Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

You gotta love those heroclix minis. Even the blister can be put to good use!



This will become simple scatter terrain. It looks very eroded, too much to recognize anything specific but you can still clearly see that it isn't a simple rock.

Next steps: Add some rubble flocking around and maybe some green tufts.

[chiefsgtbradley]

Thanks again for your intel. I had high hopes on that. Perhaps if you blend the Newspaper more it will be smoother?

[tauster]

Possibly. At the moment I don't feel like further experiments, so I'm waiting for others to come up with more pulp adventures.

[tauster]

I always loved curves. Curves are nice. You can find curves everywhere around you if you look. Lots of good things have curves.



Flying spirits trailing necrotic ectoplasma for example.




Question is: How can you make these? Skulls are easy. Just by some cheap skull bracelets and cut the string.



I've made some flying skulls a while back, but I wanted to have the ectoplasma more whispy, more ephemeral. A bit like spiderwebs if you will.



So where do you get...
- thin curvey bits that
- are strong enough to not bend down under their own wight, and
- are more or less transparent?

Easy: Use that old shampoo bottles you normally throw away.




Cut them to bits with curves:




Lots of bits:




Texturize them with hotglue (dip the hot glue in cold water to get it harden up before the glue texture smoothens out). Glue a magnet to the bottom...





...and skull to the top end.

 

I didn't expect the plastic strip to vanish more or less completely under the hotglue, so I'm almost tempted to leave it unpainted. But then I look at the painted Spirit Host in the 1st pic and the temptation vaporizes.

---

[Update]

Painting is simple when you want to follow the shots on the WH box: White basepaint plus blue washing.


...just don't wash the pieces when they are upright, as the color will run off too much:




Instead I lay it on one side and then apply the wash. I use a very much watered down Asurmen Blue.

---

['nother update]

Just stumbled over Engineer Jeff's Reaper Bones Ghost mini...



...which got me an idea:
With the new 'plastic bottle strips as ectoplasm', you can let your ghosts fly through terrain pieces! Simply make a two-parted ectoplasm trail, glue  magnets in both ends and put scrap metal on your terrain pieces. I'll try that soon.

---

[update the third]

The dried washing:




Lightly drybrushed with white:




...and started another three ghosts. I absolutely love these curves! It really looks like they're swooping around. Prefferably towards the characters!

 

[tauster]

Normally I'd never buy these garbage-intensive packings, but the kids made a picknick in kindergarden and needed something practical to drink from. The opening is spillage-free and can be operated by a 3-year old, so that's my excuse. Plus, the vent and cap will look great on the game table!



The dice-shaped cap with the round 'faces' practically begs to have a clock face painted on, or some sign. And the vent will become, well, a vent - most probably in my dwarven mine project.

[tauster]

Got them ghosts finished!

This has turned into one of my all-time favourite projects, despite being really small. It's fast, has only minimal ressource requirements (plastic bottle strips, hotglue, a skull bead and a neodym for each mini, white for base color and drybrushing and blue-green shade for washing) and produces an awesome effect. I won't have to rip my brain to pieces trying to find a god description for the swoping ghosts - the minis will do that for me without saying a single word.

Here's the evolution, left to right:



1) a trio I did long ago without having seen GW's Spirit Host models, at that time based black and highlighted metallic green. Not a bad effect, but doesn't transport the concept of trailing ectoplasma very well. In addition, I glued on the magnets in way that they didn't hold very well, so I'll probably recycle these guys. I don't feel like showing them to my players.




2) The prototype made from plastic bottle strips. Identical to the next generation in all but the color (too much blue, not enough green) and the fact that I added a second plastic strip (which I didn't like enough, so I left that out of the next three models)




3) The latest batch. I'm happy with these and will probably make some more like them.





The cool thing is that you can place them on the battlefield very flexibly. And if put together, no matter how you place them, they always look like swirling and swooping around - which is very cool because that's what they're all about.




