A thing a week 2020, week 44

As discussed for the last few posts, several weeks ago I broke down and bought a 3D printer.  It was round three or four of my roughly eight month cycle of "wow, that'd be fun to build stuff with" and "I have too many hobbies and stuff already."  I knew I would eventually break down but it seemed like most of the hobbying media I consume started talking about how awesome resin printers were right around the beginning of the summer.  I suppose I'd already lost that fight. I've got some pretty lofty goals for it which is going to require me to do some 3d modeling and I've got to say that I'm finding Blender to be an awful, unintuitive beast of a thing.

3D printing is its own hobby and has its own learning curve and despite the fact that most of the goods are digital, they can still be super spendy.  The seven skellingtons are a free set that mostly printed correctly.  Properly supporting figures is an art form and one I'm not good at.  Luckily, these guys came pre-supported but were a goddamn pain to de-support after the fact which is evidenced by the fact that many of them still have some of the supports still attached.   I hid these ineffectively as spearpoints sticking in the skellington.  They're a speed paint as one might expect (I mean, they're skeletons, what do you want?) and I think they look OK.  

The bases are Green Stuff World texture rollers over Extra Firm Super Sculpey with some sand stuck to the base.  I was going for a "dark temple floor with faintly glowing red runes" which, I dunno, almost sells.  I could have sold it more with some OSL but I wasn't super interested in doing that for these guys though I certainly could have.  Base coat was skeleton bone and washed with home-made wash adulterated with matte medium and made forever ago for terrain.  Overall, including basing which happened over several days (glue takes time to dry, yo) these were done in right around six hours total which is about how long they took to print.

You might also notice a lighter background in these shots. I'm trying (unsuccessfully) to improve the shoots here and picked up a bigger piece of supposedly-black poster board. I might print a cradle for the camera to avoid my awful shaky-cam shots. The small dollar store tripods I've been using are a little too tall, still, and I've got more work to do to sort out my lighting.

2020 finished mini counter:  147/50