Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

The final 'organic brick terrain' piece of the batch is nearing completion:

Based

 

...plus some veins that will snake along under the rubble.



The original test piece got repainted, since the blue veins turned out suboptimal.

 

...and rubbleflocked. due to the piece being askew, I need much rock at the lower end: I want it to look like it's buried under the rubble, not balancing on a point.

[tauster]

I always liked the look of wrinkled chestnuts...




The first layer is only the priming, since the color holds only in a thin layer. the second layer will be much better.

---

Something that might go into my current 'ruined statues' experiment:

---

The liliy roots I dried back in june are finally rock hard. I will probably not paint them and just cover the hotglue at the bottom where I added some metal scraps for the magnets.
I absolutely love their strange looks!

[rane]

wow those liliy roots look great

[tauster]

Another clay experiment...

You know these pot-herbs you get in the supermarket? The ones that come with an ugly plastic pot? Those pots often have an interesting texture on their bottoms. Make a flat piece of clay, press the pot in and let it dry. If your clay is very moist, it will cling to the plastic, so it's a good idea of leaving whatever you used to stamp it pressed. If you pull it away too soon, it'll rip off parts of the clay and your stuff is ruined.

   

Around the edges I used a piece of bark to give it a rocky texture. It really looks like some technological artifact, I'm super-delighted!

And then there's those plastic boxes for other green stuff. The same here: Simply press some clay, wait until it's dry enough to be separated and let it dry completely.
 

Looks like some techno-arcane thingie, or psionic circuitry. It curled up while drying (something I really came to hate with this brand of brown clay!), so I pressed down to make it flat again - which of course broke it wherever I pressed.

But that's OK - I can use it as ruined psionic circuitry in my game. Which is better for the poor party anyway: Which adventurer in his/her right mind would want to encounter active psionic devices from ancient illithid or aboleth empires?

[tauster]

I basepainted the rock flocking black. Which took much longer than usual because I had added some fleshy tendrils snaking under the rubble, and of course I wouldn't want to overpaint them. So this was another practice session of how to paint exactly...

---

Two more fleshy things finished, or almost:



The chestnuts turned out great. I'm not sure what exactly I'll use them for, but I like them already.




And the second clay terrain piece I did quite a while ago is finally painted up as well. I had forgotten th piece in it's corner while it was drying, but now it's finished. I probably won't even add a layer of gloss.

---

....aaaand: The plaster statues arrived today!





There are some really cool ones among them, plus a few duds like some sheep and even a duck. Not sure what to make of them, maybe you have an idea?

---

We bought some chese today, and there was another one of these cheap and pointless plastic toys in the cheese packing. Why don't they just concentrate on making good cheese? Do really anough people buy it because there's a piece of plastic garbage in 'for free' (as if that's true!) that everyone knows before even touching the packing goes to the landfill??? If it sounds like I'm pi**ed off, that's mostly true... But at least I can try to upycle it. The shape is interesting, so I'm pretty sure I'll find something to make out of it.

 

I actually have two ideas already.

[kris]

Looking forward to seeing what you do with the statues

[tauster]

Nov 4, 2014 22:56:52 GMT kris said:

Looking forward to seeing what you do with the statues

To be honest: me too.

Concerning the statues, I'm already in procrastination mode. Gypsum is a new medium for me, so I'll have to play around a bit before touching the favourite statues. Fortunately I have the animals to experiment with!  Whoever called me 'mad scientiest of crafting' was more right than he knew, or me...

Anyway, here's something I made with yesterday's cheesy toy:



I simply pressed come clay in and made a dimple at the top with a piece of bark, to give it a rough texture. Looks like the top of an exploded Dalek to me.

I put it on top of the clay moulds I made with chocolte candy inlay, and I like the look of it:

imgur.com/63Qfm2w

[tauster]

Not exactly crafting, but since this is my thread, it isn't exactly thread hijacking either.

I'm usually a bug fan of natural materials, but these concrete lamps are just damn beautiful!













Now I wonder how to make one myself.
Hmmm...

[tauster]

Those Daleks... are evil.
I mean, that is nothing new of course. Anyone whose vocabulary consists of mainly only one word, which is EXTERMINATE!, is probably evil. But what makes them insidious is that making Daleks is highly addictive!

So consider yourself warned.

Here's the beginning of my small army. They won't appear in my games as monsters but more probably as broken artifacts or broken parts of some ancient aboleth or illithid psionic machinery. I'm still playing with the colors. I haven't tried the classic copper verdigris, instead I did a white priming, then added a pearlescent sheen and several brown and black washings to age them. The exploded top was primed with silver and then got the same washings.

I like the effect in that they convey the sense of age, and the pearlescent white hints at materials completely unknown to a fantasy world (although ceramic would be an option). Still, I'm not convinced yet that I'll leave it at that.


White and silver basepaint:



Brown adn black washings. This were my first testpieces, so I decided to use the washings pure, to see their effects without combining them with each other:



I didn't like the result, so I decided to mix both washings )i.e. paint one first and then the other immediately after, while the first was still wet). The pearlescent sheen was added after I saw that without it, they looked too dull. And that's where I'm at the moment.





I also painted one drill core in the same color scheme.

White basepaint wih pearlescent sheen:




Aging:




I also painted one of the clay sigils I made a while ago, only without the pearlescent effect. Black basepaint, strong white drybrush, black & brown washings:

Wet




Dry

[beetlewing]

I'll take one set of sigil beer coasters please

[tauster]

...and that's how the whole stuff looks in daylight:

[tauster]

My titanium white is 80% empty (a 750 ml bottle I bought in june 2013...), and my dark magenta I need for the flesh color scheme is nearly gone, so I was looking for cheap colors. There are tons of cheap acrylics offered online; I decided for this seller. I can recommend it for German crafters; he's in the lower price end (at least on ebay; I hadn't looked in other onlineshops), shipping cost is combined and delivery is fast.