One thing that I might add in the next generation is making a few out of two parts, with two magnets. That way I can have them enter a amgnetized object and have them leave on another place. This doesn't work only with dungeon walls (which are rarely magnetized...) but also with the ground - and that's not only totally easy to do (simply make a pair of magnetized terrain markers) but also totally makes sense, as ghosts flying through the (graveyard) earth and coming out behind or below the hapless characters has been done in stories so often that it became sort of a cliché. Now you can put that to work with ghost minis right in front of your players!

[beetlewing]

Very cool. Have you considered glow in the dark paint, with a black light off to the side?

[tauster]

Jun 4, 2015 14:54:15 GMT beetlewing said:

Very cool. Have you considered glow in the dark paint, with a black light off to the side?

No, I haven't. I never used glow in the dark paint, because I think that for the effect to work, it will be too dark to actually game. You can't see the dice or read anything for example. The amount of spilled beverages will go up as fast as my nerves would go down (it's my carpet after all!) and the overall game will come to a screeching halt...

But seriously: Has anybody used darkness over extended periods of time (lets say during a short battle --> 30 min to 1 hr), and what were your experiences?

[beetlewing]

It'd be cool if you embedded LEDs in the figures, then put batteries in the base, so that when you stick the figure on with a magnet, wire leads would touch, lighting them up. It would limit where you could stick the magnets, but could provide a nice effect. You could also throw a resistor in the base so the LEDs are softer, rather than fully lit. No switch needed. Using silver wire rather than copper would help hide the wires under the hot glue and paint.

[tauster]

Finished the third batch with ghost 'tails'.

Shown below is the last step: Coating the magnet with PVA. Don't forget this, as the hotglue sometimes isn't strong enough and the neodym get ripped out again. Even a relatively thin PVA layer keeps it in place, saving you lots of troubles.



These ghosts are really quick builds. They're simple to make in the first place, but once you have done a few, it's going even faster.

This swooping technique can also be applied to things other than skulls:
- Swooping skeletons (or the upper halves of a skellie) would make a great alternative ghost
- If you have a mini dedicated for a PC (or recurring NPC, you could take an identical one, glue a swooping tail on and have a flying mini.
- Taking that last idea further, you could glue a (very flat) magnet below the mini's base and make separate fly stands with this technique. That way you don't need double minis.


Hmmm... Just when I thought the ghost project is done, there comes a bunch of new ideas...

[tauster]

Two cheap children's 'guide-the-ball-through-the-maze'  toys (what's the english name for these?)...




I had these for months sitting on my table, always wanting to impress them into clay or some other material to make, well, mazes. If you want ancient mazes, carefully texture them with bark.




The difficulty is to get the clay out in one piece without ripping apart. One time it worked, one time I got only fragments (which will look cool on a terrain piece anyway) and the third time was a total failure - the clay sticks so hard to the plastic square that I decided to have it drying in the form. Considering that the clay will shrink when it dries, I'm curious what the result will be...



I guess the simplest - or at least cleanest - method is pressing the plastic mazes into foamcore.

As often, I have no real idea what to do with these when they're dry but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

[tauster]

OK, this one goes back quite a while:

Back in May 2013 I was very much into anything fire-related. Dunno if I had posted the stuff then (I probably did, but can't find the postings...), but I made fireballs of three different sizes and small circular fire markers, different kinds of flame walls (styrofoam and popsicle versions), lava terrain pieces (that looked horrible) and so on. Heck, even made a flame pillar out of a TP roll with a styrofoam top.

Liquitex' Flexible Modeling Paste was probably one of the first really expensive materials I bought and boy did I never regret it! It was also right after I got my hotwire foamsaw, which was another epiphany for me. for a while I had a very hard time passing any styrofoam without bagging it.

So long story short, here's a fire elemental I started two years ago and (almost) finished today!

