Hill Giant & Skaven!

Run for your life!  A hill giant is coming!

I thought I would hit you with the pictures first, before going on and on about the figure and eventually sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher.

So, this figure is a hill giant.  He (or she) is made out of a pretty big egg for a body, with medium sized split eggs for upper arms, small robin sized split eggs for forearms, and the quickly becoming ubiquitous tapered beads for hands.  The head is a split lady bug, the hunch in the upper back is another split robin egg, and the belt is just a bunch of the small wooden precut thin wood discs that I get at the craft store glued around the "waist" of the figure.  The only really "new" construction here is the club.

What is a hill giant without either a club or a rock?  I didn't want to do a rock, I wanted the figure to be holding a club.  But how to do this?  I will admit, next to many of the other crafter types out there, I'm not a hot glue gun fan.  I have a really hard time controlling where the glue goes when I use a hot glue gun (I even got one of those small ones with the needle tip ... still have trouble), without fail I burn my fingers at some point, etc.  But for making a rough wood club, I am very happy with the result I got with the glue gun. 

It turned out to be very easy.  I started with a Q-tip and cut one end off.  The end with the cotton is at the top of the club.  Then I took the glue gun and just kept applying hot glue to it, tapering it larger at the end and smaller as I got closer to the "handle" of the club until I got a shape I liked.  I did not go all the way to the end with the hot glue at this point.  That handle end has to fit into the tapered bead hand, and hot glue on the end of the Q-tip would likely keep it from fitting into the hole.  When I got the shape I liked, I put a little hot glue into the hole of the tapered bead and slid the club into it, thereby gluing it in place.  The beauty is that if you get a little glue poking out the top or bottom of the bead, it looks great and it makes for a better seal.  Then I put a little more hot glue on the bottom of the part that is sticking out the bottom of the hand.  Done!

Painting wasn't difficult.  I wanted to choose a color for the creature's flesh that was somewhat "dirt" looking.  For the clothes I got inspiration from a drawing I found online.

My favorite monsters from that really expensive company that makes beautiful miniatures ($40 for one ogre figure!!!) are the rat-men or Skaven.  I've been pondering about how to do a Craftee version and I finally think I hit on the solution.  One of the ironies here is that for about two years I've been trying to come up with a slumped over goblin shape that I like, and I have yet to find it.  I literally have done 5 or 6 different goblin constructions, and I honestly don't really like any of them.  I don't even like the goblins that much that I did for this current group of fantasy figures that I have.  Well, this construction for the Skaven, with a different head, would probably finally give me the hunched over goblin look that I've been after for years ... but that's for another post.

Here are the Skaven.

I am pretty happy with how they turned out, but I'm not going to lie.  In terms of my Craftee pieces which I try to be as minimalistic as I can, there are a lot of parts to these guys.  Who knew that little rat men would require so many different pieces!

The basic shape, however, is simple.  It's a 1/2" x 1/2" spool with a split spool glued on top flat side's together.  This creates the hunched over shoulder look that I like so much.  Yep, two years later, I finally stumble upon this incredibly simple, yet effective, construction.  The head is ... yep, you guessed it ... a tapered bead.  So far so good, not bad at all.  But everything else, except the toothpick or tile spacer weapons and small round wooden shields are cut tile spacers.  The arms are the usual tile spacers but these figures are supposed to be a bit on the skinny side (rats have sort of thin limbs after all) so they are about 66% thick tile spacers (thinner than usual arms).  The feet, which turned out to be key, I need to put more feet on my miniatures I think, at least the monsters, are cut tile spacers.  From the middle of the foot towards the toes I cut it at a 45 degree angle to give a tapered foot look.  You can't really see it in the pictures, but in real life it really makes a difference.  The ears are tile spacer ends (very tough to glue on I'll be honest), and the nose/teeth is a tile spacer end cut so that the bottom teeth part is thinner than the top nose part to make it appear that the end of it's nose/lips are sticking over the teeth themselves.  Finally, the tail is a stiff craft cord that I got in the leather crafts part of the store.  You could use any string here, but if you use something thinner, I suggest after gluing it in place, you coat it with white glue and shape the tail how you want it.  After the glue dries, it will more or less take on that shape.  I used a hot glue gun to attach the tail, putting some glue in the hole in the spool on the bottom between the feet of the miniature and sticking one end of the cord in the hole.  Once the glue dried I put another small dot on the cord and pressed it up against the spool at the bottom to create the "curl up" effect of the tail.

