My Hobby Room

A bit of something different for this blog post.

A common topic on many hobby forums and something I always find pretty interesting is that of hobby spaces and hobby rooms. The little (or sometimes large!) sanctuaries we all have where we work away at what we love.

When I lived with my parents and family I never had a permanent hobby space that I could set up and leave projects for "hobby fermentation" (the creative kind, not the smelly, foosty kind!). I always looked on at threads where forumers posted their glorious hobby spaces with envy, aspiring to one day have my own full time space for modelling and painting.

Now that I'm older and have my own place with my long-suffering girlfriend, for the last 2 years I finally have a hobby place to call my own and here's some pics to prove it! (and because I don't think I've shared "my setup" before here):


My desk, complete with paint ranks (could use a couple more to be fair!), hobby mat, spray booth, manequins, lamps (with day light bulbs), a pretty view along the river and plenty of drawers and storage for bits and pieces!


A rather empty miniatures cabinet - because everyone needs somewhere to keep their work and still be able to see it for inspiration and to measure progress agaisnt.



The drawers beneath my desk, full of all manner of hobby tools and materials, along with the numerous boxes of models and parts that have started to accumulate here.


Finally, the model cupboard (well, one side of!), each white drawer is full of boxes or sprues of miniatures (because you can never have too many...!).

Thanks to the Royal Wedding tomorrow, I'll have a rare opportunity to spend some extra time in here working on some of the recent projects I've shared so hopefully I'll have something to show from these over the weekend.

Why I Hate Metal Mini's + On The Workbench

I hate metal miniatures. There is nothing more frustratingly time consuming than preparing a metal miniature for painting.

With resin and plastic you can remove mould lines, flash and imperfections relatively quickly with a scalpel and files/sand paper. With metals though, it not only takes much longer to remove these, since the material is much stronger and more brittle, but you also have to put up with pitting on almost all surfaces.

Yes, sometimes resin miniatures get spots where the finish is a little rough and pitted, but with metals it tends to be all over the figure. Very annoying!

There is a couple of ways to deal with this:


Sanding

Sanding pitted and rough surfaces with fine grit wet/dry paper (starting with 800 and finishing with 1000+) is a good starting point for cleaning up the surfaces of a metal miniature. For tighter nooks and crannies, you can cut small strips and glue them to pieces of wire or cocktail sticks to get in at them.

However, sanding will only go so far to clean up a metal miniature. Often the pitting involves both raised bumps and recesses, so unless you want to spend forever sanding a couple of mm off the entire model, you are going to need to do some filling too...


Milliput

Milliput is a two part epoxy putty that is water soluble, meaning it can be diluted to create a milky solution that can be applied with a brush and used to fill small recesses. Larger mould shift line recesses can also be filled with it as, while still fresh, it can be worked into shape and smoothed flush with the mini. It can then be filed to a smooth finish once cured. The only downfall is that it takes a couple of hours to fully cure and can take a while to ensure all gaps have been filled flush.


Mr Surfacer

Mr Surfacer comes as a grey liquid in a jar which cures in about 15 minutes to a plastic like finish. It can be applied neat from the jar to fill bigger gaps, or thinned (using Mr Colour Thinner) to create a more fluid mixture which can be painted on to fill smaller, shallower recesses. Mr Surfacer (1000 or 1200) can also be thinned and used as a primer through an airbrush, leaving a smooth finish.


One of the main benefits of this product is that no sanding is necessary on the finish as it is self levelling. Of course, if you aren't covering the entire surface, you will likely still have a small seam where the edge of the dried Mr Surfacer meets the metal surface of the model. In these instances, some light sanding with wet dry will be all that's needed.


On the Workbench

Why this outburst of hatred towards metal miniatures? Well, recently I decided to start working on an Inquisitor scale Eversor Assassin miniature from Games Workshop which I've had lying around since last year.


A nice sculpt, though with a horrendous amount of mould lines, mould shift, flash and pitting. The armour plating in particular required a lot of work to get it back to it's smooth shapes and hard edges. I also chose to remove all of the protruding injector type things from the armour plates. Partly to allow me to get them smooth and in shape again, partly because they were badly cast and would have required a lot of work to get back to their intended state and partly because I just think it looks cooler and more fitting of a sleek, deadly assassin.

All in all, I've spent about 3 days on and off just cleaning this miniature up and re-sculpting, detailing and filling areas to get it ready for paint.

Urgh!

First and Only (Part III)

It's been a little quiet on the blog front over the last 3 weeks or so but I have found snatches of time here and there to progress this project. I'm finally at the end of the sculpting and converting stage (excluding a little bit of gluing) so painting and work on the base is up next.



The arm holding the weapon and the cape were probably two of the things I was kind of dreading having to do, but in the end they were actually a lot of fun to do and turned out quite well.

All in all I am very pleased with how he has turned out and I'm looking forward to slapping some paint on him. I've learned a lot during the converting and sculpting process on this figure, including finding a putty mix that I am really enjoying working with - hopefully this will carry over onto future figures too.

