to help tell them apart if the day ever comes they're used in a game.

The next batch would require more than just washes. I'd had good luck with skin tones on the Pimp batch, with the skin not looking as blotchy as is my norm. With that, I dug out a handful of scantily clad women. One, Bridgette the Dirty French Maid, I'd forgotten was topless until after I had primed her and started looking at some painted reference pics online. Suddenly I was going to have to learn how to paint nipples (the text here probably isn't helping get past the NASA filters for Bob - sorry Bob!). Much like the time I had to learn to paint pizza when I thought a cop was eating a sandwich, this was an unexpected "oh crap, how do I do this the right way". In the end, it turned out... what's the word? Less sleazy? Yeah, that'll work. Lest sleazy than I feared.

Overall I'm happy with this batch. I made a couple of mistakes, like normal, but nothing that ruined anything. I even got some workable eyes on some of the girls! I've also started playing around more with adding points of gloss coating after the matte sealant, to help bring out metallic highlights (guns, swords, buckles, etc). Or, in some cases, glossy lips.

Over on the Painting Progress front, I technically went backwards (again?). The batch of 8 Chronoscape minis was offset by a clearance sale at Miniature Market that forced, yes FORCED, me to pickup 4 packs of Walking Dead (12 minis) and a Riddler Crew for the Batman Miniatures Game (4 more minis).

Next up is either finishing the Chronoscape motorcycles that I started with the Ninja - to be honest painting these is a little boring - or one of the 1:48 vehicles I picked up at HobbyTown on a vacation jaunt (perhaps more about that later).

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My Pimp Hand Is Strong

08.01.2018

I was not happy with my last batch of painted minis. It boiled down to the paint being too thick. I've had luck with washes in the past, so I told myself to get a batch that would work well with washes, and wash as much as possible instead of glopping on paint. Instead of glopping on paint, shoot for detail work with those fancy brushes I got.

3 of the minis would basically be wearing black suits. Men in Black Agents Jones and Smith, and a Corporate Assassin lady that I honestly thought was a 3rd MiB when I grabbed the blister pack. Another suited mini was secret agent Daniel Sterling, which I'd painted previously in a black suit, so this would be a good excuse to go an earth-tone route. Max Decker, 50's private eye, would also go the earth tone/beige route since he sported a stereotypical trench coat. A mad scientist, with flowing lab coat, would really just keep with the white primer. And lastly, there was the pimp.

The pimp sounds daunting, but honestly most washes seem to be geared for fantasy wizards, and red and purple on a pimp would work!

Instead of pouring on washes to get in recesses like I normally do, I just painted. And it worked, mostly. The black suits required a couple of coats. The secret agent required a couple of coats, and I think I may have used different colors. The pimp, ah, the pimp was glorious! Everything just seemed to work this time. I went back and touched up each mini afterwards and didn't screw things up (for once). Part of the touch up was that after applying my standard dullcoat, I went back and put a gloss sealer on guns, shoes, and belt buckles. Probably not enough gloss to notice, but I'll look closer and swear I see a difference.

Oh, the numbers game. While picking out the above minis, I came across a trio of Chronoscape minis that I'd missed when counting, so those got added to the "To Paint" column. Plus, 2 packs of Star Trek Adventures minis came in (another 20 minis). Since last time, my "Really want to paint" count went from 453 to 469 after painting 7 new ones.

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The A-Team. And More.

07.23.2018

Today, a little bit of everything from the past couple of weeks.

A-Team Complete!

The Wargames Foundry B-Team is all painted up and ready for the zombie apocalypse, or whatever else comes along. It's been a month or so since I painted anything, and I tried to take my time and not rush the paint job, but these still didn't turn out as good as I hoped. Part of it was the molds, but mostly I have a hard time with browns and blues - they just don't go on as even as I like. Must be something about the pigments used and me not doing something properly. I think I've got an A-Team from someone else, too.

This makes a small dent in the overall painting progression.

The painting progression is going to go down sometime next week as 2 sets of minis for the Star Trek RPG game, some Borg and TNG Away Team, come in from CSI.

Sanding

As mentioned yesterday I got a cheap belt sander so mainly see about sanding down/evening out printed models. The Nascar I had to slice into 2 models to print, thanks to my limited print volume, did not have flush ends to smoosh together where there should have been. The plastic was too thick to cut as I'm still wary of slicing chunks of me off. Running sandpaper over the 2 halves would take a lot longer than I was willing to commit to. Hence, Harbor Freight and a belt sander.

