Tuesday, October 7, 2014

#6MMRPC Week 5 Wrap-Up

(I'm legitimately sorry for the pictures, this week -- I couldn't take a good picture to save my life.)

Yeah, I skipped a week -- I ran out of super glue (both brush on and gel), right after a financial emergency, and couldn't afford to spend the money on glue.  That doesn't mean I wasn't working, I just wasn't doing very much.

In that time, I put another coat of flesh onto my Dark Eldar project -- a few of them will need a third coat, then I'm onto highlights -- and, that's really it for all of week 4.

At the beginning of Week 5, my wife was kind enough to buy me some glue, so I got back to work.  I did very little gap-filling (I need to find a less messy way to do it, both for the sake of my living room (where I've been working), and for the sake of my glue, which kept thickening up in the bottle from baby powder that stuck to the brush), and decided to work on bases.  This was mostly for the Salt City Gladiator Games -- with the games coming up, I want to have everything I could possibly use based, at the very least.


First up was my December Acolytes -- simple cork bases with sticks for trees.

Next up was Mr. Tannen (in the background of the Drowned's picture) -- I've made quite a few of these hardwood bases before using HO Scale Milled Lumber, but this time I wanted to fill the gap around the edges using superglue and baby powder.  That ended up being more effort than it was worth -- the glue got all over the edges of the wood, and then I had to carve wood grain into the glue after I sanded it down.  Next time I'll use Green Stuff.

After that, I had picked up some linoleum samples that I wanted to try out, so I moved onto my Drowned -- I won't be using these at the Gladiator Games, but the texture was perfect for a sandy base.  I started by drilling out the center to make fully recessed bases, then cut the linoleum to fit, glued the linoleum to plastic and glued all of that to the bottom of the base -- after that, I lined the edges with cork, and covered the seams with coarse sand and rope made of twisted wire.  I'll fill the bases with water effects after I paint.

Finally, my coup de gras of the week -- Mr. Graves.  I've been debating on how to do him for awhile, and I had various parts of this plan laid out for months.  Over the last 3 or so months, I created a door with my scale lumber and card stock, which I then used to make a door frame in some plasticard.  I didn't like how that looked, so I spent A LOT of time with a dremel, files, and my hobby knife to try and make the wall look like rough-hewn wood.  After that, I lost my door, so I had to make a new one out of plasticard, which I decorated with some Etch-Master brass from their IndieGoGo campaign (I'll get a better picture as I add my doorknobs and hinges).

Next, I needed a cobblestone base, and I've never liked the look of hand-modeled greenstuff cobblestones.  So, I hollowed out another base (I swear there's a tutorial about that somewhere -- if I find it, I'll link it) and capped off the bottom with another piece of spare plastic.  I glued down a layer of fishtank rocks, which just happened to be the right height, followed by a layer of water-thinned PVA and railroad talus which I press-leveled (I took something flat, and pressed it into the base to have a level surface), and finished off with more thinned PVA and the same course sand I used on the Drowened bases.

The final step was putting it all together -- I needed an elevated floor for the "inside" of the door, so I built a hardwood base on a wooden disk which I glued onto the cobblestone base (I made this a bit too big, and covered up way too much of the stones), pinned and glued on my wall, then my door (it's not glued, just pinned, so I can remove it for painting), and, finally, Mr. Graves.

This coming week will be more Dark Eldar -- I need to add flesh highlights, then edge highlight everything, and I'll be ready to base everything! -- and my Fire Gamin.

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