Flotsam and Jetsam

[ogrestamp]

Kind of flatten the bottom and have crab-like legs coming out of it. It's some type of giant insect or crab or something that has tentacles!

And very cool molds. Those look awesome.

[tauster]

Tentacles are good. Can't go wrong with tentacles. Or mushrooms, but thats another story...

I have a bunch of mini heads, but not many that are large enough to be in proportion with the spines I made. Seems like I'd have to do another moulding session somewhere down the road.

[tauster]

Another project I started back in June, continued in October but never finished: The maze diorama CDs. I had one clay maze left over, and it had been sitting somewhere around my craft desk for months, slowly crumbling until I had only shards left... I haven't finished the bunch (heck, not even the one I made today!), but at least it's progress.


Today I finally glued on the last clay maze a CD, put a hotglue-cast ruined stone-face in the middle...




...and rubbleflocked the whole thing.




If I find a very flat LED, I might even make the face glow (but I would need to give the CD a stand about 1-2cm high. depending on the LED stuff).

[tauster]

I had one last piece left unfinished from the last batch of underdark terrain (the unpainted one in the back with the three lumps), so here's some progress.




Building up the stalagmites with paper maché was easy and quick, but it took several days to get sufficiently dry to continue. It's still not qompletely dry, but I figured that the rest of the moisture will evaporate through the layers of color, so I can just as well finish this piece...




Primed black





Grey Drybrush                                                    White highlights
                                                                       (the difference is subtle and hardly visible)
  

So that's the typical Sin City look... Now I need some eyecatcher. Since I had no other ideas, I broke out my box with the pre-made* mushrooms and chose one that I had painted with an experimental neon-yellow 'glow'.

* like tentacles, it's always a good idea to have some mushrooms at hand. You never know when you need some, and if you had to start sculpting them, the project gets stalled for too long...




I also found a small hotglue blob that I had kept because it looks, like, well... Mickey Mouse:



This will look out from a smal 'cave' in the large stalagmite, giving the whole piece an underdark-atypical lighthearted mood. If I DM'ed right those last years, my players will first smile, then immediately get paranoid.


Inspired by deafnala 's glowing moss effect, I tried to paint the surroundings with a similar color, using a lemon green with a light drybrush.




And that's where I stand at the moment: Mickey is primed black and got lizard- or catlike eyes. If anyone can tell me how to continue painting up the little head, I'd be totally grateful. The eyes were the easy part, but the nose...?

[deafnala]

That looks FANTASTIC. GREAT WORK on a MASTERFULLY crafted piece!

[tauster]

Thanks for the praise, Alan. I don't like my glow effect paint job, it should have been much more even, i.e. I should have used a softer brush for the drybrushing (is this kind of effect even done with drybrushing???). But it's not a big project, so not much harm done. We craft and we learn.

Do you have any ideas for painting the little cave mouse?

[tauster]

I'm quite sure that I am not the first to bring this up (I even wrote about that topic months before), but it bears repeating, just in case some newbie doesn't know it and to remind the old hands among us: There's a very cheap source of fantastic paint that can be used for terrain: Test pots of wall color.

Below are a few pics from HELLWEG, a German hardware store / home improvement store (dunno what's the english equivalent to the German 'Baumarkt'...) to give you some ideas. They come in countless different shades, and most of them are very cool (I regularly have to skip these rows to escape the temptation to buy just a few more) . These pots are 75 ml each, which is more thab six times the amount of a 12 ml Citadel potand cost between 1.99€ and 3.49€, i.e. the same price span that regular miniature color has. 

Quality-wise I think that Citadel and the other regular mini colors are way better. I haven't tried painting minis with it, and would be interested in first-hand reports. For terrain however, this stuff works perfectly fine. For really huge terrain projects you can even buy a litre can, but I doubt anyone will ever use up so much color.

[SpielMeisterKev!]

Howdy,

Dec 8, 2015 6:54:13 GMT tauster said:

Do you have any ideas for painting the little cave mouse?

Already looks like something from Studio Ghibli?

Kev!

[tauster]

Some progress with the Instant Bones project:

I cast a hotglue head, glued it onto the boney spine and added bone legs from a plastic dino fossile.




I tried several postures; in the end the slugging-me-along bearing won. I find that downright creepy: A giant corpse with a demonic head, its flesh rotted to the bone, slugging itself along. The tail didn't make it in the final concept...











