First 3D sculpts and prints

 There's definitely a learning curve to this...

It involves sculpting something, printing it, going back to the sculpt and making tweaks, printing it... then going back to make more tweaks before printing again. And so on again...

These are very quick and messy sculpts just for practice. As we all know- it's not as simple as scaling a sculpt up or down, the entire style of the thing needs change - take the spears here as a prime example.

I'm a convert to digital now so 2022 should be extremely productive.

The Wheel weaves...

I was never a fan of the Wheel of Time books (I think I only got to book 4...) and even less of a fan of the new Amazon series.

That said, these conversions are based on a couple of the main characters. Mostly Frostgrave plastics from Northstar, with the guy on the left using Fireforge Mongol legs and torso. Most of the arms needed sculpting, along with a lot of details and touch ups.

Ice Dragon painting WIP

All the base colours are blocked in and a few washes are going on. This will take a while to paint... and the base will take even longer (few more snow layers and textures still to go).

More Frostgrave terrain painted

 

These latest 3 terrain pieces painted up relatively easy, and they seem to configure in a few different ways quite nicely (totally unplanned).

The entire collection now needs details like signs, railings and the odd crate. I really want to add icicles and snow to everything but it's quite a delicate procedure so I might experiment with photoshopping these images before I jump in with glue and artificial snow... I've never been satisfied with my winter efforts on terrain in the past.

Some gratuitous shots with a background skyline with the Loke battlements DM screen.

Christmas decorations equates to Frostgrave terrain

I wanted to make something that might be a row of houses or reflect a little street in downtown Felstad. I'll do more later continuing this theme but this is a nice little versatile set to start with.

Almost everything is from Firedragon Games: XPS foam sheets and resin windows and doorways. Only the cardboard tiles and wood were entirely raw materials.

In hindsight I might have preferred to make everything from scratch, I'm not sure how those windows will look next to the actual wood texture once painted. I'm sure it will be fine...

New stuff for Frostgrave...

I have a feeling Frostgrave is one of these games that I'll play for life and always wheel it out around the winter time.

This thing is from Steamforged games Epic Encounters series, the box set called Halls of the Orc King. It's a snowy/winter themed set of miniatures.

They're all way too big, more like games workshop 'heroic' style size. But, they will make good big monster types.

This one here is perfect for some kind of stone troll, which can join my slowly forming Orc warband.

And not to be outdone, I'm going bigger with my next painting session... with a true Mountain King and an Ice Dragon. The Dragon is from the Reaper Bones range. I forget where the giant mini is from, I ordered it off Etsy months ago, super sized.

Painting Infinity Nomads

I've had a short break from sculpting and focused on painting all the Nomads I had for Infinity, this is the stuff from Operation:Icestorm and Beyond Icestorm sets.

Both out of print unfortunately (I think).

I'll come back to this range and do the Pan-O faction at a later date, which I assembled and undercoated years ago and never got round to actually painting.  I've also acquired the Onyx Contact Force as well as the Spiral Corps army packs, along with a handful of random characters... which might sit in the box for a few more years. Maybe.

I think the Fembots were from Statuesque Miniatures, nice addition to the collection and they blend right in... despite my lazy paintjob on them.

Infinity miniatures (and Star Saga.. yes they seem to scale quite well... for use in Stargrave)

I've had these minis for a couple of years but never really did anything with them.  I decided to give them a lick of paint as part of my foray into 3d sculpting and printing to see how I felt about the style and size of them.

There's no denying that Infinity minis are very cool and stylish, and most importantly for me they're internally consistent as a range when it comes to style and size (mostly). 

Heroic style has really bugged me for years. I always drift back to it as a fun and familiar style, but 3d sculpting offers up the opportunity for me to produce different version of my minis - heroic style, or even Infinity style. I'm under no illusions you can simply shrink or inflate a sculpt, features will need to be tweaked accordingly in every case when you switch size and style.

As a mini designer Infinity stuff really falls down in one key area for me - too many parts to glue together when the mini could easily be a single cast. Total pain. 

That said, infinity stuff is seriously easy to paint! Way more easier than some of the recent GW plastics. The small size of infinity means less surface area. No big areas to blend, so less need for washes. A fine detail brush and a steady hand are a must, but layering of paint is very effective. 

The mantic games Star Saga plastics are essentially cheap and nasty casts, the sculpts are pretty decent but I'd say slightly over engineered... too much detail and gubbins that really aren't necessary. Still, quick table quality paintjobs on them using my Inifinity approach seems to have come out OK.

And yes, they scale really well with Infinity. 

Going off on a tangent now, this little collection I have will be perfect for Stargrave!

Featured sculpt surprise

I recently ordered the army painters wet palette after years of using a homemade one with foam and greaseproof paper.

The palette came with a little army painting guide booklet that I quickly flicked through before it went into the recycling... I got a nice surprise and saw a very old sculpt of mine was in there as a painted example.

This little guy, painted green and red was originally sculpted back in October 2012 (I had to check the tags 'Crowmantia' on this blog to find the original post.

I'd only really been sculpting properly for about 3 years at this point, the sculpt was actually OK, it's just the anatomy and overall style I look back and question now. I dug out an original resin cast from my stash but could not for the life of me find the original sculpt. On the right of the original cast however is the original sculpt of the dolly... I made several such in the early days and re-used them multiple times. The sculpt is in grey procreate and you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a resin copy.

At the time I was really liking the Victrix Napoleonic plastics and I did an entire range of steampunk/low tech science fiction minis to match the exact scale Victrix were using. Pretty much every post on this blog from 2012 up to 2015 was done in this style - the original tox troopers, desert rebels, imperial borderers, cultists, aether pirates etc. 

'Slimline' is probably the best way to describe some of them.

So old I've lost the original image and photobucket have watermarked my online version!

I contacted Anvil Industry in 2012 about casting some of my dollies in resin for me and they kindly accepted the commission. Once I'd got some finished sculpts in order using said dollies, Anvil put them into production for me. And that's how I really got started with licensing, casting and getting my sculpts out for sale (well, actually from about 2008 I was active on the Troll Forged sculpting forums and had some stuff put into production by them in the states, my sculpts weren't the best but the owner/operator was a very kindly a supportive chap who gave lots of aspiring sculptors a chance).

Bit of a nostalgic post about nothing, but I got a genuine little smile seeing this sculpt in here. It's also quite timely, I've had a slew of emails from people asking if my sculpts can be featured in their upcoming rulebooks recently so I might have some surprises like this in the years ahead.