You know me, I can't resist action shots!  Our intrepid adventurers have stumbled into a room with some nice loot on the far side, but it seems to be guarded by a hill giant (don't ask why a hill giant would be in the depths of a dungeon ... just go with it).  Also, Skaven have heard the adventurers and have rushed down their dark tunnel to arrive in the room to fend off the party as well.

Hope you enjoy looking at the pictures as much as I enjoyed making the figures! 

Wyloch's Armory

Disclaimer: all pictures in this post are not done by, or of work by Matt or I. I am showcasing the work of Wyloch's Armory. I am using their pictures with the permission from them.

One of the reasons why I have never delved too heavily into the modern subjects has simply been vehicles. Sooner or later, no matter how much you tell yourself that you will only limit yourself to infantry for skirmishes, you inevitably, eventually, want to include vehicles (along with cavalry, artillery, plus machine guns and other modern weapons of war). Vehicles are hard. They are complex shapes, many of which are curves. Although people scratchbuild them, they are typically made out of paper or wood, but they wood ones are very intricate. Much more than I want to do. I am not a model maker, after all, but a miniature builder.

Well, then I saw the Wyloch's Armory build of a not-Eldar Falcon on Facebook. Now that is a lot of curves! And because I saw it before it was painted, I could see the parts used to make it. Many of them are parts that I already use in my miniatures making.

Let's start with a picture of a game, not-Eldars versus not-Tyranids.

You have to look closely, but those miniatures are all paper flats. And that Falcon is scratchbuilt. I will let the build pictures do the talking.

 

 

 

 

As best as I can tell, he took corrugated cardboard to make the basic 'winged' shape of Falcon, then took two blocks of balsa wood to make the shape of the hull. Spools define the engines, and bits of shaped wood define the 'flair'. The curved, upside-down 'U' that attaches the 'wings' to the hull is chipboard (cardboard like you find at the back of a notepad). Some of the other shapes are also chipboard. The weaponry consists largely of either wooden dowels or plastic soda straws filled with hot glue. Beads make up the various 'electronic components' for the weaponry.

 

 

 

 

Wyloch's Armoury also has a Youtube channel which has more not-Games Workshop 40,000 items (like a not-Rhino), but crafting for RPGs, along the lines of DM Scotty and DMGinfo.

Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing their work. I know it has inspired me to take up more modern periods. (Although, not yet. I still have too many other projects still on the table.)

Dimensional Paint

I first talked about acrylic dimensional Writer by Americana back when I was building my first Austrian artillery piece. It is essentially a thick paint that adds some dimension to your work, as advertised. However, the product had issues when you tried to build up a sizable area, such as the combs on my Austrian Dragoons. It took lots of layers – with an appropriate drying period in between each layer – and could only go so far before it became fragile. It is only thick paint, after all. So I limited my usage for cap peaks and such and left it at that.

While wandering through the local Hobby Lobby I noticed the following product, E6000 Allure Dimensional Design Adhesive Paint.

It comes in a 2 ounce tube, in various colors, and either gloss, glitter or metallic. So far I have only purchased Gloss Chocolate and Gloss White. My first test was to see how different it is from Americana Writer and to see whether it kept its gloss. I decided to make a shako cord for one of my 42mm cavalrymen.

The first thing you will notice is that it is like a glossy plastic. (This is after it has fully cured.) Second is that it comes out like thick pudding. It is not easy to get a solid, consistent bead. It sort of comes out in waves, giving that rippled appearance. As I get used to it more, I am sure I will get more control over it.

Here you can see it being used on a 12mm figure. In this case I have used it over the Americana Writer, which has sort of pooled and flattened out, giving a much crisper, well-defined shako peak. Further, I have created the cockade at the top and the whole of the right arm of the figure. You have much more control of the material than with hot glue.

The material takes a bit to set up, about 15 minutes or so, and takes several hours to cure. It still stays a bit tacky for a day, but I see no deformation. It is adhesive, and I see no signs of this peeling off, at least from wood (which is very porous), so your ability to manipulate it after curing will be limited to cutting with a sharp blade. Because of its rubbery nature, sanding is problematic. It is like trying to sand latex or silicone caulk, rather than plastic.

