New Mini!

New mini!

This is Atropos, a half elf (?) bard, painted for Yoshikagequeens' character in an upcoming campaign! Atropos will be in the same party as Frix! I'm looking forward to it.

I'm weirdly chuffed with my choice of dark red for his pants, and I think the highlights along the creases look really good. I also got the opportunity to finally properly use some of the colour shift paint I got like half a year ago, to put some glitter in his hair, so that's neat. I put the colour shift just in the parts and underside of his hair, to kind of make it looks like some sort of underlayer shining through. I really like the effect in person, seeing the glitter shift as you move your viewpoint is quite cool! Photos don't really do it justice.

My least favourite bit of this mini is the base. I shoved a generic column into a generic base, rather than using the desk base that comes with the stl for this mini. I wanted to push the character more into bard territory, rather than the professor character it's originally meant to be. I think it works for that, and I like the column he's leaning on, but the ground of the base is just a bit too plain. I put some cracks in it with an Exacto blade and added some cut up grass tufts to give it a bit of texture, but it's still not quite right. In the end, I just had to stop fiddling with it before I made it worse.

It's a learning experience to remember next time I try and make a custom base though, gotta remember to have texture or something on there.

The mini used here is Professor Syiva, by Twin Goddess Miniatures.

The column used on the base is Socket Pillar, by Phillip Meys.

Just finished up painting this mini for @yoshikagequeen's character, Sunlil! She's an Air Genasi storm sorcerer, in a game we're both in. My character in that game is the Barbarian Mars, which you can check out here.

This is actually the second time I've painted this mini, the first one was done on my FDM printer, so I couldn't do the swirling air currents around the body, and it ended up being too fragile and breaking apart. (I glued the foot to the base paint on paint, which sure didn't help).

Now that I have a resin printer though, I can do cool minis like this. I printed the air currents and base in transparent resin, and tinted it with a little alchohol ink, which is an effect I'm in love with, and will definitly play with for any future spell effects I need.

I've also pinned sunlil to the base with a piece of wire into the foot, so it should be a lot stronger of a bond.

In terms of painting, I'm pretty happy with how this mini turned out. I like the colours on her outfit and the gradient in the hair. Skin continues to be a bit difficult for me, particularly a tone I'm not particularly used too, but I think it turned out ok. This is also the favourite eye I've done yet, I tend to lean towards painting the pupil/iris too small, and having it look a bit derpy. It sure helps that the other eye is hidden by hair, so I don't have to worry about matching the direction the eyes are looking in.

Overall, I'm looking forward to seeing this mini in play on the table :)

This mini is Ellie the Genasi Mage (Air), by Twin Goddess Miniatures.

Carrying on from my last post, heres some pictures of me pouring resin on my octopus mini!

Got all my materials together. Resin, blue alchohol ink, measuring cup and my mini all set up with its resin dam from my previous post.

I like the patterns the alchohol ink forms when you add it to the resin. I'm doing 3 30 ml pours for this mini. I've found on previous attempts that doing the full 90ml all at once can soften the PLA I print my minis in enough for them to start peeling paint and distorting. This resin sets fast enough that I can pour the next layer after a couple of hours, so its not too annoying to have to wait.

First pour in! Doing these on a plastic plate, just in case any resin manages to get out of the dam. I've gotten pretty confident in making these dams resint tight, but I'd rather be right and waste a 2 dollar plate, than wrong and out a cutting matt and anything else the resin makes it too.

I was a bit incautious mixing this layer, and theres a lot of bubbles that never managed to rise out. I really should get a vacuum chamber if I'm going to keep doing resin stuff, I guess.

second and third pours in. Still a fair few bubbles, but much less than the first layer. I was a bit more careful mixing up these two pours, but I still ended up with a fair amount of bubbles in the end product.

I went back and took a closer look at my sharks, and I think I had the same issue with them, but the darker resin helps hide it. Something to remember the next time I do something like this I guess.

Resin all set, and dam removed! I didn't end up having any resin leak below the base at all, which is always nice.

I did have some marks left behind on the resin unfortunately, you can see them if you look closer. In a couple of places it happened right between resin pour layers, and I suspect those are because I was overzealous popping bubbles with my barbeque lighter, and I think I melted the laminating sheet a little. There are also some marks on the top layer, where the resin was still just a little soft and the sheet stuck to it. That'll teach me to be impatient I guess :/.