Basic shape cut sculpted with the hotwire saw out of styrofoam. I was experimenting with how to wield the saw, how to bend the wire and what I can do with moving it in spirals. This was the best result. It looks already now like a head with two raised arms swirling around it.




Liquitex Flexible Modeling paste applied. This stuff is absolutely great: The swirls carry their ow weight (to a point) and after drying stay a little bit flexible - enough to survive at least some rigors during storage (though you'd still better wrap them in something soft!).




Basepainted yellow. ...and that's when I put it into a box for 'intermediate storage'. A few days back I rediscovered it and put in somwhere I see it almost constantly - my usual strategy when I want to get something done soon: Put it somewhere I can't ignore it for long.




Drybrushed with two different oranges and three gradually darkening reds.






Next steps: Giving it a protective finishing layer (matte varnish), and before that perhaps painting in some black eyes. I'm not sure with that, so I'll leave it blocking my craft area until I have decided.

[lordbryon]

Great idea with the cheap maze games nobody ever knows what to do with. I now know. Looks very cool, arcane even.

[tauster]

...well, eyes simply aren't my strong point. *sigh*

On the other hand, that black drybrush was actually a good idea:




Now the only thing to do is the matte varnish. That, and keeping the Lady Forscale from committing one of the most epic stupidities in the history of backstabbing
(Warning: large image linked)

[tauster]

For all fans of Lady Forscale, here's a quick nod if you want to get that mini cheap...

[lordbryon]

cool, it has snig the axe. My favorite goblin min ever. In fact I played him as a PC because the model was so cool. The DM let me play him as a deformed Gnome who I called Leviticus Fuzzywig.

[tauster]

I recently told you what kind of flamey stuff I've done in the past. There was something I missed though... You might have seen it a few times in the background of some of my WIP shots as I had it standing on my craft desk for ...ages.




I think I modelled this one back in spring/summer of 2013, basepainted it and added another layer of light orange... and then went on to other things.

It's a broken bottle that didn't survive my practicing experiments with the Kinkajou Bottlecutter. Sometimes when you hold the cut bottles under hot and cold water, they just don't break at the cut. Bit of a luck thing... But this shard actually looked like I could salvage it, so I slapped Liquitex Flexible Modelling Paste on (my favourite material at that time) and practised making flames (hint: hold the object upside down so the paste doesn't follow gravity while it is still soft!).

Now that the fire elemental which had a similar fate has been finished, it's only just that to give this abondoned project the same amount of love and finish it too.

I used exactly the same colors as with the fire elemental, so I didn't take any WIP shots.





Due to the glass core, it has quite some weight but since the bottom isn't completely smooth, it is still a bit prone to falling backwards. Let's see how it does on the battle map!

[SpielMeisterKev!]

Howdy,

  A plastic bottle would work well in this fashion.

Nice work,
Kev!

[anrui]

Looks fantastic! Love how it engulfs the mini.

[tauster]

Another day, another ghost. ;

Backstory:
1) A while back I made a mould of an ogre head, but the hotglue cast I made wasn't very encouraging, so I set the result aside and stored the mould away. The head and breast part of that thing loks cool though...
2) For several months now I have the metal binder of a spiral-bound notepad on my desk. It looks a bit like a bone snake, but I never really figured out how to turn it into one...




It seemed a good idea to combine the head with the spiral binder, but it didn't really work out, no matter which way I turned it.
So instead I got back to the bottle-strip technique and made something that looks more like a swooping ghost:

 


Not many details to see, so here's the guy basepainted white. Looking better, eh?



Can't wait to wash it with green/blue. This ghost will probably be the boss of the bunch I made previously.


So what happened with the spiral binder? I covered it in hotglue to hide the wire, textured the hotglue with more hotglue...and set it aside until I find a large head or skull to glue to the top. Sometimes waiting for the right idea pays. However most of the times it just causes your desk to clutter up with unfinished projects faster than you can say 'storage issues'.