Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

Both the sclupted and the 'real deal' cavern terrain piece are basepainted. Now that the color hides what's below, it's time for a comparison:



What do you say looks better?

Honestly, I can not answer this question: They look different, but simply going after the look, I can't for the life of me say which one I like better. The sculpted piece is more even: apart from the few larger ones, all stones there have the same height - so they would look more like pavement, were it not for the larger boulders. On the other side, the real stones look like it would be a royal pain in the behind to walk on them - you can almost feel the sprained ankles. Which should drive home the point of it being a natural terrain...

What do you say?

---

...cardboard score!
I just received a beanbag, and was almost as happy about the bag as I was about the box:



Of course I already have more cardbard than I can ever use up crafting and no supply shortage in sight, so I'll leave the box folded up on the attic. You never know when you need a really large box... But should I ever feel like crafting a humungus terrain piece, I could start at once. Feels food!

---

Got a box full of styrofoam filling thingies (how are these thing called anyway?).



So far I couldn't ever come up with something crafty to do with them, but I might have found something today:
How about a giant centipede?



A few legs made of bent wire below it, some texture, a frankensteined head... shouldn't be too difficult. This will have to wait a bit: I'm not at home this weekend and next week is my start at the new company, so I predict a craft-poor week.

[skunkape]

That's some mighty nice looking terrain and figures!

[daveb]

Aug 29, 2014 14:07:39 GMT tauster said:

Both the sclupted and the 'real deal' cavern terrain piece are basepainted. Now that the color hides what's below, it's time for a comparison:


What do you say looks better?

Honestly, I can not answer this question: They look different, but simply going after the look, I can't for the life of me say which one I like better. The sculpted piece is more even: apart from the few larger ones, all stones there have the same height - so they would look more like pavement, were it not for the larger boulders. On the other side, the real stones look like it would be a royal pain in the behind to walk on them - you can almost feel the sprained ankles. Which should drive home the point of it being a natural terrain...

What do you say?

I think they both look great and have their own uses.  For cobblestone or stone floors, I would use the sculpted.  But for natural terrain, I would use the real stones.

[tauster]

New project: ancient, ruined, floating monolyths.
I wanted to do this ever since I saw DMScotty's tutorial...

Take some strong wire (several different heights, depending on how high you want your monoliths to fly) and make a loop like this:



Glue them to magnets:



Cut some pyramid- or edge-shaped pieces of green foam*. Leave some edges ruined if you want, or ruin them yourself. I also left some traces of the melting from the hotwire saw. Draw some runes, glyphs or whatever you like. I just went freestyle.
* I found a badly battered piece of green foam lying on the sidewalk a while back. I almost made a full brake - fortunately there was no other car behind me. It would have been the most expensive crafting material so far.





Pin the wire in the monoliths, balance them out so that that miniatures are able to stand on them.



The one in the front has a very nice arch of molten greenstuff on top. It was an accident, but I was very happy and will take care that this won't break off.


Next steps:
- black basepaint
- deciding in which color the runes shall glow & painting them
- maybe a glossy varnish?

---

I found a half-piece of a plastic bubblegum packing on the sidewalk. Hubba Bubba can tell whatever they want. But I know it's supposed to be a generator!

[dmzane]

Your like the mad scientist of crafting...I bow with respect.

[tauster]

Sept 1, 2014 0:18:27 GMT dmzane said:

Your like the mad scientist of crafting...I bow with respect.

Now that's something I haven't been called before!
*mad cackle, lots of eager hadn rubbing*

But seriously: I don't think I do something that's very hard to do. On the contrary: I'm just playing around with stuff that comes my way. Sometimes I get something cool out of it, sometimes not. I'm continuing to be surprised that the former clearly outweights the latter, because more often than not, what I play with is worth keeping. From the beginning I expected it to be exactly the other way around: You make lots of experiments with stuff and sometimes you get something that works, even more rarely something that's really cool. Nobody was more surprised and delighted that from the beginning of this thread, almost all of the stuff was a success. And believe me, I don't hide experiments gone wrong - all stuff comes in this thread, because we can also learn from mistakes.

So in short, I can only encourage everybody to do play around with stuff and see what you get!
We all know that this is a rather inexpensive hobby, where you need only a few tools and most of the materials are more or less free. As a beginner, you don't even have to come up your own ideas, as there are so many cool projects shared here. Start by trying to make something yourself that you have seen here - I'm sure before the project is completed, you'll have your own ideas what the next projects will be! Share a picture or two - in the age of smartphone cams and free webspace, that's a cakewalk. Once you've crafted one or two things, you'll never go back to a craftless live!


