Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

Tried to make something like noctuary's cavern walls, but the result is a bit different...

Instead of making the structure completely out of hotglue, I stacked cardstock pieces up until I had the rough shape. I wanted a rock arch, so I made several parts glued together with whiteglue (this took about 10 min), let them set for a few hours...



...and hotglued the 'modules' together to the final arch. Unfortunately I didn't take a pic of the cardstock core before the hotglue.

Then I simply let my gluegun fly.






I also included a 'pond' on top:



So far I have no idea about the arche's base. I just know that I will have to flock and paint both the base and the arch before I glue them together.

[dungeonmistress]

That looks fabulous! I can already imagine how it will look when you've finished it. My only thought is, "Damn! That's a lot of hot glue!"

[Deleted]

daaaaaannng...... thats cool. can't wait to see the end result.

[tauster]

it took 6 of the long gluesticks...

[tauster]

Before I risk ruining my precious robot with the wrong aging method, I tried some ways of creating a verdigris effect, using the Razowrind thingie I made lately. I think the hindmost shard looks best, but it's still wet so I'll have to wait until tomorrow...



I would like to have some clean copper shining through (mostly at the elevated areas), so I'll try if I can polish some of the color away once it is dry. If not, then maybe drybrushing works. We'll see.

---

Since I really like the copper effect, I finally touched the bubble gum generator that was staring me in the face each day since late august:




The diorama you see in the background left was a lucky (i.e. dirtcheap) buy on ebay. I always wanted to replicate that look and feel, and now I'm confident I can come close to something similar.

I cut in half a small joghurt cup (the overprized ones for kids) and painted it as well. It will be glued on one side of the generator.
I also painted two drinking straws (not shown on the picture), so that I can add some tubes.

[tauster]

I can resist everything. Except temptations.

That wasn't only Oscar Wilde's problem...
I plead guilty as charged, which mean I got some new loot from the Thomas Phillips (German equivalent to dollar store) near work. Here's what I got for 10 bucks:



- 2 headlamps a.k.a. robot heads (99c each, which is ridiculously cheap if you ask me, even without batteries)
- 8 small clamps (1,29€)
- a mini gluegun* with 2 packs of 24 8mm gluesticks (5,56€ in total)
- another cool-looking headlamp (1,48€, see below)

* I always intended to use only one gluegun and didn't buy a mini version. I hated the fact that the small guns need a different size of gluesticks (6mm instead of 8 mm diameter), and thought one gun should generally be versatile enough for all glue work. But more and more I found that small detail work is a pain in the behind with the large gun. So when I saw that the minigun was less than 3 € and the sticks are 5 cent each, the 'shut up and take my money'-side won.




The b/w headlamp looked like War of Worlds to me (specifically the movie's Kraken, see here and here, and this cool blog entry), or like a cyclopse's head. I might gut the LED mechanism or not, depends on what I'll do with it. But eiher way, you get great value for 1.48 €.

[beetlewing]

Y'know.... if you painted the backside of the headlamp lenses red, green or dirty amber and left the led stuff in, it'd glow, rather than light up the whole room... maybe

[tauster]

Oct 8, 2014 19:08:58 GMT beetlewing said:

Y'know.... if you painted the backside of the headlamp lenses red, green or dirty amber and left the led stuff in, it'd glow, rather than light up the whole room... maybe

...bingo. That's what I'll try!

[beetlewing]

Also, since your robots are rusty, might want to hit the outside of the lenses with really fine sandpaper, then a thin wash of black or dark brown to tint the new white haze. Practice on a soda bottle or something first.

[tauster]

Oct 8, 2014 19:55:54 GMT beetlewing said:

Also, since your robots are rusty, might want to hit the outside of the lenses with really fine sandpaper, then a thin wash of black or dark brown to tint the new white haze. Practice on a soda bottle or something first.

Good advice, will do!
*goes looking for soda bottles*

Here's the generator, aged with a verdigris wash and then drybrushed with copper again to get some of the luster back.




Also, I wanted to see how my floating monolyths look in copper.



Not bad, but not good enough to paint the rest of the batch the same.

[tauster]

I always loved the look & feel of Warhammer's Tyranids. Since I'll need a lot of techno-/arcano-organic terrain*, their Capillary Towers are a no-brainer for me.

* ...and I really mean a whole lot: a complete aboleth city, a forgotten outpost of Nihilat, the ancient Illithid empire, made of living buildings, plus the King's Highway made by Torog eons ago (see Mother)


Here's the first batch, made of styrofoam.


   

  

Two of them got spraypainted with white and are drying atm - not for priming them, but for the spraypaint to eat away some of the material so they get that pockmarked look on the inner side.

If anyone has a good idea how to emulate the bone plates on the outer side, please fire away. I'm probably going with soft cardboard, bend it around and try to mark it to get the long cracks, or use hotglue to texture them. Not really sure that either works, but I'll try.

[tauster]

Found some nice brick fragments and drill cores at the neighbouring construction site. I really like the holes in them: They are not really straight; their curved edges make them look somewhat organic. Imagine them bone-white, with large pulsing veins snaking around then and an egg nested in each of them, and you get the picture of what I'm trying to do with them...

First I gave them a priming with watered-down whiteglue.

 


Before continuing, I'm doing a small testpiece. I started with the hotglue veins.

     


Basepainted purple:



Next steps:
- blue mini-veins on the veins
- texturing the hole, plus adding some kind of egg inside
- bonewhite basepainting around them
- washing the bonewhite
- ...?

The large pieces will get some rock terrain on one side so that it looks like they were grown straight out of the rock. I'll do that probably with paper maché like with the modular cavern walls, but that's not set in stone (haha) so far.

