Pulp Anyone?

Okay, the title is a little misleading.  These two guys could be in most pulp games, but honestly I'm doing them for different reasons.

The first is a Cthulhu Adventurer that looks a lot like a particularly famous archeologist.  I have a gaming buddy who wants me to take a stab at making some classic Cthulhu investigators (adventurer, priest, professor, journalist, etc.) and this guy was my first attempt just because he is so iconic looking I thought he would be the easiest to start with.

His construction is a little new and a little old.  The body is an upside down wooden craft milk bottle (7/8" tall) with the normal tile spacer feet that I always use.  His head is a 3/8" bead I split in half.  I made the head/hat grouping by gluing the flat side of the bead to a piece of paper, and then glued a 3/8" tapered plug, larger side down, on the paper on the opposite side of the bead.  After it dried it was easy to cut the paper to make the proper brim shape for the head and then just shape it with my fingers.  Arms are also tile spacers as is the gun, holster (on his right hip) and satchel (on his left hip).

His jacket is paper.  I put strips down the front to his waist and then put a larger piece on his back.  After it dried I cut a semi-circle and cut it to fit to make the collar of the jacket.

One thing I may try and do in the future is to sand down the top of the milk bottle in front of his head to make more of the right "chest tapered shape," but I might be getting a little too crazy.  Probably best to leave it as is.

The next guy is going to probably be a superhero in the new minis game I'm working on for low-powered supers like Batman, Daredevil, Hawkeye, Black Widow, most of the characters in the Watchman, etc.  I call this guy "Grenadier" and his big thing is he is a hand-to-hand combat expert and he has all these different gadget grenades (smoke, flash, tear gas, explosion, goo entanglement, etc.).  He also wears some light body armor and a gas mask to protect him from his own grenades.  I modelled the outfit after a WWI French Grenadier.  At the same time, this guy would be just as at home in a pulp game as an ally or enemy of the archaeologist above.

He sort of shows how different looking of a figure you can get using add-ons like belt pouches and goggles and gas mask.  He really is nothing different construction wise than the Dark Ages guys I've been doing except for the two pieces of tile spacers that make his goggles, the one that makes his breathing apparatus just below the goggles, and the various pouches he has on his belt.  His cloak and hood are just paper.  In every other way, he's just like a Dark Ages guy I've made before.

I like the red pants (early WWI French) and the gray light body armor.  His helmet is a dark blue and his cloak is a brighter blue similar to the color used by the French early in WWI.

I've got a few more of these on my construction table right now and I'll try to show the pieces separate from the figure as I'm building them so that you get a better sense for how the figures are constructed.

Steampunk Clockwork Soldier - WIP

I'm building up steam on my Steampunk Clockwork Soldier (sorry, could not help it). As you can see in the figures below, I have added a 'neck' and the 'head' for the unit, in this case looking down presumably to smash some meat bag in front of it.

The legs are now glued in position so that the feet could lie flat on a base. I articulated the right foot by sanding a notch in a wooden oval, soaking the wooden piece, and then bending the oval at the notch and letting it dry in the new position.

The neck was created by using a flat plug, 1/4" in this case, the same as the 'eyes'. To make it all work I drilled a hole through the face, the neck, and into the shoulders, then ran a dowel through it all to strengthen the glue. This is now a technique I am pretty much doing for almost everything.

I forgot to mention that I used the dowel pinning process for the torso. I drilled a hole through the top of the heart shape, down all the way through the bottom, then made holes in the top and bottom spools. Unfortunately, drilling a hole all the way through the heart made it fragile, and it broke in half. Next time I will only drill a hole in the top and the bottom of the heart shape and simply use two pins. (It would help if I also found some thinner dowels or started using metal pins.)

All that really remains are the arms. I know I want a close combat weapon attached to one arm and a ranged weapon attached to the other, but I haven't really figured out what. Traditional close combat weapons are typically smashing types, given these machines fight each other, and cutting weapons are generally ineffective against their armored bodies. That makes it easier to design.

For the ranged weapon, unless electricity is being used as a weapon, it would have to be a breech-loader with an automatic feed mechanism. I may think about electrical weapons. Maybe look at some Tesla coils...

Steampunk Clockwork Soldier - WIP

If you are thinking Warmachine, well so be it, but I am not making a copy of some copyrighted intellectual property of Privateer Press, but my own version of a clockwork soldier from a steampunk genre. (By the way, I collected figures from the Protectorate of Menoth...)