I quickly crunched some numbers today because I wanted to know if my gut feeling is right or wrong. Turned out it was right:

- We have 834 registered members here (minus one pure admin, so it's 833 users).
- 494 members  haven't written even a single post.
- 168 members have 10 or less posts, together this group has made 615 posts.
- 75 members have 10-49 posts, 1905 posts in total.
- 36 members are tool gatherers (50-99 posts), making 2512 posts.
- 34 paint manipulators (100-249 posts), making 5009 posts.
- 13 room planners (250-499 posts), making 4358 posts.
- 8 room builders (500+ posts) with 8701 posts. This group includes DMScotty, AJ and thedmg, which I view as funding members, a bit apart from regular users but still included in this analysis because they most of all contribute content.

Here's two pie charts, the upper is the number of members in each group, the lower is number of postings per group:



- 59% of all users made   0% of all postings,
- 20% of all users made   3% of all postings,
-   9% of all users made   8% of all postings,
-   4% of all users made 11% of all postings,
-   4% of all users made 21% of all postings,
-   2% of all users made 19% of all postings,
-   1% of all users made 37% of all postings.

So what do all these numbers tell us?

Mind you, I don't critisize anybody for not posting, so please don' get this anybody wrong.
On the contrary, I see this as an opportunity, a vast untapped potential: To me these numbers say that if we would be able to get even a small percentage of the less active people making the step from silently watching to actively posting, this community would explode with creativity.

---

When I cut the floating monoliths out of the green foam, I had lots of clippings left over. They have great sharp, jagged edges, and some have that melted look from the hotwire saw. I always was a huge fan of the movie Riddick, and the Crematoria scenes were some of my favourite moments in the movie, whith the hunt over the razor-sharp rock formations. Some screenshots below:




credit: andreewallin.deviantart.com/art/Alien-landscape-105953893



credit: catapultedcarcass.deviantart.com/art/Crematorian-Sunrise-117592011


So I played around some more with green foam and hotwire saw and got this stuff:



I simply glued them to some cardstock bases:




I'll basepaint them black and either leave them matte with only a little bit of dark grey drybrushing or give them obisian-like glossy varnish. Probably both of each, to see what both ways look.

This stuff will go well together with my fire terrain!


...now what would I do with this mazelike terrain from the movie opening? Hmmm....

---

I guess everybody knows those paper plates:



Turn them around and they're perfect as bases below a house or another large structure. Just give it a bit strength underneath (paper maché, aluminum foil, hotglue, etc...), flock it, paint it up and place something on. I'll try that soon and share the results...

[dmzane]

Wow that's alot to absorb...

[tauster]

A basepainted test piece with crackle glaze. This stuff will dry with lots of cracks, hopefully looking like cracked obsidian.



[update]
That's how the crackle glaze already looks after 2 hours:

---

The approx. 30x30 cm paper maché dungeon tile I made with the sink mat I bought last week. I made a huge mistake with the paper maché: I ripped-up newspaper*, put it in a bowl and soaked it with half a litre water. Then I poured most of the water away pressed parts of the water out of the paper maché before adding the glue. It turned out that there was still much too much water in the stuff - it took almosta week to get from dripping wet to still pretty moist. I had turned it over a few times so that both sides have a chance to dry, and today I finally coated the upper side with whiteglue. I'm can't wait to see how much it has dried tomorrow. I'll then turn it around again and leave it to dry for another week or so before hotglueing it to a base of balsa wood or something similar (the paper maché alone would break soon without support).

* I strongly recommend using gloves or you'll have a hard time gettink the ink washed from your fingertips!

[tauster]

Some progress on ongoing projects...

The crackle glaze on the Crematoria test piece is dry, has crackled like it should, but I don't like it too much:



Reason is that while you can see the cracked pieces, there's not much contrast, so the effect is a bit wasted. I should have given the underground a yellow/orande/red basepaint before applying the crackle glaze, and after it's dry, drybrush it with flat black. That way I would have had some hot magma shining through the cracks. I'll try that on another piece soon.

With this lesson learned, I basepainted another piece orange, but this time I won't do crackle glaze because it has rock rubble flocking, so crackle glaze probably won't make sense here (I guess it works only fine on flat surfaces, though I might, just for fun, try it on a rocky underground. I'm curious how that might look...)