That's the colors I bought in addition to the 1/2 l pot of white, a 120 ml tube each for 1,79 euro. Of course my neon light is distorting the colors, but you get the general idea.




I compared the naples yellow with Games Workshop's 'bleached bone': the GW color is a touch darker, so if you carefully mix the naples yellow with some grey, you should get something fairly similar. A small pot of GW color is about 1,50 to 2 euro for 12 ml, while the 120 ml tube from ebay is 1,79 euro. You do the math.

[tauster]

Got another clearace price score from the crafting shop: a 500ml bottle of metallic black for 2.95 euro! I guess that's all the gunmetal I'll ever need.



And that's how it looks on the brown clay.



The right one obviously got the gunmetal, the other got a self-mixed 'grey with a hint of blue' I found a hard nut to crack recently. I wanted it for the ruined monuments/statues, but I found that tinting an already existing shade of grey requires huge amounts of the other color. To get this result, I mixed 1 part medium grey with probably two parts light blue and about 2 parts of an intensive aquamarin blue.The result just shows hint of grey, even if there are 4 parts of blues to 1 part of grey, which really surprised me. Now I have much more of that particular color than I intended, which means I'll have to make either many more statues that I intended or a truly massive ruin, which will be the bane for my limited storage capacities. *groans*

[tauster]

The psionic seal I did a while back has long since completely dried, and crumbled even more:



I'll put it on a larger than usual base and make it more threedimensionally than usual, so I'll need something below whole thing to support the brittle clay. This is where cat food aluminum comes in handy again:



Three tins, hotglued together and covered with a bit of whiteglue-strengthened kitchen paper,...




... basepainted black while the whiteglue is still wet.




Next, I'll give it a bit of brown drybrushing and washings because after I'll glue the clay on, it'll be hard to reach between the cracks with anything other than washes, so I want that more or less completely colored.

[tauster]

Just wanted to share another youtube channel I found recently: Eons of Battle

The techniques for miniature bases are awesome and can easily be applied to larger terrain pieces, and there are also some other useful painting tips and general tricks.

[beetlewing]

I love reading this blog thread.

[voduchyld]

Nov 12, 2014 18:34:31 GMT tauster said:

Got another clearace price score from the crafting shop: a 500ml bottle of metallic black for 2.95 euro! I guess that's all the gunmetal I'll ever need.



And that's how it looks on the brown clay.



The right one obviously got the gunmetal, the other got a self-mixed 'grey with a hint of blue' I found a hard nut to crack recently. I wanted it for the ruined monuments/statues, but I found that tinting an already existing shade of grey requires huge amounts of the other color. To get this result, I mixed 1 part medium grey with probably two parts light blue and about 2 parts of an intensive aquamarin blue.The result just shows hint of grey, even if there are 4 parts of blues to 1 part of grey, which really surprised me. Now I have much more of that particular color than I intended, which means I'll have to make either many more statues that I intended or a truly massive ruin, which will be the bane for my limited storage capacities. *groans*

Recently i've tried food colouring in my acrylic paint, and i was surprised how good it looked. I also tried it in my gloss varnish and it does a great job also. Maybe you should give it a try.

[tauster]

Never tried food colors before. Hmmm... *looks at the racks full with acrylic colors* I'll keep them in mind, but as long as I don't see any advantage over the paints I already have, I probably won't go into food colors. My wife would kill me - or worse: Show me the wordless shaking of the head and the folding of the arms. Wailey, wailey!

---

Here's the broken sigil, whiteglued to yesterday's hill. I had to pad the clay shards with glue-soaked paper towel, as it would easily break at the slightest touch. I must remember to use this kind of clay only for stuff that is either massive and/or won't ever be encumbered with any significant weight...



...and in related news: I got another two parcels with statue material!
(This will be the last for a while. I now have enough statues to craft a ruined disneyland... )

The chess game figures turned out even better than on the picture, but at 14 euro they weren't exactly a steal. I wanted them anyway because I absolutely love the abstract style. Reminds me on the easter island statues. And after all, it's 32 figures, so less than 50 cent per fig is quite OK...



These two ladies were a bit more expensive, but not really much: The faerie box was 5 euro, but the other was only 1 euro. I won't paint them immediately when I know how to do that - I want to make various moulds from different parts of them and use these as broken statuary, as I can't bring it over my heart to break them, even if they are quite kitschy.

   

I'm still in the learning stage with the colors, so I hold all of these statues back until I'm sure that I don't ruin with a poor paint job.

[beetlewing]

That last chess set is awesome. I also like the head/hair on the second fairy. Cool stuff.

Another thing you could try for mixing custom metallics are metallic/pearlescent colored powders, usually found near the rubber stamp or scrapbooking sections in craft stores. They're not overly cheap, but a little bit goes a long way. They can be buffed on with a brush or finger for bold application, or mixed into the paint for a more subtle colored metallic effect like car paint.

[tauster]

This critter is inspired by the Accretion Servitor serving as a deco piece in @rouseau's LED firelight post.



I absolutely love the technical look and feel of this robot, so I dug out my steampunk beads, took a styrofoam ball and glued away.




The back side:




Front side, seen from below:




[update]

I mixed my own metallic with acryl silver, a bit of black and some gun metal, but I added too much water, so I ended up with the color having not enough pigments to properly cover everything:



I had to add a second layer, which is drying at the moment.