Adding some wave effects to the surface. This also has the neat effect of helping to disguise the lip of resin that forms from it clinging to the edge of the dam.

I just use Liquitex gloss gel for this, and shape it with a paddle pop stick. It looks pretty thick now, but as it dries over the next day or two it'll mostly turn transparent. Then it'll just need a quick drybrushing of white to pick out the ridges, and it'll be done! I'll upload a final pic when thats done!

I'm glad I finally got around to getting this guy off my shelf and into resin. He was staring at me judgementally while I painted other things.

I do wish the resin had turned out a bit better, but given that its not something I've used a lot, I'm not too upset about it, and I've got some ideas on how to improve with it next time so it wasn't a wasted effort.

While I'm posting things, I just painted this neat little ruined portal terrain piece! Just a real simple paintjob on this one, took me about an hour total, including waiting for paint to dry.

I had fun freehanding the little runes, and I really enjoy how the metallic paint lets the blend in most of the time, and show really strongly if the light is just right.

I did end up only putting them on one side of the portal. Because uh... it shows which side of the portal you're meant to stand on... yeah... not at all because my hand was getting tired, and i was starting to run out of ideas for runes.

:T

This is Ancient Stone Structure - Portal Gate 3D print model by Odgardian

I'm going to post a whole bunch of my minis, all at once because no one can stop me, so there. :)

Here are all my minis, nicely sorted onto my ikea shelves that I love, but also are very annoying because they don't sell extra shelves for these ones seperately >:(

All the minatures on these shelves are 3d printed.

Froghemoth! This is one of my older models, and I kinda want to redo this one at some point with what I've learnt since, but I still like him! printing him was a real pain, becaue I kept having clogs on large prints at the time. I ended up with like 3 or 4 froghemoth butts before I got a success.

Sharks! Embedded in resin cylinders with reef bases. These are some of my favourites, mostly because resin embeds are cool :D. It took me a couple of tries to figure out how to get these to work, between having to figure out how to make a smooth, cylindrical resin cast, and the first attempt melting the mini when I tried pouring all the resin at once.

If I could change one thing on these, I'd probably use just a little less dye on them. They're just a tad too opaque to really see whats going on inside.

More resin! A gelatenous cube this time, with some random bits embeded in it.

This one was simpler than the sharks, I just 3d printed a gelatenous cube mini, covered it in resin to smooth out the layer lines, and used it to make a sillicone mold I could just pour resin into. The hardest part was trying to get all the bits floating throughout, rather than just sinking to the bottom.

Kobold gang! not pictured: the 9 or so other kobolds I still need to get around to painting.

I've only fairly recently started trying to make more interesting bases for my minis, and I'm pretty happy with how these simple rocky/gravelly terrain bases turned out.

A muscly troll! Painting all the muscles on this guy was a lot of fun. It was my first attempt at highlighting shapes rather than just edge highlighting or drybrushing, and I'm pretty happy with how it went overall. Lots of room to practice the technique on this guy :D.

BOO! Spooked yah, right? Don't worry, these ghosts aren't real, just miniatures. :P

I mentioned in a previous post that I found I could dye clear resin prints colours with alchohol inks, and these ghosts are actually what I figured that out on!

I did these quite a while back, but then I left them for a few weeks until I made some bases, and then I left them sitting in my light box for a couple more weeks before actually taking these photos, because for some reason I really just didn't want to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the transparent ghostly effect is cool, but I also really like the bases I did for them too. This was me trying out adding little extra bits to them, going for a bit of a haunted manor theme. I'm pretty happy with it on the whole, although I think the beer mug and the pot are just a bit too big and attention grabbing. I really want the focus to be on the mini, with the base elements blending in more. I am quite happy with how the kitchen tile bases came out too. I started out trying to freehand sculpt them out of greenstuff, then when I figured out that I am not by any means a compenent enough sculptor to make that work, I quickly designed and printed a little tile impression jig to make clean, straight tiles for me. I made and printed it fast enough that I didn't waste my greenstuff, so thats pretty cool I think.

On the whole, I'm happy to have these translucent spooky ghosts in my collection.

Miniatures in this post are made by:

Townfolks ghost male and Townfolks ghost female by Titan Forge Miniatures.

Ghost by Great Grimoire.

Base in this post are made by:

Gothic Tombstones by Medusa Miniatures.

Table Scatter, Extra Dining Items, Books, Piles & Rows by Darkest Desire.

Candle Holders by Pellinor.