Flotsam and Jetsam

[tauster]

I started these little gems (pun totally intended) in August 2013, failed to finish them and had them cluttering up my craft desk ever since. No more.


They are just acrylic deco crystals hotglued together:

 



I tried to tint one of them, it looked horrible (the left one)...



... and set them aside. This week I decided to try my GW washes. I have them relatively new and need to play around with them a bit more, so using the crystals as lab rats was ideal. [insert evil doctor laugh]

The result was not quite what I had expected. I had used the washes straight out of the bottle (i.e. not watered down), but applied relative small amounts of color. Still the result was surprisingly dark. Which was not so bad, but the matte look was something that didn't look right. So I tried matte acrylic varnish on one crystal. Yes, I know that gloss varnish would have been the more logical choice if you want to get rid of a matte look, but the matte varnish still has some gloss, and I assume that high-gloss varnish would let the crystals look like plastic. The result was better but not good enough, so the next thing I tried was lightly drybrushing pearlescent color, taking care to highlight the crystal's edges. I immediately liked that look and painted the rest the same.




The rock's color scheme is the usual black basepaint with some grey drybrushing. I dusted some parts with pearlescent, giving the ground an almost metallic look:

[tauster]

Almost there...

[anrui]

Jun 7, 2015 10:30:11 GMT tauster said:

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.

They look like the base to a floating portal, that once activated, leads to somewhere else. Maybe cover half in sand, and have it buried in the desert or something. 

[anrui]

Additionally, this made me think of being useful to cover those gem rocks, possibly: nikcreates2.blogspot.com/2013/02/elmers-glue-food-coloring-seaglass.html?m=1

[tauster]

The wash has dried. Now all that is missing is a white drybrushing.


...finished!

Without flash:


With flash:



With this technique we should be able to imitate minis like this one :
(Blood War / Air Genasi Swashbuckler R 13/60)




Spontaneous idea: Of course you can take an existing mini and 'upgrade' it with these bottle-strips. But then you would have it permanently altered... and no PC will always be flying around. So how about finding a design that would allow a standard-sized mini to pop with it's base right into a group of 'air swirls'? That would be the ultimate fly marker!

[tauster]

That 'generic fly stand for miniatures with standard bases' idea refused to go out of my head and on the waiting list... It squarely stayed in the front of my mind, put on a demanding face (you know, the onemost wifes have perfected), folded it's arms and tapped it's feet until I gave in.

The design is simple:
- a heavy base (I have some stuff left over from experimenting months ago with screw tops weighted with pebbles and hotglue...)
- a bottle cap used with the inside up (bases of standard sized miniatures fit in perfectly)
- strong wire glued to the cap underside, hidden below hotglue texture and then glued to the base
- a dozen swirling plastic bottle strips, texturized with hotglue like I used with the ghosts




...but first of all I had to repair my gluegun.


Somehow the whole front end has completely filled up with something that looks a bit like hotglue, although it has a yellowish/brown/green tint and is more brittle than normal re-hardened hotglue. And now that stuff blocked the trigger:



I guess that somewhere hotglue had leaked out into the insides of the gun and then, due to being heated for much longer than intended, changed chemically. Anyway. It took me almost 1hr to clean up the whole mess.


Back to the fly stand...  Here's the center. I want it to be a bit tilted so it looks like the mini is actually flying forward.


From here the only thing left was texturizing strips cut off a plastic bottle. This time I had a clear one where the plastic warped due to the glue's heat. Which was totally great because it warped into shapes that I couldn't have made half as swirly and swooping!





I really like how the clear plastic dissappears under the hotglue. If it weren't for the bottlecap that shines through, I would leave the swirls unpainted.

[tauster]

Has anybody ever used compressed EPS foam instead of styrofoam? How were your experiences, and where can this stuff be bought? My guess is that it might be the same stuff that is used as insulation around the concrete fundaments of houses, but that's just a hunch...

