GodOfCheese

Thanks! I took a leap of faith and used a really tiny art pen. It came out okay, though the OSL doesn't show very well on the ink :-)

One of the kids pulled this wonderful sculpt out of my miniature bin and said "You have to paint THIS!" So I did. I painted it concurrently with Sophie, but the children did not understand why I called them "Wyvern and Shirley". Womp womp womp. Anywayyyyy... This mini was awesome to paint, except that I wanted the wyvern to be reasonably camouflaged in its native ruins environment, but I kept accidentally making the camo too effective, and the wyvern kind of vanished into the ruins. Great for fighting adventurers, but not so much from an aesthetic perspective. I ended up with this color scheme, which was hopefully close enough to echo the stone, but not so close as to actually hide in it :-)

I was painting with a bunch of kids, and one of them said "I'll bet you can't finish that bird guy before lunchtime!" I present to you: the bird guy before lunch time.

I love this sculpt's hair and beard. It reminds me of a roman politician or something neat and classical.

This miniature had some DRAMA associated with it. I painted her for quite a while, and then she went into a kind of miniature limbo in which I just couldn't stand any color on the sculpt. Finally I ended up dunking her in the Simple Green and leaving her there for a week. The paint came off, but strangely the bones sculpt was dyed a strange orange color and its texture changed. It got really, really soft... almost floppy. ...but eventually I got the fig to take a brown basecoat, and the rest of the painting process went off without much of a hitch, except the OSL. The figure was so weirdly soft that drybrushing made it wobble. So her OSL is a lot lighter than I would have hoped. Anyway, here she is :-)

When I first started painting this little beastie, I had visions of drool and viciousness. But after several mouldline challenges I decided that this thing's mouth was already busy enough. :-)

Oh wow, that sounds a ton better than the six-hour cure time I had with my resin. I'm thinking of some other watery stuff so I will check that out! I wrapped the base in wide painter's tape, which I don't recommend at all. I figured that the outward pressure from the resin would more or less maintain the cylindrical shape. It turns out that this is only true for the shallowest part of the pour though (you can see that it's not circular toward the top... it kind of distorts off to one side). The tape came off really easily, but it really lent itself to stippling along the curved surface. I think I was sanding and polishing it for almost a week, and the base still smells of auto polish (why the bottom is still unpainted-- I don't think the paint will stick to it yet). I had read that deep pours can also cause cracking, but I missed the part about pouring slowly :-( This guy was like six pours over several days (I'm sure FamilyOfCheese was getting quite sick of hearing alarms go off to tell me to go pour the next layer), but I was probably pouring too fast or not mixing long enough. Oooh, if I'd known that I'd have tried it -- this base was so wide that I really would not have to worry about spilling. Next base will be small though so it'll be a while before I can take this advice! :-) My assumption for water effects was that creating ripples in the water would bend surface light (like real water does). This would distort the view from the top down, which is currently crystal clear. I'd have been okay with that if the view from the sides wasn't also distorted. Next time I'll try to do this with a rectangular base, so the side-viewing angles are more visible, and the view from the top can be waves or ripples without fear of distortion. I'm not brave enough to try it on this model yet :-) This is gorgeous! I'll definitely try to hunt down that video. I really want to do some churning water effects with my minis. Thanks! I wanted to do fish, but couldn't think of a way to get them to sit upright in the resin. They seemed like they'd just flop over and look weird. For larger things (like the shark) I can suspend them by a fin, then remove the suspension on the next pour when the model is safely trapped in resin, but little things are harder :-(

Thanks! I was kind of struggling with staircase-to-ground transition. I thought about putting some cotton "fog" around the base, but cotton is so fragile that I would worry it would become unusable for gameplay. Vegetation sounds good though... I might try that if I can find/make some flock that doesn't detract from the whole washed-out effect prevalent in the rest of it :-)

When I saw this miniature during the kickstarter, I immediately thought "oooh! I'll put him in a watery diorama of epoxy resin. I have lots of little shells and things that might look like underwater plantlife. It'll be awesome!" When my Bones arrived, I thought "YES! It's an interesting size, but that means the underwater scene will need to be that much bigger. More flock!" Then WifeOfCheese had a near-miss with covid19 and I thought "I'm about to be completely quarantined for weeks! We can't go camping! Oh well... but hey, I can finally pour this resin! This will be super-educational and distract me from the nightmarish horror of sars-cov-2!" It turns out that epoxy resin is a harsh mistress. Like a cruel Charybdis, she is unforgiving, yet somehow bubbly and only visible from certain angles. Originally my plan was to do water-effects on the surface to make it look like the shark is moving through, but the curvature of the side would mean that the rest of the shark wouldn't be visible at all, so I present my experiment in resinous necromancy: the zombie shark.

This guy presented an unusual challenge. His base, which I love, was just a little bigger than a standard Large, but is a tad thin. It just doesn't look big enough for the diorama inside. It merits a plinth, but at the same time, any plinth I added would make the mini base even bigger than a size-Large base, complicating gameplay. So I got to experiment with magnets! This way, the base pops off for gameplay, and sits safely on the plinth for display. This is my first resin mini... I noticed that the chainmail on his back doesn't exactly meet up. I wasn't sure what to do with that -- if I shaved it down, it seemed like it wasn't going to match up and there would still be a visible seam. What have other people done on this mini?

The scales near the stress fractures look kind of voxelated too, which is weird. I wonder if they 3d-printed the master but didn't antialias (or whatever the 3d equivalent is)...? I almost backed that KS because the models were so gorgeous (especially this one), but I really balked at the price. I hope they fix it for you!

MOST impressive!

I love it! The colors are so brilliant! I'm actually painting this right now, and am torn between painting it a huge snake and painting it as a huge statue of a snake. Did you have trouble making the freehand details symmetrical on yours?

Oh, even with heavy polyurethaning, the foam is still fragile. I'm just hoping that the wooden base will be enough to keep the mini safe if it's ever used in a game. Until then, it'll be safely tucked away in a look-but-don't-touch location. :-)

Thank you! The terrain part of the base is 3/4" pink insulation foam leftover from a remodel long ago. The wooden base is a circle cut from scrap oak, stained and sealed. I never throw away junk like that. :-) I scratched it more or less randomly with a box cutter for about twenty minutes at different angles so that it took lots of notches out-- especially from the edges. Once I was reasonably satisfied with the scratching, I cut out holes for the dragon's feet and test-fit it as tightly as I could. Coated the upper surface with white glue, then poured sand onto it. I did this a couple of times to get it to pile a bit. I also put some glue into the deep spots and pushed sand into those. When done, I poured the sand off and knocked away anything loose. Glued aquarium rocks to strategic locations Glued some sand to the aquarium rocks to serve as lichens When utterly dry, spray painted it black. Because canned spray paint propellant can melt the foam, I used my HVLP spray gun on lowest pressure to deliver craft acrylic paint. Even still, the gun tries to blast the foam away, so this little task was more adventurous than strictly required... Once dry, sprayed with polyurethane sealant. The foam is easily dented, which ruins the paint even if it deforms back into shape... it's not as resilient as bones. :-) The foam terrain base, the wood base, and the sculpt are mated with white glue. I love making terrain. I just wish I had reasons to do so more often :-)