Russellmania.com

Still not the gas station

09.17.2018

The TTCombat gas station is taking longer to wrap up that I predicted. Once I got the 3D printer printing again, I got on a bit of a roll printing things out. I'm not sure how much of the above will end up in or around the gas station, but it's sure not going to be an empty building! After ~2 (maybe 3?) weeks of printing, at 100% infill just to give Daniel a coronary, the printer is now off and getting a little rest. Printed models have had brims cut, errant plastic trimmed, and run through a thorough warm, soapy rinse to help get rid of cruff that will get in the way of the next step, PRIMING!

The way the rest of the week is looking, said priming may not happen until Friday or Saturday.

Just because they look out of place, the 4 discs at the top of the picture are tank tops for Pringles cans, which will hopefully work as fuel tank/storage for the gas station.

Permalink 3D Printer gaming miniatures

Chronoscape Nova Corp/IMEF

09.11.2018

En masse army painting. It's a wargaming thing. Prime, wash, drybrush, seal. You can crank out minis by the gob this way. "Gob" is a lot, don't even bother Googling it. Just trust me.

After the last batch of random minis I'd sorted through some sci-fi/military minis that I'd gotten a gob of at some point. These minis were old. They were likely some of the first Chronoscape minis I'd ever seen in a store, so I got them. I like space marines (more Starship Troopers than Warhammer 40K) and these would come close to fitting the bill when the day would come that I'd need them. Many days passed and the need never happened. Being me, I managed to pick up at least 2 of most of these things. Since I first picked up these minis, my painting skills have gotten better. I've also gotten a little more picky in the details of the molds that I buy, because these Nova Corp/IMEF figures aren't very good compared to what I've seen and gotten over the last couple of years (the date on the bottom of one of these minis had "2009", so mini-sculpting has come a long way in a decade-ish). The first thing I do these days when getting ready to paint is look online for what other people have painted. For the most part, they're not good. With this in mind, I didn't hold out much hope for anything really usable, but tried to focus on not screwing up too bad along with a dash of tweaking my wash and drybrush skills.

16 (well, 15 by the end of it) minis would be a lot for me to paint at once. All but 3 (well, 2) I had duplicates of.

With that many minis, I knew I would bore painting details on each one, so I went the pseudo-army painting route.

Grey primer on everything.
Nuln oil wash on everything.
Anything that looks like fabric (pants, maybe a jacket) ended up with washes of Camoshade and Biel-Tan Green, topped of with whatever the green glaze is that Ciatadel has. Why so many green washes? It took (me) that combo to get green to show on top of grey + black wash.
The exception to the above was that the 2 females with huge guns got either a crimson or violet wash, and on grey primer + black wash it's hard to tell the difference between the 2 colors.
Faces get some Pale Flesh paint, and then some Fleshshade.
Random, small piece splashes of color (washes) to differentiate duplicates. Hair color, some feathers. Orc flash wash makes for a good & different brown wash, and can also work as leather on a gun strap.
Another Nuln Oil wash on guns.
Some dabs of actual paint! Brown and black on belts and straps. Neon red and green for lights. Anything glass-like gets my favorite fake-glass color of Sky Blue (Vallejo).
This was the part I was most nervous about - on top the grey primer & black wash, I start going over everything with a Boltgun Metal dryrbush, aiming to make the armor & padding look metal-like, but not metallic.
A New Thing - Laser Printed Decals, with the Marvel SHIELD logo at 300DPI & ⅛" square. Small enough most of the detail was gone, but I wanted to see how these Laser Decals would work. Except for wasting half of them because they were so blasted small, they worked pretty good!
Whichever Citadel cracked earth base paint I'm addicted to went on all but 1 base. That base got Martian Crust somethign or other, and looked like crap. I painted it, and got it to looking like poop (so it still looked like actual crap). Eventually I got it to "mud". Wash and drybrush as normal.
Matte sealant on everything.
I went back and used some good old 'Ardcoat on everything I hit the metallic drybrush on.