First and foremost, I survived sanding with no injuries, so it's a win there no matter what. Outside of that, sanding is going to be a challenge. The printed plastic starts to melt after a while, which isn't that big of a deal other than something to be aware of and factor in. The hard part, especially for me, is that sanding in 3 dimensions when there's not an even/flat surface to go along with (each outer side of the car was curved enough to not really be flat, even the bottom). It was also the first time I've ever used a belt sander, and with that comes at least a little bit of a learning curve.

In the end, the 2 halves are closer to fitting that when they were first printed. At this point it's going to end up coming together as a wreck of some type, maybe with smoke billowing out. It's going to take some extra practice before I print the A-Team van.

Loot from Antenocitis

At the first of the month, Antenocitis Workshop was running a sale to (so they said) test out and celebrate their new shopping cart. They've had vehicles on my "oooh, those are cool" list for at least a year, and I had intended to place an order around my birthday but at the time, I just wasn't feeling it. Can I say "just wasn't feeling it" this close to 50? I'll say I can. When they had this sale, I was feeling it.

Antenocitis has 2 lines of vehicles I was interested in. They have vehicles for Infinity which I like to think would fit in my game world set 15-25 years into the future. Far enough to have some curvy, sleek, sci-fi looking cars (as long as they steel have tires) yet still not look too out of place next to a current run-of-the-mill car. They also have a Survival line, which is mostly modern cars and trucks, sometimes with a hint of Mad Max or Kill That Zombie. Even better, they have wrecked molds.

The key with this order was to maximize what I could get while minimizing shipping. They have a free shipping option which, for the US, is a special balance of overall order price and estimated weight. I tweaked what I originally had (and took out a LOT of things that I really didn't need, like an equivalent of an Aliens 2 Drop Ship) and managed to get free shipping at 35 British Cents over the minimum. Not bad! My order consisted of 21 items, which after GBP conversion and exchange fee came out to just under $170. Once shipped, it took a little over a week for the order to get processed, it took a little over a week to reach me. England to Alabama, with no problems.

I guess I need to figure where to start on that batch?

The Airbrush

I've been wanting an airbrush for a long time. All the cool kids use an airbrush on minis and whatnot. The maintenance and cleaning required has always kept me from entering the airbrush arena. Then, one day at work, Daniel came in with a couple of his airbrushes and showed me how they were different, how they came apart, how they went back together, and then he told me a lot of interesting stuff I forgot. Then I watched some beginner YouTube videos with tutorials on how to get started, how to tell when you've screwed up all kinds of stuff and how to fix it. Important stuff. Then Hobby Lobby reduced some prices.

The Iwata HP-CS was what Daniel told me I wanted. Daniel's always right. Life has been easier since I accepted that. The Lobby dropped the price on that specific airbrush by $75. The Hobby Lobby coupon wasn't good on airbrushes - so no extra 40% off that. It was still cheaper than I could find elsewhere. Being me, I went to JeffyB and ordered the air compressor (that Daniel told me to get) and a 10ft hose. Since then I've been stopping by Hobby Lobby on the way home and using my coupon to stock up on air-friendly paints, because I'm going to need all the help I can get here.

Since getting all my painting loot it's been staying between 90° and 95° in the garage whenever I think about hooking up the airbrush and actually going through the tutorials I've watched, but that's pretty damned hot out there. So for now, I watch tutorials and ponder.

I haev no idea what I'm going to work on next. Paint cars? There's a gas station that still needs to be made. Another small batch of minis? Temperature be damned, get that airbrush brushing? Is there something I need to 3D print while doing all of this?

A It's time to organize my list, it sounds like.

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Not the post Bob is expecting

07.22.2018

This weekend my goal was to paint some minis (Foundrey Wargames version of the A-Team). They're 90% finished, needing their weapons painted and whatever texture/terrain on the bases to dry and get the little details I enjoy putting in. I would have gotten them completely done except I spent too much time on Saturday running errands I didn't really need to run, and then I wanted to keep taking naps on Sunday. But that's part of a joy of the weekend. Procrastination!

One of those errands Saturday swung me by Harbor Freight where I picked up a cheap belt sander, as pictured above. Why do I need a belt sander? Well, obviously I don't. Why did I get/want one? For those times when I tire and bore of hand sanding! My first experiment in belt sanding, no I've never belt sanded before, will be to see what happens when you put a curved yet oddly solid piece of 3D printed plastic against 3400 RPMs of 120 grit sandpaper. The votes are evenly split between "melt" and "shatter" so far.

A-Team to be finished sometime this week!

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