I'm asking because I stumbled over a failed kickstarter and a fewof their youtube vids. Some of the sample terrain pieces look fantastic, and should be not too hard to build. In fact, building them is probably less a problem compared with storing them!


www.youtube.com/channel/UCazsSkR5WHHWRKoBFC5nArg






I absolutely don't like the fact that they glue the walls to the boards - this neutralizes the vast potential of being a modular system. With separate wall elements, you can create infinite variations. So glueing 'em down just makes no sense to me, apart from maybe avoiding the walls to be toppled while gaming - which is very probable because these foam elements weight next to nothing.

Apart from these points, I would absolutely love to experiment with this material. I don't know the differences between this stuff and pink (or green) foam, but I simply don't have pink/green foam, at least not in quantities large enough to make more than a few single, small pieces. If this stuff is easier to come by, I'd give it a try.

[tauster]

I really love this earth elemental. So much that my fingers start itching to build such a guy ...right now! 




...oh, and this scissory guy in this clip isn't bad either. Enjoy the fear on your player's faces when you put a printout with the rules for vorpal swords next to your DM screen. Snicker, snack!

[tauster]

A wonderful scene from 4E's Underdark sourcebook: A Mushroom arch.




I made a strong inner frame with aluminum (cleaned catfood containers)




Glued the arch to a MDF base and textured the crumpled aluminum with more hotglue




Covered the whole thing with a heavy coat of PVA, then wrapped old paper towels around that were soaked in watered-down PVA glue. More glue applied where needed.

 

[tauster]

I want to do a bunch of floating rock islands, inspired by this video.

This will be the prototype to get the hang of this floating rock thing and come up with new ideas.

Cone-like shaped cut out of a block of styrofoam, rubbleflocked and sealed with PVA


Basepainted black


I'm considering to make the floating rocks modular: If I leave the tops flat without any decoration, I can simply put on interchangeable MDF disks with whatever I need on top of a rock. I still have some half-finished pieces lying around...

[tauster]

Another unfinished project... this one I started last October. Quite a while, but hey - not even a year. I've been procrastinating far worse.



I absolutely love the weird organic shapes, but I still haven't found a color scheme I like enough to apply it to the whole set. I tried though (here and here)...

Here's the next test piece:



this time I used a metallic black* and after applying an orange drybrush for rust effect, I'm quite happy with the result.
* I got a 750 ml bottle for next to nothing (less than 5€). I wouldn't do this with expensive miniature colors though. If I wouldn't have said cheap metallic black, I'd simply basepaint it black and give it a heavy pearlescent drybrushing, which gives you a metallic black too.

I took extra care to pick out the edges with the drybrush (and this piece has lots of edges!), which really helped to define the sharpy-ness of the thing.


   


What I haven't tried on a large piece is the 'brass with verdigris' scheme, but I like the rusted iron so much that I'll probably go with that variation. It also gives me a nice puzzle for my players: It's clearly not organic because it's rusted iron, but the shapes look like it is a grown structure, or at least arganically shaped. What kind of creatures would do that?

I might even go so far and instead of putting these structures in an abandoned cavern of some ancient civilization deep down in the underdark, using them in the Aboleth city the party needs to travel to.

[tauster]

This one will be a birthday present, and I have only little more than a week time, so it's priority no.1 at the moment. At it's core it's based on a pun, but I'll explain that in the final posting (trust me, not even most Germans will get it, and the language barreer doesn't make it easier).

I start with a plywood square 20x20 cm...


...and model a hill. Catfood containers (thoroughly cleaned!) are ideal because they're quite strong and extremely lightweight.
 

Covered with paper mache. I use old paper towels that were used for cleaning brushes. I never throw this stuff away but simply dry it and upcycle it later.


Then I lay out some cobblestone pieces I bought here (also check this variant out). You can always make such stuff yourself, but it was not expensive and having that stuff at hand whenever I need it saves lots of time, so the few bucks were well-spent. The other two little hills were leftovers I made in 2014 or 2013 and never finished (little paper maché hills), so I'm happy they finally get used.


I filled all empty spaces to a bit more than the height of the cobblestone pieces up so it later looks like the pavement is sunken in and overgrown. I left one corner empty because I'll glue a small glass in there to put pencils in, but I have to wait for the whiteglue to dry first.


Covered everything with a final layer of glue-soaked paper.