The first inspiration was not so much Warmachine itself, but a fellow wooden soldier builder, James (a.k.a. frater_corvus on the Wargaming on a Budget forum). He wanted to make some figures for the game and I really liked his first effort at a warjack. (You have to be a member of the Wargaming on a forum to see his photos.)

I knew I wanted my figures to be big ... towering ... compared to the 25mm figures I would make to go with these. The picture below shows the basic shoulders, torso, and hips. I wanted the design to be broad-shouldered, more so than the hips, so I used a wider and thicker spool for the shoulders. The heart just serves as a basic shape to attach other elements, but I liked the way that the heart outline conveys a rib cage reducing to a waist.

I knew I wanted a smokestack and I knew just the scrap piece of wood laying around to use, but because it had a flat base and was a rather hard piece of wood I decided to add a base below it. This is a simple 5/8" dowel of softer wood that I sanded to meet the curve of the spool. I drilled a hole through the dowel into the spool allowing me to pin the two parts, and later the smokestack, into a nice line.

If you look at the second picture in the section The Cannon Barrel of my artillery tutorial, you will see where the smokestack came from. It is the bottom piece of the spindle that I cut off for the cannon barrel. Lesson: never throw away any neat looking wood scraps!

As noted in the picture, the smokestack is probably too tall and needs to be cut.

Next are the legs, which are another interesting wood scrap from another project. If you saw my experiment with the Greek in the Trojan War figure, you will note that I started with a clothespin. However, I did not show the original clothespin, but you can see it in a woodcrafter's catalog as MCP400. If you look at the 'legs' of the clothespin you will notice the same shape in the legs below, only turned upside down and reversed.

While waiting for things to dry, I started looking about for a 'head' for my creation. The figure below shows you you can use simple parts and shapes to make the head. A small slice of dowel with some wire mesh or screen glued over will serve as a vox receptacle (mouth), if I can find a piece. Otherwise I will simply paint a grid.

Looking at the legs, I just did not like them stiff and straight.I looked at putting a 1/4" flat plug on the sides to represent a knew joint, but that would not solve that it was straight legged. So, I cut the legs in half and sanded my own knee joint. To be honest, this is the kind of artistic work that I love doing (just not in mass production).

The torso was looking a little spare, so I found another scrap, this time the top of the head of the pawns. I started cutting off the tops so that I could glue the shako to the flat top and get a better join (in addition to avoiding 'scooping out' the spool, like I used to do).

The split sphere gives the torso more body, and the armored belly can hold the clockwork guts of my construct.

The figure below shows you the figure so far, along with a simple 25mm soldier made from a micro-peg and a flat plug. It will definitely tower over the battlefield.

As you can see, I have also shortened the smokestack; I think it looks better. (And no, I did not throw away the top of the smokestack that I cut off...)

Printing Designs on Paper using Laser Toner

When I first started experimenting with printing designs on paper and gluing them to wooden pawns (which I termed digitally painting), I used my inkjet printer at home for printing out all of the designs. After I finally settled on a design, I laid out a large sheet of all the components and printed them up using an HP Color LaserJet. One of the things I immediately noticed was that the colors went darker. But, as I was hurried to get some figures out for a convention, I only did as many as I needed; I set aside the remainders on the sheet I had printed to do them later.

Well, I have gone back to the remainders and have been working on finishing the rest of the British squad; six figures are just not enough. So I started building the remaining six. As I started working with the paper, because it is handled much rougher than a normal page might be, the dried toner started flaking off. Now I noticed this when I originally started building the figures before the convention, but this time it seemed much worse, so I suspect that some slow-acting chemical reaction is still occurring and the toner is continuing to dry out and harden, making it brittle. So, the solution seems to be to fix the toner to the page.

As the figures that I game with have not exhibited flaking after they were finished, I can assume that the varnishes I put on have done a sufficient job of fixing the toner to the paper, so I tried an experiment while building. I brushed Future acrylic floor wax (the acrylic painter's miracle fluid) on to the paper over the toner and let it dry. This seemed to completely solve the issue, plus it brightened the colors (which may or may not be a good thing, depending upon your point of view).

One final note: the paper will warp, of course, when you wet it with Future, but by rubbing the back of the paper you can control the curling and remove the wavy effects in the paper.