Happy 2011

A Happy New Year to all, and I hope your accomplishments in 2010 will be dwarfed by those of the coming year!

"Gilding the lily"... Part 2

Interestingly, this common phrase is (like so many others) a mis-quotation from Shakespeare. The quote, from King John (1595), actually reads:



To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet...
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.


While I was waiting for terrain-glue on the Llama Dioramma to dry, I picked up my new 5/0 brush and this figure, which has been sitting untouched. I'd already primed it and blocked in the clothes and the skin base shades, but she needed detailing and an appropriate facial expression.

Here’s Josie the Survivor, modified from Hasslefree’s Kendra figure. There are a few tiny touch-ups still to be done, but I’m pretty pleased. Sorry about the grainy photo - among the future projects is the construction of a simple light tent for shooting these things...
All that needs to happen is to free her from her cardboard painting base and to glue her securely to one of the 20mm transparent bases I ordered from Litko Aerosystems. I saw photos of AKULA’s minis on clear bases and loved the “invisible” look.

Litko’s website allows one to specify custom bases, and I chose the 1/16th inch (1.6mm) clear acrylic material. So often, 28mm figures are seen standing atop these plinth bases that are 3-5mm thick, which adds six to ten scale inches to their height. No wonder cars and doorways look so small!

Once Upon a Time in the Andes... (Part 2)

I was off from work on Christmas Eve and spent part of the day finishing the Llama Dioramma for Josie. Feast your eyes on its splendor!

The llama family, at Josie’s request, was re-painted white. They received several washes of blended Raw Umber and Vallejo Cold Grey, and were then dry-brushed successively with Ceramacoat “Country Twill” & “Buttercream”, and finally with Vallejo Cold White. (Vallejo Bone White proved too dun-colored to make proper, brilliant llamas.)
I laid down a scattered coat of Scenic Cement, and then dusted the prepared base with Woodland Scenic’s Coarse Turf in light and medium green. The same glue was used to fasten the terrain piece to the base of the dome.
And here’s the finished piece, done for Christmas Day. My lovely bride was delighted, and I was too, since it's the first deadline piece I've completed on time in quite a while. (And we'll ignore the fact that it was supposed to be a project for last Christmas!)



Once Upon a Time in the Andes...(Part 1)

My bride likes llamas. I don't read too much into this, but if pressed on the subject, I'd surmise that it's because they're cute and fuzzy and, if you tick them off, they spit on you. Suffice to say, she thinks they're neat.

So, MegaMinis actually makes a set of 25mm scaled llamas - a family of 5 ran me $8 USD, and I set out to create a mini-diorama for The Lovely Josie to display on her desktop. The enclosure is a bell dome which I think I sourced from Woodland Scenics. (This project was a non-starter for her last birthday, interrupted by wedding planning, among other things…)

The Llama Family, primed in Testor’s Aircraft Gray. Not all these guys are going to make the final cut.
I cut a piece of ¾” (19mm) insulation foam and used a piece of sandpaper on the benchtop to bevel a slope onto its upper surface. This will be the base for the terrain insert.
Here’s a test fit, with additional foam terrain added and carved a bit. Three llamas is a good number to fit into the dome, although as you’ll see their final arrangement will differ somewhat.
I wanted Papa Llama to be standing on the crest of the outcropping, which required shifting the alignment of his legs, neck and head. As you can see, these castings are pretty delicate-looking, but I still needed to take a Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel to carve away his base and around his neck & head.
Here’s Papa, positioned atop his rocky outcropping. You can see the nubs of his base, which will be blended into the terrain with sand and kitty-litter.
I increased the angle of his neck more sharply, and bent it forward as far as the cut allowed. I also pushed the legs as far back as I felt the metal would allow - I wanted him clearly in a position to watch out over his little group! (Off to the left, you can see Kendra/Josie in the sculpting stand I made - very handy design.)
Here's Papa, all sculpted and ready to get attached to the base.
The family group, attached to their terrain base and primed flat black. I layered kitty litter onto the base with watered-down PVA, experiencing some difficulty because all I had was the "clumping" litter. When it gets wet, it sticks to anything nearby, especially the paint-brush I was using to convey the glue-solution. Aagh! Before I attached the llamas themselves to the base, I thickly painted the foam with Ceramacoat acrylic craft paint (Raw Umber) to provide a base coat as well as to protect the foam from the spray primer. I've made that mistake once.
And here is the group after some paint attention. I'm sorry I didn't get any WIP shots leading up to this point, but I got swept up in the process. The rocky ground got worked over with thin washes of gray and darker gray, some Payne's Gray (a mix of black & ultramarine blue) and thin washes of terra verde to suggest lichen and such. I use mostly Ceramacoat craft paints, with a few colors by Golden, which produces artist's acrylic paints. I did the llamas themselves without my reference photos, so I'll be redoing them shortly. The diorama has been hot-glued to the lid of a jam-jar, for ease of handling.
Another “beauty shot” of the family. The backdrop is the wonderfully textural (IE, “flaking and nacreous”) brick wall of my basement…
You’re probably wondering what happened to the 2 llamas who didn’t get included in the diorama. Well, one of them took a wrong turn on the way to the zoological park, and is pictured here surrounded by zombies. Lucky for her, they’re only interested in human brains…

Work on the diorama will continue as time permits – before Christmas, I still need to finish painting The Bride’s yoga room, and sewing a stocking for myself. Hopefully, it will be filled with wonderful things. (I’ve asked Josie for an Optivisor, since my eyes are not what they used to be…)

So why "The Cellar Dweller"?

