A thing a week 2021 (week 17): cheap & easy painting

This week we have one of my favorite kinds of painting: lazy painting. That's not to say that the results aren't good, just that these don't take a terribly large investment in time. 

First up, we have three ghostly guys are hypnotic spirits from the Legend of Drizzt boardgame. I painted the two that on the left because their magnets had fallen off and needed to be re-glued. I didn't think to look for the third guy so they don't look as close as I'd like. It's basically the same as the ghosties I did way back in week 4. Notably I washed the last guy and still had the same paint-sticking issues. Not sure what's up with that. I think these guys are serviceable and probably should have colored the base rings.

These two are Hellhounds from Pathfinder Deep Cuts. Despite my dislike for these types of figs for their terrible mold lines and questionable priming. These have none of those problems being made of harder clear plastic. They clearly went through a lot of trouble making these transparent and I didn't want my paint job to completely mask that so I started with Pro Acryl yellow transparents and walked up drybrushing darker and more opaque from there. I don't think this sells very well and notably they didn't shoot very well. They look OK.

These last three are hell hounds from Reaper Bones 4. Unlike the Pathfinder Deep Cuts hell hounds, these aren't made of hard, clear plastic, but they were painted in much the same way. I wanted more contrast than I got with the other two so I took extra effort to start with a bright yellow in the cracks moving out to hull red darkened down with coal black at the end. Afterward I picked out their eyes and nostrils with a white and tinted it again with yellow to really sell the heat. I also took extra time to prepare some 32mm bases with crackle medium which were painted the same way. I think these three look a lot better and are much closer to where I wanted to get.

Overall these eight figs took maybe three hours all told and I think for that investment, they look pretty good.

2021 finished mini counter: 108/100 

A thing a week 2021, week 16 (stone and wood cabin)

My love of half-timbered buildings stretches pretty far back, really, since I discovered them several years ago. This is not one of those, it's instead a wood and stone cabin which you may have guessed from the title. As an additional challenge, I wanted to experiment with different techniques for getting the same results, namely, using cardboard for walls and chipboard for roofing. Spoilers: this worked out OK with caveats.

Construction was done in chunks over a couple days and finished up in maybe hours all told. The inner walls are single thickness cardboard with a footer of half inch XPS. The planking on the walls is a lot like the planking on my liftships, i.e., roughly 1/16" planks of various widths textured and glued to the structure. 

The roof is made of medium weight chipboard which is way easier to cut and glue together and both more rigid and more thin than the more typical Readi-Board I usually use. Down side: its thinness means that the front fascia has less to hold onto which made gluing them down harder. Overall, I think there's good and bad with these amendments and while I'm glad I experimented some, I don't think this will be my preferred method for future buildings.

Just like last week, the top floor is held with magnets while the ground floor is held by friction fit like my other buildings. Also just like last week, we start paintage with Mod Podge plus black craft paint. For this paint job I didn't want the planking to be super duper dark unlike the inspiration photo I worked from. I started with a fairly light brown drybrushed with an off white. After that I hit it with a couple layers of wash with the terrible brown craft paint wash I made years ago + Liquitex Raw Umber ink and the same terrible wash + Daler Rowney Red Earth Ink for the roof and top floor. Every time I use it, I'm struck by how wood like the raw umber ink is over a brown + light highlight. 

Probably this building wanted to be darker. The inspiration picture was much darker, anyway. I don't think the roof is quite as nice as last week's and the wood seems newer and is lower contrast than I think it should be. I like the re-addition of the chimney (notably missing from many of my buildings) and despite wanting tighter shingles, they ended up the same size I usually make them. So there's that.

The bottom windows and door are glued into the walls without transparency. There's a piece of yellow post-it behind the granny grating to pseudo-stand-in for a lit interior. In retrospect, I should have painted them instead. The top floor's windows are cut out but with the same granny-grating and post-it construction. The intent was to have translucent window pains to show a dollar store tea light through. Well, it turns out that under normal lighting conditions, the tea light isn't strong enough to show through. That's how we learn--by tryin' stuff. I might redo the windows on this building sometime in the future. Watch this space!

2021 finished building counter: 3/5

A thing a week 2021, week 15 (half-timbered building)

I haven't built a building for a long time. In fact, the last one was way back in May of 2019 in the first iteration of A Thing A Week Weekly Challenge. By the time this article goes to print it will have been nearly two years. Also, future perfect tense--triple sentence score! I've learned a lot about working with foam in that time so it was instructive to revisit the topic. Note that buildings take up a lot of space compared to miniatures and I'm going to need to rethink my storage solution.

I had two goals and (spoilers) I got both. First, I wanted to experiment with magnetizing the different floors which would sidestep some difficult high-precision crafting with low-precision materials. This worked out OK. Second, I wanted a curved roof.  This was less OK than I would have liked but that's how you learn, right? Construction was pretty typical and was completed within a couple days. Painting stretched out for the next couple days but wasn't particularly difficult.

The base is a piece of Readi-Board foam core hit with a texture roller and glued to piece of chipboard. I couldn't work out how to get either a magnet or a nail into the base without a mess so I kept the friction-fit build. The walls are a quarter inch by two inch tall XPS textured with a ballpoint pen. The windows and modular portals are cut out with an exacto. The second floor is the same foam core hit with a different texture roller. The walls are reinforced with craft sticks and I was not super careful when gluing them together so they're not as square as I'd like.