I little more detail than army painting, but I still did three times the number that I normally get done in a week. And they're done, which is mainly what I was trying to accomplish with this batch. With the SHIELD shoulder logo as the theme for squad organization, I've got plans for the 1:48 military vehicles I picked up about a month ago. But that's yet another story for another time.

I've already forgotten what name goes with which mini(s), and the pics aren't really for showing any detail since I was skimping on the real detail. Still, I've got a tradition of posting pics of what I paint (and Bob gets bored at work sometimes).

I dug out some of the original Nova/IMEF minis I painted from Feb 2017 (which I had completely forgotten about) for a little side by side comparison. 3 minis that I took my time + dedicated detail work VS their modern counterparts that I whisked through. While the old ones aren't as rough looking as I half-remembered, the speedy results from this week are just as good/better.

A momentous occasion in the painting progress list - there are now more Chronoscape minis painted than left to paint. There was one in the batch that was sacrificed for testing. The head and arm didn't glue on very well, and I've been looking for another mini to test things out on. In the batch of 16 primed, only 15 completed painting. I've never (successfully) painted that many minis at once, especially without rushing and doing a crappy job - that makes me proud of this batch!

Next time... the gas station should finally be ready. 3D printed whatnot still has to be cleaned up, primed, and painted. And maybe some bonus scenery, but we'll see how carried away I get before the next post.

Permalink gaming miniatures hobbies reaper chronoscape

Not The League of Justice

09.03.2018

Most of my work over the past week was on the TTCombat Gas Station. So with that, I don't show any pics of the gas station.

Thanks to the 3D printer once again printing, the interior of the gas station is still in progress. I'll save till next time any details about said printer, along with the fun of using paint that might have been sitting around for a decade.

On the mini-painting front, I did one of those things I'd been saying I would do - just grab a random handful.

Captain Griffen, Superhero - Not Superman.
Jake Ryan, Hero Explorer - I'm not sure who this is supposed to be, but it's a Han Solo pose.
Zenith, Superhero - Not (Reverse) Flash.
Achmed the Terrorist - Such a generic evil militia guy.
General Drake - I think he's in charge of the generic evil militia guy.
Shadow Talon, Super Hero - Not Iron Man (at least this was the direction I went).

My big change this time was priming some minis in white (my go-to) and others in grey. Since half of what I randomly pulled were super heroes, I wanted to try some techniques I was planning on using on the Batman Miniatures Game minis. I feel much more comfortable trying something out (with my erratic painting skills) on a $6 Chronoscape mini VS a $15 BMG mini. It worked well as I learned some important things.

My flesh painting technique works on white primer, not so much on grey.
Citadel Carroburg Crimson wash is mostly purple/violet.
The above on top of red paint works pretty good.
I need a metallic red paint.
The yellow wash on white primer works exactly like I want it to.

I had the most fun with Shadow Talon. Originally this one was primed grey with a Nuln Oil wash so I could test out some Batman painting schemes. After the wash, the armor-ness of the mini came out, so I changed direction and tried going an Iron Man (Red & Gold) route, but still using washes. The Citadel yellow wash worked well, but the crimson wash on top of the grey was just... kind of purple, kind of violet. I went over with a light gunmetal drybrush, and then a little copper drybrush. Usually by this point I've glopped on enough paint to cover all the mold details up, but it seemed to be working this time. I added some gold drybrush to the yellow washed parts, then the lightest stroke of drybrushing silver over the whole thing. In the end the red is duller than I wanted, but it turned out better than I thought.

In getting the next batch of minis to paint, I found some more duplicates that required updating the list, even though nothing new was purchased. Ok, there may have been a Knight Models Sinestro that had a good deal on Amazon, but everything else was a duplicate, I swear!

While waiting for the printer to crank out the interior contents for the gas station I'm trying another new thing - painting an army. This shouldn't be as daunting as it sounds, as the plan is to paint the rest of the Chronoscope IMEF troops (16 if I've counted right) primer grey w/ black wash + some highlights. That's what I've been doing with the last couple of batches that turned out well, so I'm going to see what happens when I commit to that from the start.

Permalink gaming miniatures reaper chronoscape

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!

Permalink 3D Printer gaming miniatures reaper chronoscape ttcombat

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).