Of course it will have a very slow speed, so I'll have to compensate that with some very tough attacks and abilities to give it a survival chance for at least a few rounds against mid-level characters. Ideas welcome!

[tauster]

I got another project done: The maze with the face.



Instead of painting the maze and face ruins as stones, I went for rusted metal. Metal architecture something not seen very often, and will give my players a pause...











I added some metal scraps as well, hidden among the grassy stones and flowers.

Another idea: Maybe this isn't ruined architecture but the remains of a celestial being from the lawful planes that splintered when it died. And maybe some of its animating force remains? I'm tempted to craft another 'walking statue' piece with this head... *rubs hands*

[tauster]

Not terrain, not a monster, not even roleplaying-related...

I wanted to practice with some of the new powertools I need for the housebuilding, so I made us a small xmas tree. The inspiration was this pic I found online:




I got a few wall color testing pots...




...and cut a few slats




Then  used a wire brush for the power drill and brushed the wood against the grain (i.e. from the side, 90° against the grain). That way you scrape out the softer parts of the wood (these sections grow in summer, when wood grows faster and thus is softer).






I painted it...




...and after the paint had dried I went over the slat with an orbital sander, leaving only color in the deeper parts.




An old weathered slat serves as the trunk. I polished it with transparent shoe wax (I didn't have proper wax polish for wood around, so this had to suffice). I cut out a hole in a wood scrap where the trunk will fit in.




Spacers were used to have identical gaps between the slats:




...and that's about it.

[tauster]

While the old year winds down, so does my pile of unfinished projects...

Here's another one from the dreadful pile of things waiting to be finished: My favourite piece of underdark scatter terrain. It's a bit embarrassing that I didn't end that one earlier, because all that was left to do was glueing on the face (which I left as is) and the glowing mushroom.

[tauster]

Also finished: Another maze on a CD base. For previous WIP posts, see here and here.


Not much to write about that one, except that I tried to make it look like large roots from an old tree that chose the maze's center as a good place to grew, and while growing, breaking the maze apart. Today, all that remains are the tree's roots and a rotted stump between the maze's ruins. I hope that evokes a feeling on age...

If I made it well, my players will guess all by themselves that this maze is truly ancient. Hey, at least a crafter and DM can hope, right?

[tauster]

I'm a huge fan of Monte Cook's Numenera. It's a great setting with a very unique feel to it, and it really has new monsters, items and adventure ideas that are standing out from the rest of the crowd. Here's one monster that I can't wait to craft: The Kalyptein Crab (pic found here)



It's an excuse to have some SciFi-looking things in your game even if you play in a standard fantasy world: simply have this critter come through a gate or let a NPC summon it. All you need is some technological-looking parts, then you ust add some crab legs (cheap plastic toy crabs are easy to find) and the head. If you feel really crazy, add a head of a totally different monster and mess with your players!

[tauster]

It is Christmas Eve and this year there will be no snow, which my boy really dislikes - no snowmen to built!

So what's a crafter to do? Make some snowmen together with the kid.

I grab some of my white balls... [You didn't expect me to ignore that pun, right?]
Large washers form the bases of the larger ones.




I had some of them already glued together, one or two years back, but never came around to finish them... Various bits from undead and other minis, with quite an arsenal of weaponry will make sure that nobody messes with these snowman. I plan a combat room session in a winter scenario with these as villains. *rubs hands*




Textured modelling paste (really just modelling paste with some rough sand in) smeared over the hotglued washers. You can see the based arms in the background.




I'll paint them up in white of course, but give them a very light turquoise washing. I also have tons of artificial snow left, plus several icicles. The hardest part will be giving them evil grins.

[tauster]

Xmas with small kids is so cool... The little ones really bring the spirit of these days to life. When Father Christmas visits and rumbles his 'have you been a good kid?'-speech, that really becomes what you remember from your own childhood: An awe-inspiring moment in your live.

Anyway, there's till some progress between the feasts and faerie visits. I got the arms basepainted, some drybrushing and some magnetizing done:




Since these guys don't have legs, movement is kind of an issue... I don't want them to slowly shuffle forward - that's hardly fear-inspiring. Instead they'll move similar to Dr. Who's Weeping Angels: Whenever someone blinks (more exactly: when nobody of the party looks their way, even for a split-second), they suddenly appear nearer to you.