My workbench is tucked into a corner of our basement. When I have spare time (not that often, given that we're revamping and maintaining a house that's turning 100 years old next year), I descend into the cellar, duck under the heating ducts that threaten my crown, and ease my way past the thicket of adjustable support columns that keep the floor above actually above me. I flick on three or four separate lamps, turn on the heater (vital at this latitude and time of year) and put in a CD. Then I can sit down at my cluttered bench and decide which projects I have to move to unearth the one I want to work on.

On the list of house projects - after the bathroom and kitchen renovations and the wife's yoga room (which needs new plaster, mouldings, trim, floors and paint)- is a revised and expanded workbench, to incorporate my woodworking tools as well as my hobby gear...

It will happen. I swear it will.

Gilding the Lily

I've always been enamored of Kev White's work. The man's an artist and his sculpts at Hasslefree Miniatures are sort of a gold standard for lithe, elegant miniatures. So it's pretty arrogant to presume to "correct" his work.

I picked up a small selection of his pieces through a local stockist (Armorcast, who still owe me an Alyx) and they're lovely. After some consideration, his Kendra was the ideal figure to represent the pistol-packing love of my life, my beautiful bride Josie. But there were some changes that Kendra needed to make.

She needed a new hair-do, and I discovered upon closer examination that she needed a far more determined chin if she was going to play my wife on the field of combat. So I pulled out my files, an Exacto knife, my small stash of ProCreate putty and a handful of sculpting tools I've either bought or made over the years, and I set to work...

Here's Kendra as she arrived from the caster. Mr. White’s smooth surfaces and crisp details look far better in real life than this photo properly conveys.
In this profile shot, you can see her chin. It definitely needs a little something....
I filed off the front of the hair-do (prepatory to removing the entire thing, eventually) and used a very tiny bit of putty to rework her chin. I love ProCreate because, after it’s cured, it can be shaved with a sharp blade. This made “correcting the corrections” to her new chin much easier. I started the hair, then hated it, so this photo represents a false start, coiffure-wise.
Here’s Kendra, her transformation into Josie practically complete. I carefully studied how my darling bride’s hair waves when she’s not concerned with straightening it, and how it flips off her forehead when she tosses her head in annoyance. I thought that gesture suited the hand-cannon this figure’s toting… Anyone who crosses Josie on the playing field is in for a world of hurt.

Now all that remains is to paint the figure in Josie’s favorite black silk SWAT trousers and one of her carefully-selected crop-tops.

And, yes, she is that lovely.

Projects on the Bench

Here's what I have going on at the moment:

• Once Upon a Time in The Andes: a diorama featuring a family of MegaMinis' llamas, for my wife Josie, who's fond of llamas. Built to fit into a bell-jar from Woodland Scenics.
• Zombie Horde: I have 72 plastic Zeds from Wargames Factory assembled. They need to be based, primed and painted.
• Survivors: First among the list of survivors is Kendra, from Hasslefree Miniatures. She's being converted to represent my lovely bride, a conversion necessitating a chin augmentation and a radical change in hair-do. The immense handgun, on the other hand, doesn't require any adjustment. :D
• The Battle of Britain: My nephew and I are building a pair of 1:48 scale fighters, since he loves the old warbirds. In the spray-booth right now are a Stuka and a Spitfire. These are The Lad's first attempt at painting up a model to look really good - and his uncle's first such attempt in about thirty years.
• A Wretched Hive of Scum & Villany: Since we've played the heck out of the map-sheets that came with the Star Wars Collectible Miniatures game, my nephew asked his old uncle for somewhere else to play. Since I happen to have a few square feet of EPS insulation board, a foam-cutter and a hot-glue gun, we're working on some terrain features and structures from some desert planet far, far from the bright center of the universe.

The Game's Afoot!

We've moved into the house and mostly settled in, the wedding is finished and done, and finally, in between the vital tasks I have as the newly married owner of a house nearly a century old, I'm finding I have the odd sliver of time when I can make my way down into the basement, to the corner where I've laid out my tools and stockpiled my  raw materials, to work on hobby projects.

I'm sort of a solitary wargamer. I don't belong to a local club, and I haven't any regular opponents. I have a couple pals with whom I can get together to play a couple times a year, and my nephew (a likely lad of 13) is still interested in games, albeit mostly the Star War collectible minis, which I bought for him a few Christmases ago.

Mostly, this is a maker's blog. There may, from time to time, be After-Action Reports posted, but mostly it's going to be painting, conversions, and terrain. I'll try to make it worth the visit.

Cheers!