[tauster]

Update on the mushroom arch, but in the proper thread.

[tauster]

Coffeeflocking...
  




and a first basecoat.


I hotglued a small glass to one corner. I want to texturize it with paper maché, but a split-second before I put the first stuff on, I realized that even after painting the whole thing, the unpainted paper it would be visible from inside.

So I gave it a heavy black basecoat (which is drying at the moment) and put the paper maché on later.

[update]

Applied the paper maché. I decided to merge the glass with the small rock because the glass shape won't look like a rock no matter how I paint it up. So I'll probably have to apply some more paper maché layers later (after each is dry and hard) until I reach a shape that looks like a natural rock.

[tauster]

'nother giant flame....

Nothing new, nothing spectacular. I just like these thingies and since I'll have a large-ish lava terrain encounter in my underdark campaign*, this is all the excuse I need to fill up a whole box with fire-related goodnes.

* Complete with fire giants, floating lava mini-islands that the PCs and their enemies can use as flying battle platforms and a holy site of Kossuth, Lord of the Flames to liberate from evil fire monsters. This will be the first encounter where the party's new PC will truly shine (a fighter/sorcerer/cleric of Kossuth or something similar... heavy dose of houserules here).

Cut out of styrofoam with the hotwire saw


Glued a piece of scrap metal to the bottom to use it in magnetized terrain, plus applied a heavy protective layer of hotglue



Some Liquitex flexible modelling paste to make flames (take care to hang it upside down while the flames are drying!).
Then basepainted yellow and painted with the same color scheme I used before (here and here, and here).

[tauster]

I received a package from michka today*, and besides one of his awesome stone giants (more on that later) were several heroclix minis. One of them was a Screeching Terror...
* not related to the insider trading scheme, we just traded craft stuff...

I still had some plastic bottle swirls left from the previous swooping ghost projects,...




...so I removed the mini from it's base, glued it on one strip, added a magnet to the bottom and did a little hotglue texturizing. Five minutes later, Lady Forscale faced a new terror:






Cudos for how she endured the demon's stinking breath!

[tauster]

My monitor gave up this week, but the company I'm working at has some great engineers, so a friendly coworker repaired it the same day I bought it in and thus saved my a lot of money. Fantastic guy!

I want to thank him, and saw his desktop wallpaper...



He told me that this is a Japanese forest ghost called Totoro. I'm not into asian comics or animes, so I didn't know the series. But a quick search came up with more than enough reference material to get the general idea of this sweet critter.

I still have a handful of styrofoam eggs, and they're the perfect shape for the body. Plus, weeks ago I purchased my first milliput, so I'm happy to have a chance to try this new material. Also, having an alternative to greenstuff is an added bonus.


The first stage: Adding belly, legs and arms.
     


I didn't like the sitting position of the legs, so I remade them to look more like he's standing.



Adding the ears...


...and the smaller version that will be sitting between the ears.


Enough for one night. I needed to stop here because I couldn't touch the figure anywhere without damaging the still-soft milliput. It was rock-hard this morning, so I continued in the evening and got this far:


I started with a very thin layer of milliput on the free styrofoam areas and scratched furry texture in.
     

I'll probably overpaint the eyes since the original has it's pupils looking dead center. Aa bit lifeless and weird if you ask me, but I want to be as true to the original as possible. These oogly eyes are just as a reference to get a sense of the face.
  


From the 4 oz of milliput, I used up about 3.5 oz so far. I totally love this stuff! It is much easier to work with than greenstuff, even if it seems that greenstuff is better in holding tiny details. but for this project, milliput was the perfect choice between the two.

[tauster]

Progress on the birthday present...
(see here for part one and part two)

Sorry for the bad lighting. The pics of the final piece will be made in natural daylight.

More paper maché.



Some paint (several layers of drybrushing, then a wash of Agrax Earthshade),...
 


...then a mix of colored coffeeflocking and some commercial grass tufts, plus two little bushes made of colored lichen.






Coming along nicely, but Tuesday isn't far off and the final details are what usually takes the longest...

[lordbryon]

I really like the egg shaped guy. Impressive job.

[tauster]

Almost there...