To get an idea of the thickness and control you can get, I decided to try the various products on wood. The picture above is cropped, but to get an idea of the size, the above is as wide as a wooden popsicle stick.

Item A is Americana Writer. You can see after curing overnight that it has flattened out a bit and pooled.

Item B, D and E are White Gloss Allure mixed with Americana Light Avocado craft paint (about 60%-40%). B sort of spurted out. D shows a thicker layer for dimension. E shows a thinner layer to see if the gloss is reduced and to show fine control. I mixed this with my grass green color as I wanted to see if this could be a substitute for static grass for 6mm figures, as I previously experimented with on my other blog. It looks like it can.

Item C is straight Chocolate Gloss Allure. Notice the waves and high gloss. It is much thicker and can definitely be used to make larger and taller dimensions for details.

This product is highly recommended for quickly and easily adding those details onto your figures where you need more dimension. It has the ability to easily form points and it retains much of its shape during curing with very little shrinkage, flattening or pooling. I have noted, however, that the larger the area where you put this product, the more likely it will flatten. This is great for making dots and lines, but less so for adding large, well-defined shapes.

Cold Weather = More Painting!

It continues to be brutally cold outside (at least for here) so I'm staying in today.  Might as well get some painting done.

I'm on a roll with doing these fighter type figures.  Painting the armor I have to admit is a lot of fun, in addition to the challenge of trying to make the figures look different from one another.  Here are two more:  a traditional dungeoneer fighter type, and the second is my take on a citadel guard from Lord of the Rings.

The fighter type is a standard mile bottle construction with a flat cap head and a split bead glued on top for his helmet.  He's actually no different construction wise from the other fighter type I did at the same time I posted about the demon statue with thieves tribute piece.  He has a toothpick spear, tile spacer arms, and tile spacer shoulder pads.  I wanted to give him padded armor on top of his suit of chainmail, just because I think it looks cool.

In this next picture you can see that he has a shield slung on his back.  It is a very simple thing to add to him to make him look different than the other figures that have essentially the same construction.

Next is the citadel guard.

He is also an upside down milk bottle for a body, teardrop precut thin wooden piece from a craft store for his shield, tile spacer shoulder armor and tile spacer arms, and a toothpick spear.  His head is an oval bead that I glued vertically just like I did for the E. O. tribute wizard figure.  On top I glued a tile spacer end to give the top of the helmet some visual interest.

I wanted the shield to have a bit more realistic position, pitched forward a bit, so that meant that I had to taper the left arm tile spacer (more or less at a 45 degree angle), and also I did not put the second tile spacer shoulder armor piece (the rectangular one that is on his right arm) to allow the shield to be closer to the body.  Worked out pretty well I think.  I was confident that with painting I could turn the oval bead into both his face/head and his helmet, and I think it turned out pretty good.  I wanted to keep the back simpler in terms of painting, and I also wanted to have his black coat to cover more of his armor that is shown in, for example, the GW sculpts of this same guy.  I never liked the nearly full plate armor for all those citadel guards.  Chainmail with some shoulder plates seems much more likely and affordable both in time and money for the kingdom.

These guys were a lot of fun to paint, I hope you enjoyed seeing them!

Traditional Gaming Tile and Torch

Dale asked for a wall piece with a torch.  I actually have some of those I made out of thick foam for the traditional dungeon floor tiles, and when I was looking for the wall piece with the torch, I found a floor tile too!  So here is the "traditional" floor tile that I use with my metal or plastic commercial miniatures.

It's just thick black craft foam that I use a stipple brush on going from darker shades on the outside to lighter shades in the middle.  Then I paint black lines to make 1 inch squares.  Piece of cake!

I think, though, that this technique looks better with traditional figures, not the wooden guys I do.  Here is a picture with a Mage Knight repainted figure that I use for a goblin along with my recent thief figure.  I like the traditional foam tile, don't get me wrong, I use them every week in my D&D game.  I just don't like how they look with the more flat colors and blocky painting of the wooden guys.  But you be the judge.

I should do a wall piece with a torch in my wooden figure style, but anyway, Dale asked to see a wall piece with a torch on it with the new tile, so here it is.

2 New Heroes and a New Tile?

Been working on some "traditional" figures of late so I haven't been painting as much of my wooden guys, but it's so cold outside here I stayed home today and painted, so I got a couple of heroes and possibly a new way of doing a room/hallway tile done.

First the heroes ...

