Wednesday 27 January 2016

Round and round we go

When I made my paint carousels (see previous post), I wish I had known that you can get these.



It is a 3 inch 'lazy Susan' bearing, bought from Ebay for £2.99 delivered. I might still use one, or more, if I remake the carousels. I've got some ideas for making a much better one, but it will involve getting some mdf, or ply, laser cut and I've yet to get any quotes.

Meanwhile, I am going to use it with my ceramic palettes. When I am working on an individual figure, and jumping between half a dozen shades, it can be a drag (literally) to be constantly turning the palette around.

Monday 18 January 2016

28mm Astronomer-Wizard

This is a Reaper Miniatures 28mm 'scale' figure from their Dark Heaven Legends range, called 'Heinz Stargazer' (03291). I painted it back in early December, as a Christmas present, and only remembered about the photos today. It was painted in acrylics. The base is made from an ordinary plastic 40mm plinth base and a circle of embossed plasticard cut from one of the sheets that can be had from Wills.

As ever, if you click on the pictures you can see them a little bigger.









 







 



  


Tuesday 12 January 2016

Dwarf Piggy Progress

Today I hope to get back on with finishing the Pig mounted Dwarf cavalry. Just the metallics, varnish, bases and flag left to do. This is how I left them between Christmas and New Year.


Monday 11 January 2016

Painting Carousels

Having noticed them in the very first post on this blog, a couple of people have asked how I went about making my painting carousels. When I made them I posted some pictures to my Facebook page and on The Guild, so this may be familiar to some of you.

I only took photos when I made the first one. During construction I learned a thing or two and modified the construction for numbers two and three. I'll discuss those changes at the bottom.

First, the materials. I used some balsa wood, a cardboard tray acquired from the supermarket, the bottom half of a smallish box, a TV turntable and a hot glue. The most expensive of these is the turntable. I got mine from Ebay for £3-4 each. The turntable is not in this picture, but you can see it below.




Using lots of hot glue I started off sticking things together.

 




I used an old turntable, that had done duty in the spray booth and so was covered in grey primer.




 


To stop paint bottles on the lowest level falling off I added some side bars.


 






 And the finished carousel with paint bottles on it.


 


It worked well but I found that each level was not sufficiently higher than the one below and I was finding it awkward to read the labels on the bottles. So numbers two and three ended up with double layers of balsa to raise them up more.

You can see that I also found that there was no need for a cardboard tray for the upper level,


 


That's it, very simple really and they took about 15 minutes each to make. They do the job, the only slight annoyance is that once a few are taken off the carousel the others can fall about a bit, but the carousels are much cheaper than buying the commercially available ones.

If anything is not clear, or you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will do my best to answer them.

EDIT - Postscript. Lately there has been a lot of traffic to this topic. Please note that if I were making a carousel now I would do it differently. Please check out my post "Round and Round we go" (27th January 2016) about 'lazy susan' bearings.

Thursday 7 January 2016

New Year Update

Just before Christmas I managed to get sometime at the painting table, but then life took over and I've done little since. Hopefully, that will now change and I will be able to get plenty of time sat with brush in hand.

I managed to get the Piggy flesh done ....




I've named my Dwarf leader 'Torun Granitejaw' and managed to move his paint job along quite a bit. Might even get it finished this weekend.








 



My fantasy armies are all duel purpose, for Oldhammer and for Kings of War. The latter gives you the option of having a 'Steam Behemoth', so when I saw the 'Dwarf Runic Golem' from Alternative Armies I couldn't resist it. It took a little while to clean up, as there were a couple of biggish air holes, and then after a black undercoat it got a squirt of Vallejo Air 'Rust' 71.069.





More soon. Maybe ;-)