Then I gave it a black drybrush and consider the piece done.
I might have put additional colors (yellow, red) on as well but decided to go simple this time. I think it looks fine:

---

And I made some progress on a floating monolith test piece. I gave it a black basepaint, painted the runes blue...




...and went over that with white, using an extremely fine brush. The effect is OK, although I thought it would look better.

---

And finally, the kitchen sink mat paper maché terrain piece (now that's a word! *g*) has dried almost completely up:



I'm still thinking about how to paint this one, and how to stabilize it: Initially I wanted to hotglue it on a piece of balsa wood to prevent warping, but I like the underside quite a lot since it has a nice, irregular rocky texture. Guess I'll have to do without it - it simply can't go without something that forces it to stay straight. But so what, I can always do more of this stuff...


    

[tauster]

Dunno who of you has participated in stonehaven's pop-up terrain kickstarter project... I did, and can't wait to get the pdf's (which are announced for download the coming week).

The first tutorial videos are online now, take a look:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCfa_C2-dkCz1i21vQle8Gnw

Apart from the eye-popping and yaw-dropping I will get from my players when I unfold this on the table the first time, I love the details of the pieces and the storage aspect. My final goal would of course be to make this stuff myself. Even better: Make stuff myself and share it with the community here.

[wildagreenbough]

Sept 7, 2014 18:06:51 GMT tauster said:

Dunno who of you has participated in stonehaven's pop-up terrain kickstarter project... I did, and can't wait to get the pdf's (which are announced for download the coming week).

The first tutorial videos are online now, take a look:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCfa_C2-dkCz1i21vQle8Gnw

Apart from the eye-popping and yaw-dropping I will get from my players when I unfold this on the table the first time, I love the details of the pieces and the storage aspect. My final goal would of course be to make this stuff myself. Even better: Make stuff myself and share it with the community here.

Fascinating videos    Getting my head around the notion of designing pop-up terrain pieces from scratch made my brain protest somewhat, but that might be because my morning cup of tea hasn't taken effect yet.

[tauster]

Sept 7, 2014 19:24:31 GMT wildagreenbough said:

Fascinating videos    Getting my head around the notion of designing pop-up terrain pieces from scratch made my brain protest somewhat, but that might be because my morning cup of tea hasn't taken effect yet.

Me too; I haven't watched the vids so far, just copied them - so haven't a real feeling for how this works. But I really like the concept. Can't bee too hard, I guess...

---

Some small progress on two projects:

The Crematoria rock formations got their protective whiteglue layer, plus a 'bicolor magma-basepaint'.




...and I tinkered with the second floating monolith: I reversed the painting sequence, starting with the runes before the black basepaint because painting the runes without spilling color outside the indentations is possible, but slow and no fun. Instead I'll try to paint around them; I think it's maybe easier not to spill paint in the runes than working the other way 'round. Perhaps similar to the drybrushing technique. We'll see...

[tauster]

Here's a new hotglue application. It's not terribly creative, but at least I haven't seen anybody else on the board do it before. I found a cheap diamond-shaped silicone ice cube maker,...
 




...filled it with hotglue, left it to harden and - presto....




...(more or less) instant giant diamonds!





A very quick method to get some nicely shaped crystals. Alternatively, if you put them on a piece with the pointy end down, you could ise the trapeze-shaped facettes as monitors of some SciFi control device.

That's what I tried to do with this testpiece: I tried to carve runes in the facettes, but didn't find a way that gives clean carvings. I first used an xcacto knife, but with that I can only carve straight lines; curves are almost impossible. Still, the straight lines are more or less clean:




I then used a pointy sculpting tool (looking like a thick needle) that I heated over a candle flame. While it's possible to make curves, the melted hotglue collects around the edges and the whole thing looks ...less than optimal.



(sorry for the bad quality; I didn't have better lighting conditions and no time to set up lamps and stuff...)

I poured some blue ink* in the melted runes and left it to dry.
* I once tried to clean an old inkjet and filled kept of the ink. I don't use it much otherwise, so I thought I'd give it a try...



I repeated the 'inking' two more times; whenever it's dry, what little color pigments were left gathered at the edges and not in the indentations (as I wanted them to). So inket ink is a clear fail for this application.




next steps will be a brown/black washing and then highligting the runes.

[tauster]

...and in other news:

I painted the Crematoria rocks black, after yesterday's orange-red basepaint. My crappy neon light messed the colors up as usual, so you won't see much difference to the pure orange I used for the test piece. Just believe me when I say the new ones look better.




And another floating monolith got painted up. It's not finished (the white highlights are still missing), but this time I painted the runes first and the surrounding black afterwards.