Feel free to let me know what you think, or any questions in the comments below.

Crystal Brush 2011 Awards - Jakob Rune Nielsen

Today's blog post is something a little bit different.


The Crystal Brush

Last year, CoolMiniOrNot.com announced that it would be organising a special painting competition, the Crystal Brush Awards, to take place at AdeptiCon 2011. With a $10,000 top prize and $2,000 and $1,000 respectively for 2nd and 3rd place, this is certainly the most valuable prize of any miniature painting competition I know of.

The competition is also a little special because of the way in which judging is handled. In addition to judging, which will take place at Adepticon in Chicago by a panel of experts including the legendary Mike McVey, the other 50% of the final scores will be determined by internet voting on the CoolMiniOrNot website.

Without getting in to discussion about the judging system (of which, personally, I am not a fan), it certainly makes things interesting in the run up. For a change, entrants are actively promoting their work in progress on entries in order to generate public interest which could pay dividends come the online voting.


Jakob Rune Nielsen

One entrant in particular, who's work I have long admired, is Jakob Rune Nielsen. I have been fortunate enough to be privy to the entire development process of Jakobs entry and I have to say, it is quite simply one of the most captivatingly unusual miniatures I have seen - embodying a great blend of John Blanche-esque "Gothic Sci-Fi", with Jakobs own creative abilities.

In the interest of helping a friend out therefore, I thought I would share with you a couple of pics of Jakob's progress and point you in the direction of his wonderful website (which, if you haven't already seen, you really should!):




Jakob has begun to share his WIP progress photo's on his website on a regular basis now, so if you want to follow the development progress, check it out. Having seen the final piece and painting begin, I can promise you, it is well worth following!

First and Only (Part II)

Since my original post on this I have spent a fair amount of time doing some research and amassing parts and ideas which have begun to find there way into my initial test model (shaping up to be Tanith scout Bonin) seen below.

As I wanted to keep my guardsmen to a realistic scale and proportions I've used Elysian guardsmen legs (from Forgeworld) as a base and sculpted the torso, neck and arms on top since there is a lack of pieces in the GW and Forgeworld ranges that fit with the look I'm going for for these. I have also removed the kneepads, thigh padding and harness straps from the legs and replaced them with a look more fitting with the Adrian Smith artwork I am using for inspiration.

There are still a lot of details to add, and this is obviously still very WIP, but I figured I would share it since I feel it is a sizeable step forward in the progress. Incase you are wondering about the pose - he's going to be moving silently to the edge of the wall he has his back to, weapon raised in his left arm ready to break cover and bring down the enemies of the Imperium.





More soon! Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments section.

Captain Korvydae Finished

Finally got around to finishing this figure - first of the year! A nice sculpt but with a few headaches due to typical Forgeworld cast issues (though much improved over the quality from about 3 yeard ago!). The jump pack in particular had a few ugly areas.




The other area I always find a little frustrating is the round metal dimples on the jump pack - painting metal over white is always an issue!


The paintjob is a bit predictable being fairly similar to the one on the Forgeworld site with the exception of the fully gold hammer and the gold raven on the jump pack top. I felt that it was important to emphasise his captain status with plenty of bling.


The base was a bit of an after-thought on this figure as I really just wanted to get him finish. It turned out ok, but there are areas I think could be improved. Still, I think the sand/dirt colour contrasts the armour quite nicely.


I spent the afternoon doing some early work on the first test model for the upcoming Tanith project too. I've settled on putting together (at least some) of the Gereon mission team.

More on this soon...

First and Only (Part I)

The Tanith are coming. A few years ago I converted up a couple of Blood Pact warriors inspired by the fantastic Gaunt's Ghosts novels by Dan Abnett. At the time I had always intended to get round to doing some Tanith and that time has finally come.


While there are metal models for Tanith guardsmen released by GW a good few years back now, these don't fit with either the cover artwork for the novels by Adrian Smith (below), or my own personal mental image of how they should look. Therefore, the majority of the models I will be putting together will be sculpted.

At the moment I'm pulling together inspiration artwork and bits and pieces for the models. I do have a question for any of you more knowledgable readers though...

Does anyone have any good descriptions for appearance of the following characters and their tattoos:

Ceglan Varl
Hlaine Larkin
Brostin
Oan Mkoll
Elim Rawne
Beltayne

Any descriptions would be much appreciated!

More on this project soon!

Sculpting Charts - Gone

Yesterday I put a sculpting chart up as a resource for folks to use, but after some good points from a friend (cheers Migs!) I've decided to scrap it and start again.

Looking again with fresh eyes, the proportions for the marines and humans don't scale 1:1 at all sizes - some creative modification is required in order to produce sculpts that both look realistic, yet also allow room for detail and characterisation.

Therefore I intend to rework these from scratch for each scale - it'll take a bit longer but hopefully be worth the effort.

Cheers,

Dante