The magnetic mechanism is basically short roofing nails driven into the corners of the second floor. They attach to small 3x2mm magnets glued into the second floor's surface. I started gluing stuff together with PVA with the intent of keeping the seams tight. This was a mistake, though I did need to use PVA to glue the magnets in and for shingles as per usual. Once I switched to using hot glue, everything sped up and generally things went better.

The roof was by far the most complicated part of this build. I had the two roof surfaces cut to size already. I settled upon throwing a beam at the top pretty quickly and settled upon freehanding curved A-frames from drawn patterns on foam core. To these I glued XPS chunks for attach points and glued the roof surface to it. I wasn't as careful as I needed and the place they meet at the top isn't straight and there's a very noticeable bow in it. I probably needed a larger beam since it doesn't hide the tops of the shingles. The fascia on the front of the roof surface is also not straight though it's a lot less noticeable.

Painting started with the typical coat of black craft paint + Mod Podge and was followed by a basecoat of craft paint. I also drybrushed more starkly than usual with craft paint but instead of using my normal lousy ancient stinky washes I used real artist inks this time. Nutmeg brown + antique white drybrush hit with a coat of Liquitex Raw Umber look convincingly like preserved wood. I also used

Daler Rowney Red Earth and Daler Rowney Indigo for the mahogany themed floor on the second story and the blue slate on the ground floor respectively. 

Overall, I think this is a good building and a good reprise of some skills that I haven't put into use for a long, long time.

2021 finished building counter: 2/5

A thing a week 2021, week 14 (corner organizer!)

This week we have something completely different and I didn't enough about what I was doing to take proper WIP pictures. While I'd like to count this as a building, that'd be a stretch even for me so instead it'll just be a weekly entry without progress toward other goals. So WTF is it?

Several weeks ago by the time of this posting I saw a thing online, a thing that I'd like, that would bring my messy painting table into something resembling sanity. This would be that thing. It's a corner piece for a modular hobbying organizer and one that I might have bought and imported from Poland if they hadn't run out. Instead, I built my own.

Construction is about as dead simple as you can imagine. It's about $1.50 of black Readi Board from a nearby dollar store which is my go-to for this kind of light construction. It doesn't need to hold a lot of weight and doesn't have many moving parts but it does need to sit between my home-made paint rack featuring prominently in week 31 of last year and the much nicer wooden one that someone gave me a couple jobs ago that takes up more space but holds fewer bottles. That space and the surrounding area have accumulated a pile of unsightly junk most of which doesn't get used super often but that I still want handy and there isn't generally that much of it.

The hardest part of the operation was cutting out the L-shaped pieces one of which is the bottom and one of which is the base of the top. The cutouts were used as the two risers and everything was more or less glued together. I got fancy this time around and made the little drawer-y things which have already proven their value. And by moving some of the paint from the nicer holder on the right, I could consolidate some stuff while opening up space to hold extra paint holders made up of 1" dowels. 

I like building tools--I'm pretty sure I've said that here before, and this is no exception. I like even more organizing things and this piece hits both. Besides which, I've opened up space for more paints...and I love buying paints!

Nostalgia, it's a thing

I've spokentyped here about a few of the handful of things I've got nostalgia for. They're few and far between but for me, like I imagine a lot of you, they're special. Space Battleship Yamato, Star Blazers in the States, is one of those things. Some of my earliest memories of a childhood long in the rear-view are of watching this on the small screen in the early 80s. It colors how I think of sci-fi, epic fantasy, and ship design, and it shows in many of the things I build even today. "Is that from Star Blazers?" is one of the comments I fish for with my designs, right up there with "I can't believe that's Lego."

I've been told that 2199 was really good but I'd been disappointed at how poorly the original had aged when I re-watched it about a decade ago. At that time I'd moved hundreds of miles away from anything I cared about and it stood in stark contrast to Robotech which I'd revisited around that same time which had aged well. So I was hesitant and as usual, got swept away in a sea of other concerns. I purchased the complete series of 2199 on blu-ray months ago and for reasons I can't sufficiently explain, the box containing the discs sat unwatched on my desk. 

Star Blazers 2199 is almost everything I'd hoped and dreamed. It's the Star Blazers I'd always imagined existed but was in doubt ever did. It's the spiritual successor of the original but updated and embellished with some 21st century sensibilities. I finished the last episode about 30 minutes ago at a time that I desperately needed it without realizing it. It is a beautiful thing and by no means perfect but then again, what is? I expect to watch it again in the near future and I desperately want more. 2202 discs are on their way to me and by God I need it to be as good as 2199 is. 

Years ago when I started my Lego journey, I knew I wanted to build the Yamato but I also knew that I didn't have the skill yet to do so. In much the same way that the original Mass Effect pushed me to build my SR1, I feel that same compulsion now--a compulsion to do right by a thing that means a lot to me in ways that I can't adequately express. I think I have the skill and resources to feasibly do this now which would mark a thing off my bucket list. I'm hoping that in the months to come I can share that journey, one that I expect to be as meaningful as my first steps into the Lego world, and with a subject that I truly love.

I suppose that's the power of nostalgia and I hope it will carry me through to completion. Wish me luck.