The left one is today's piece, while the one on the right side is the test piece.
Painting the surrounding areas after the runes took a bit longer than the other way round, but the result looks more clean. I don't knwo if this is generally so or if I mastered this technique better/faster than cleanly painting the confined areas of the runes. Maybe I should give both methods several more tries, just to get the hang of both. Let's see if I get the white highlight better than the first time (which really sucked, imo).

I'm not sure whether or not I should drybrush or wash the black areas... Maybe I use the test piece to see how that looks.

[indigo777]

Sept 8, 2014 19:33:34 GMT tauster said:

Here's a new hotglue application. It's not terribly creative, but at least I haven't seen anybody else on the board do it before. I found a cheap diamond-shaped silicone ice cube maker,...
 




...filled it with hotglue, left it to harden and - presto....




...(more or less) instant giant diamonds!





A very quick method to get some nicely shaped crystals. Alternatively, if you put them on a piece with the pointy end down, you could ise the trapeze-shaped facettes as monitors of some SciFi control device.

That's what I tried to do with this testpiece: I tried to carve runes in the facettes, but didn't find a way that gives clean carvings. I first used an xcacto knife, but with that I can only carve straight lines; curves are almost impossible. Still, the straight lines are more or less clean:




I then used a pointy sculpting tool (looking like a thick needle) that I heated over a candle flame. While it's possible to make curves, the melted hotglue collects around the edges and the whole thing looks ...less than optimal.



(sorry for the bad quality; I didn't have better lighting conditions and no time to set up lamps and stuff...)

I poured some blue ink* in the melted runes and left it to dry.
* I once tried to clean an old inkjet and filled kept of the ink. I don't use it much otherwise, so I thought I'd give it a try...



I repeated the 'inking' two more times; whenever it's dry, what little color pigments were left gathered at the edges and not in the indentations (as I wanted them to). So inket ink is a clear fail for this application.




next steps will be a brown/black washing and then highligting the runes.

Those turned out great. I'll have to keep an eye out for ice cube trays now.

[sgtslag]

With regard to the cavern terrain pieces, I'd use the flat top piece: figures will fall over too much on the natural rock piece. I always go for a more practical terrain piece, as opposed to "realistic" terrain pieces. I never want to have to touch up the paint on my mini's for the sake of 'realism' in my terrain, which damages my painted mini's. For hills for my wargames, I use flat-topped hills: they don't look realistic, but they work for gaming purposes. Cheers!

[beetlewing]

Sept 9, 2014 3:11:08 GMT sgtslag said:

With regard to the cavern terrain pieces, I'd use the flat top piece: figures will fall over too much on the natural rock piece. I always go for a more practical terrain piece, as opposed to "realistic" terrain pieces. I never want to have to touch up the paint on my mini's for the sake of 'realism' in my terrain, which damages my painted mini's. For hills for my wargames, I use flat-topped hills: they don't look realistic, but they work for gaming purposes. Cheers!

You could also have the best of both worlds and make removeable tops - more work though. Maybe have the top held on with a magnet, and have a flat area on the base with a magnet... then you could pop the top off and stick it on the base, to keep the 2 parts together.

[tauster]

Thanks for the tips, I'll consider them!

---

valas infected my with his mykonid project, and today finally some plastic 'shrooms arrived! *happy dance*



So I finally made my first mykonid, but boy was that critter hard to craft!
All in all, it took about 45 minutes or so (didn't really look at the watch), but it felt like ages. My main challenges were:

- Forming the legs into a believable walking pose (I failed, it's just standing)

- Making the eyes actually look, i.e. making two simple indentations that looked like eyes and cause the illusion of a face. sounds easy but was super-hard for me, because whenever I had something I liked, I destroyed them when I tinkered at the shoulder areass, or elsewhere.

- Arms... I liked the spindly arms that valas made and wanted to replicate thatm but the difficulty is that they always bend out of shape.

- ...and don't even mention the hands! *teeth gnashing*


Long story (rant) short, here are some pictures:

Lady forscale was witness to the birthing of 'shroom number one.




I accidentally ripped the first arm off, so I had to try again. Three times. His right arm seems caught in a rapper's pose.




After I was done, I had to find a place where it can rest and harden, without toppling over or bending.
Gravity is your enemy here... I put a nail through the center hole and made gravity my friend.



Zoomed in and turned upside down. Or downside up, to be exact.