I was wanting to see if I could do a heavily armored hero that wasn't so large like the knights are.  The parts that make the knight so large are the shoulder armor plates and the split spool forearm pieces.  So I decided to try and split a smaller spool on my own (which turned out to be easy) because I still think the split spools make great forearm pieces.  The shoulder and other pieces of the armor I just used tile spacers for, cutting them into a shape I liked.  Other than that, he's just a standard milk bottle figure.

The second guy is a thief I have been thinking about for some time but finally got around to doing.  Nothing special here, I just wanted a thief in heavier leather armor throwing a dagger.  He is a shaker peg guy.

I don't have any of these tiles that I make for my "standard" D&D game, but they are made out of thick craft foam that I cut to shape and then use a stiff stipple (I think it is called) brush to paint on the tile colors.  I just push directly down with paint on the brush and it makes a textured finish.  But the really cool thing is that I can use a darker color on the outside, a medium shade of the same color in the middle, and then a light shade of the same color in the very center.  It gives the impression of there being a torch in the middle of the room casting out light that gets less intense as you get farther from the torch, with the corners of the room being very dark.  I'll have to get one of them and take a picture.  They are currently "living" at the guy's house that my group plays D&D at and I just got tired of transporting them and left them there.

Anyway, one of the things that I do not like about the way I paint the wooden pieces to make the room tiles is that there is no change in shade.  In other words, it doesn't produce that effect of light getting dimmer as you get to the outer parts of the room (which really does look cool ... I stole the idea from the old Warhammer Quest game as their tiles are done that way).  So I decided to give it a go with my tiles, but I wanted to use solid colors so that it would match the rest of the style of my figures.  Then I just painted lines on the tile so that people can see the "spaces" and know how to move their heroes.

Below is this new "graduated color" tile with my traditional one.  I see the benefit of both, I'm not sure which one I like better.  Then after this picture is a pic with the new tile and some heroes on it just so you can get a sense for what it would look like in actual play.  Again, not sure which one I like better.

Final Holiday Work - Fire Elemental & Pig Faced Orcs!

Had this Fire Elemental sitting on my painting table for about a month now, so I thought I should finish him.  Also, I've been painting a lot of  "fire" lately, so I just finished him off.  Nothing too exciting here, nothing at all new.  Larger egg for the body, small split egg for the head, tile spacer ears and arms, hot glue gun flame at the bottom of the figure.

The only thing that's a little different is in the painting I emphasized the yellow instead of the red like I had done with the more red-looking Salamander figure.  The reason is that I knew I was going to do the Fire Elemental's "eyes" and "teeth" with just red, so I wanted them to stand out more.  Now I've got fire and air done in terms of elementals.  Just water and earth to go!

And now, the pig faced orcs, or "porcs" as some people call them ... I really hate puns.  After receiving the tapered tube beads for my 10mm project and finding them too big for horse bodies at that scale, I was afraid that I had purchased 100 of them for nothing.  However, after doing the Erol Otus wizard tribute figure, which used the tapered bead for a head, and now these pig faced orcs, which also use the tapered bead for a head I just turned it side ways for the orcs, I'm sure I'll find plenty of uses for these beads.

Construction is much easier than it looks, honestly.  Upside down milk bottle body, tile spacer arms.  The tricky part was the helmet which is just a split smaller bead (1/2" I think).  The beauty of this is that there will be a half hole that is normally something you want to cover up.  But in this case, the half holes on each side are perfect mounting locations for the tile spacer ears.  I just cut the ears from tile spacers making sure they had a little "nub" sticking out the side that would be attached to the head and they just fit right into those half holes perfectly.  That is also tile spacer trimmed to the proper shape making up the nose and also the back of the head, which you can see in the pictures below.

Painting was fairly straightforward, I just wanted to make sure the nose was pinker (rather than being green) and the skin on these guys green.  I'll do some that are pink all over eventually, I just wanted to see if I liked the green with the pink nose, and I do.  I also wanted to make sure on the snouts that I left some of the dark green showing through to create the look of the rolls of skin on the snout that is so important for pig faced orcs.  These are great for classic D&D.  I remember the old Minifigs pig faced orc figures, and I know Foundry does some as well, and of course there are the wonderfully detailed, if not quite large, pig faced orcs from Otherworld miniatures.  Although definitely not as detailed, it is interesting to know you can make them as Craftees too!