Reviewing the vid above, I'm tempted to craft them another set of arms, a harmless traditional version. But them I would also have to give them different facial expressions, and that would mean making a whole other set of snowmen since you can't make magnetized faces. So the'll either perpetually smile, or frown.

Oh, and how about turning their enemies to snow, or freezing them? Throwing superfrozen snowballs? Giant icicles with an arcane punch of winter's essence? *silent cackle*

[edit]

OK, dinner is over, the kid's sleeping and there's a small time slot for another crafting mini-session.

I made another set of magnetized arms, this time the harmless traditional versions. That's what the players will encounter first.



Btw: The 'move only when nobody looks' idea sounds a bit unlikely to me. It worked in Dr. Who because they were only two people (at least in the episode introducing the weeping angels), and because they played with the light. In an outdoor scenario, snuffing the lightsource isn't going to cut it... but a blizzard is! So the party will encounter these guys in a blizzard, and no player can convince me that his character will go unblinking through the whole encounter. There will be some very hard Willpower checks... *mwahaha*

As you can see, I found a red, cone-shaped bead. It has the perfect size for a red fez. And no, I don't even try resisting that particular temptation to include it!




Textured the snowman and the new arms with Liquitex Flexible Modelling Paste. An while we're at temptations: some of them now suddenly got ...haircuts. You just gotta love that flexible modelling paste.




Attentive readers will have noted that one snowman is missing in the pic above. That because he wanted a special haircut, one that at the moment gravity helps to create:




I think making these guys funny (apart from the painted-on frowning eyebrows...) will make the shock all the harder when they start to move when nobody looks, and then suddenly change into weapon-bearing monsters. *rubs hands*

[tauster]

Found a handful of cone parts on the xmas walk... The same I used for flying critters quite some time ago, only that this time they will turn into flying ice-themed monsters, to go with the snowman.

After a protective coat of PVA glue and scrap metal glued to the bottom:




Textured with flexible modelling paste:

[tauster]

Painting comes along nicely.

After I tested the method on one, I washed all the snowmen in a watered-down GW Hawk Turquoise.




...drybrushed some pearlescent sheen on, and painted the eye-beads flat black.




I tried to give one blue-glowing eyes but didn't like the result:



The shade of the color is not right, and the effect draws too much attenttion to the hole in the bead. It simply doesn't look like glowing eyes, and I don't feel like endlessly experimenting with it until I get it right, so I painted over it with black and tried something else:



...better. Not perfect, but something I can live with. I probably don't do this on all of them because I want them to look innocious initially, but one frowning snowman won't spoil the surprice I guess. And after all it will give some of them a little indidivuality. I'll have one with a red fez, one that frowns, and perhaps have some other ideas for some of the others...

Next step: Noses. I don't have or want to make carrots just for this purpose, but I do have some tentacle tips that have broken off. Should work just as well I hope.




I punched a hole in the frowning one, superglued a carrot in... and realized that I should have painted it beforehand... *growns* So I carefully took it out of the snowman's face again and basepainted it orange. I'll probably do either a drybrushing or a washing later (and I don't have the slightest which method will look better...), so right now I'm left with a frowning snowman with a hole punched in it's face.  No wonder these guys gat angry at mortals.

---

I drybrushed three of the ice-flyers (anyone got a better name for them?) with a dark blue (actually a test pot of wall-color), and washed them.




The remaining ones just got that same washing as the snowmen over their white basepaint.




A bit of pearlescent sheen over both variants, then I declared them finished:

[tauster]

Finished, at least the snowmen themselves. All that remains is painting and magnetizing the weapons and arms.

Initially I didn't want to give everyone a carrot nose, but I ended up making five of them. Doesn't look too uniform, as each nose is different:



From left to right:

Gonzo (because of the crooked nose)
[to be named]
Punk (?)
[to be named]
The Little Doctor

Any name suggestions are welcome!

I like the tilted way the two smallest turned out. In the encounter, I'll group them together like on the pic so they seem to be whispering with each other. And mention that the PC aren't sure whether they hear someone talking or if it is only the blizzard. They'll handwave that away as the DM trying to scare them. And then the fun will begin in earnest. At least for me.

[tauster]

Wish you all a happy new year!

Now that we have this out of the way...

...here's a quick DIY tip for those of you always wanting to have a styrofoam cutter:



You can probably alter the design to make something larger, and add an old power adapter instead of the batteries. Just thinking...