Well, for a prototype, it could have been worse, but the next 'nid will be made with clay instead of green stuff. It would be too much to say I actually hate greenstuff, but I certainly like other sculpting materials like clay much better. For one, 'stuff sticks like hell. It gets better when you dip your fingers and tools in water from time to time, but whenever they are dry again, you're stuck. Literally. And then there's those fingerprints all over the figure... *sigh*

---

Completed the second floating monolith:



Cleanly painting the extremely fine white highlights is difficult, and I have a long way to go until I master that technique. But art rhymes with hard, right?

[tauster]

I finally got foamboard, yay!

I found a cheap seller on ebay and got 5 sheets of A4 size, and a few days later someone sold a whole bunch of foamboard scraps that I got for 1 € (plus 7,90 € shipping... ) that will last me for months. Today I found some time to make a first test piece:

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I also continued with the sink-mat terrain piece: I glued it to a strong (3mm) MDF board and hid the edges with hotglue texture and basepainted it black.





Not really sure how to continue, i.e. which colors to chose...

---

I recently revisited one of DMScotty's tutorials: Modular 2.5D Cavern System for D&D and Pathfinder (The DM's Craft #100) At 9:47, he held a beautiful pool in the camera for a few seconds:


I need a few of those for my underdark campaign, so I decided to give it a try.

Half a dozen pond-shaped cardstock pieces ringed with hotglue and basepainted black.



I knew I should have waited for the black to dry and continue with the grey drybrushing for the rock texture of the hotglue edges, but I was too impatient and started with the water on a few pieces. Scotty used dark blue metallic with lighter metallic blue dabbled on top, so I mixed myself some metallic blue's and



The darkblue has a little bit of black in the mix, while the light blue has some dark green added. Probably not enough green, but let's see hwo it looks when dry. I still have a few pieces for testing:



[update]
Drybrushed the edges (only a final white layer is missing) and painted the remaining pieces. I mixed some more green in the lightblue shade and it worked out great.



There's a nasty warp in most of them, but that's to be expected if you use thin cardstock. I think I just re-bend them later; if that still doesn't work, I'll glue them to something stronger.

Next: glue some rocks on the water of some of the pieces like Scotty did (love the effect!), apply acrylic glossy varnish, probably several times.

Working on a larger number of water-themed pieces, it's also time do some experimenting with water effects. I usually work with either simple whiteglue (PVA glue), or one or two layers of clear acrylic gloss varnish. A while ago, I got lucky and found a very cheap bottle of Games Workshop's water effect on ebay that's been sitting on my shelf ever since. I will try that on a smaller piece ot two, to get the hang of layering this stuff.

I mastered fire (at least some of the basic techniques), did some pretty nice ice-and-snow themed stuff and can do rocks, cavern walls and stalagmites. So I guess now it's time to master water...

[tauster]

As I wrote yesterday, I have a warpage problem with the pond terrain pieces. I'll try to correct it by glueing them to something stiff, like MDF or balsa wood. But I want to go on with the water effects before that, so I need to get 'em straight by another way. I tried clamps, but I have only four of them. And beyond that, for some pieces the clamps simply don't have enough reach...



My solution: I use pairs of my largest neodym magnets (1 cm diameter) to press the edge of the pieces down. Works only if the distance between the magnet pair (terrain height plus wood height) is rather small, and you have to take care to keep them from sliding off, but over all it seems to work.

On this piece I tried regular PVA whiteglue.
 


I'm also trying acrylic transparent glossy varnish:



After a few minutes, this piece is seriously warping in the center. I'm trying to keep it down, but obviously I can't just put something heavy in the middle, so my means are limited. Guess I should have waited with the water effects and first glued all the pieces to their wooden undersides. 'nother lesson learned...


I applied the first layer of the Games workshop water effects this morning before going to work. It says on the bottle that it takes 24 hrs to dry; this is what it looked like in the evening after 12 hrs:
(Sorry for the bad lighting conditions!)


I'll apply at least one more layer, but somehow I doubt the first one will be dry in the morning.

---

If you happen to have a construction side nearby, keep watching for interesting crafting materials! I just came across some sawed-off brick remains that simply looked too interesting not to keep. I have no idea what to do with them, but their shapes are quite cool. My gut reaction was 'modular walls!', but the stone is brittle and will break too easily.



The grey thingy is dried cement that got it's form from the folds of the cement sack. It looks organic, so my spontaneous idea was to paint it up as some sort of weird fungus. But maybe a better idea floats my way - I'm not in a hurry... *shrugs*

If any of you have ideas what to do with the bricks, tell me!