[tauster]

Some experiments with copper paint...

I'm still unsure how to paint the greenfoam-carved terrain, so I'm trying my two favourite color schemes: flesh and copper.

  

Plus, there's a small dracolich miniature sitting on my desk for a few weeks, more or less patiently. It was just white plastic, with an ugly blank base, so the least I could do was rubbleflocking it. I might glue on some bones or mangled victims later. But for now I'm going with simple rocks.

I'll probably give it a bonewhite priming and just a black/darkbrown washing. I suspect that less is more when it comes to skeletal figures.

[tauster]

My mother is making pottery as a hobby since a little more than 15 years. Today she made (together with a bunch of other hobbyists) raku ware, which is an old japanese pottery firing technique and produces pottery that is nothing short of stunning. I just want to share some of her stuff, so let me apologize in advance for off-toppic-ing. But since this is my own thread, I think this isn't really thread-hijacking.

Today's results:




Jewellery pieces (I'll glue in small metal ears later so that they can be hung from a chain or leather band)



Her sculpted women and xmas smoking houses are some of her signature items (as you can see here and here in some older works)...




...as are her bulls. The horns are broken-off metal rings that get integrated during sculpting.




I'm just damn proud of her so I wanted to share some of her works with a community who values self-made things and creativity.

[tauster]

Many capillary towers have 'thorns' or 'teeth' set in them, like the bonewhite portrusions here:




I made the core of the largest ones out of strong aluminum foil:




...and covered them with clay. The smaller ones are comepletely made of clay.




This clay is very soft, so I'll wait until it is a bit drier and harder, then I'll texture it.

[tauster]

The organic terrain test-piece I painted in flesh-colors yesterday didn't convince me... until I added bleached bone color:



...now we're talking!

I'm not sure how to continue, but even at this stage it already looks much more 'grown'.

[beetlewing]

Your mom's stuff is gorgeous! I want a buffalo!

For your spikes, you mentioned soft cardboard for the plates... In the picture you showed of the ones with the little teeth/horns, the plates curl out a little. I think you could do that with soda bottle plastic: make the plate, then hit the top edge with a lighter. While it's still soft, control the bending with needle nose pliers.

[SpielMeisterKev!]

Howdy,

Oct 12, 2014 14:51:08 GMT beetlewing said:

Your mom's stuff is gorgeous!

Yeah, the Craft is strong in that family!


Kev!

[tauster]

Turns out this was one of the more productive weekends. *happy smile* If I smoked, I would lean back now and contentedly smoke a pipe.

On friday evening I had some free time available for craftnig but didn't know in advance how much time it will be, so I hesitated to start or continue a larger project. Instead I took care of one small project after the other, all stuff that wouldn't take up much time or could be interrupted easily.

It turned out that there was more time than I had anticipated, so I started one thing after the other - many of them stuff I wanted to do or continue for a long time but never really came around to actually do it. As an example, I don't really like to experiment with color schemes - which means that oftentimes projects get stalled because I can not decide how to paint them but don't feel like making actual test pieces to find out what works best (even if I know that this would be one of the best ways to expand my knowledge and skills).

So with all these little projects started or revived, I could work on them several times this weekend and got some real progress done.

- you can see the dracolich in the back (but you can't see the rubbleflocked and black-primed base). Next steps would be washing the bones, then drybrushing the base.
- the test brick got basepainted in skin color, some bleached bone in and around the hole (doesn't look as impressive as I wished, so I might change that)
- one tyranid tower made of greenfoam just got primed and washed
- the beholder golem / robot finally got aged with verdigris - I had put that step off for a number of days for no reason at all; I just didn't dare to do it because I had feard it might ruin it. Turns out it didn't, as usual.
- as a little sideproject while I waited for some paint to dry, I started another ancient copper terrain piece: the lid of a tin can glued to a round cardstock. I'll add a copperedcap of a toothpaste tube (between the 'nid tower and the robot), some copper 'tubes' (drinking straws) and some rubbleflock around it, just to get the look and feel of copper ruins among rock rubble - something I haven't combined so far in one piece.
- to the upper left there's some poppy pods glued to magnets (the pods are out of the picture I fear, because I hadn't them in mind when taking the picture). No idea how to paint them so far...

[tauster]

some progress today; nothing fancy, just little steps on different projects...

The horns/teeth of the capillary towers have dried, but the largest ones have lots of cracks. That's probably due to the aluminum core being unable to shrink like the drying clay. It's not a bad thing - I couldn't have sculpted these cracks as realistically if I had intended it.




Here's the 'ancient copper' test terrain, where I hotglued some 'ancient copper' bits on, covered the whole cardstock base with hotglue to prevent the warping that the whiteglue normally causes.
Right now it is covered with rubbleflock and will get a protective layer next. The rubbleflocking will cover the ends of the straws, leaving only some middle areas of them showing through as pipes.
Hopefully I don't forget again to add some metal scraps around the edges for using it together with the magnetized stuff... But even if I did that wouldn't be too dramatic, as the tin can lid is magnetic.




I carved a few stamps out of foamboard. Haven't used them so far, just want to get the feeling of working with this new material. I might try to stamp some cork mats with them.
Not sure what to do with the foamboard material I have removed on the largest piece (you didn't think I threw that away, right? *g*). Maybe lightweight rocks?




The magnetized poppy pods I failed to capture recently:




A test piece, showing the difference between gloss and unglossed 'flesh' areas. The picture isn't the best, but I like the glossed areas much better...



... so I made covered a large 'tyranid tower' test piece with the same clear acrylic gloss:



Maybe I should have added some hotglue veins...