In which we get crafty, get some paint on a chaos model, and do some dwarven engineering.
Figures for the Whole Family
Last weekend saw me do some unusual miniature “painting” with my son. The miniatures were paper and the paints… colouring pencils!
I came across these paper minis a little while back, but only just clicked that they would be great fun to print out and put together with my son. We had a great time colouring, cutting, and glueing them together and ended up with a nice collection of figures and an extremely messy table.
The models are by Zhu Industries over on itch.io for those of you that are interested. I think they look really cool (I really like the art style) and they’re made really well. It’s relatively easy to follow the instructions and all the fold markers are bang on so that you end up with double sided models that are properly aligned.
My son is 6 and has had a few shots at painting “regular” models, but he’s been more engaged in colouring these; I suppose it’s a much more familiar medium for him. It’s not like this is just for kids either, these are very viable alternatives for playing skirmish games if you want to avoid the expense, or don’t have the space for regular models, or just like the look of them. I have to admit even after my son decided he wanted a break a few hours in I still kept on colouring and cutting away…
Black Armour
Last post you saw me betray my Dwarven Battle March army by getting distracted by some very cool new chaos models. I managed to get said distraction painted over the weekend after a bit of colour scheme pondering. I ended up on what I think is quite a menacing look in straight black armour, leaving the trim also black to avoid the more usual chaos all shiny trim look.
The colour scheme pondering I mentioned above was done in the way I usually start (but not always end): looking through books. I quite like flicking through art and design books for inspiration for colour schemes, and while that is not always a successful process, in this case the books delivered.
I started with this very cool Japanese book that is just a massive collection of colour schemes and found a set of colours that piqued my interest. The top one is what caught my eye first, but the second one seemed much more useable as it was a more complete set of colours.
I then turned to art books, and decided to start with a very nice book of Paul Bonner’s art. You might know him from early Warhammer 40k art, or the plentiful gaming art he’s done in the years since. In this case, his cover art for a book in the Swedish RPG Drakar och Demoner‘s Trudvang range caught my eye. I quickly realised that it’s pretty much the bottom colour scheme I’d found in the other book! The stars had aligned and I was locked in.
This artwork is just very cool, I found the stark blue/black armour against the red/orange background really striking, and looking a bit deeper the range of browns and other secondary colours really complement the overall feel. It’s not just the colours that grabbed me, the fact the riders’ armour is all one colour, with only reflections highlighting all the details makes them look extremely imposing and threatening which is perfect for the model I was painting. Plus it meant painting black with Vallejo Dark Sea Blue highlights which is my absolute favourite way to paint black (as an example my Darth Vader).
This is not a particularly quick colour scheme to paint as there is a lot of edge highlighting to do which I do find a bit tedious when doing it en masse, but quite satisfying when tackling one model at a time. The model took around 2 hours from start to finish which means I can do one of these in a nice painting session. I think I might do more model by model or small batch painting in the future. It’s definitely slower than batch painting 10 or more models at a time but a lot less of a grind.
On the Painting Building Printing Table
Good news for Dwarf fans, after my brief dally with the forces of evil I’ve jumped back into my Dwarfs. After the Hammerers it’s time to make a dent into the units of Longbeards. I’ve decided to go for smaller batches after my experience with the Chaos Warrior and have picked out 4 as a nice small batch size.
Just like the Hammerers were, these models are sculpted ready to be holding shields so I tapped into my new shield supply and decided to go for these smaller shields. Unlike shields I used last post, these originally came with icons on the sprue which were meant to be glued onto them. As a result, they have some handy locating holes on them, which given I don’t have said icons I needed to cover up.
I decided this might be a job for 3D printing, although I expected it to be a bit of a challenge given the size I’d have to print these at (the shields are 9mm diameter), and the fact I only have a filament printer which isn’t renowned for fine details.
The design process was quite straightforward in that I knew I needed to play to the strength of a filament printer, which is to print lines. To that end I decided to go for a simple embossed horn shape. I first drew it up in a vector program (Affinity Designer) then exported to SVG and imported into a 3D tool (Tinkercad) and extruded into a 3D shape. I then exported that as an STL and imported it into the slicer software for my 3D printer (BambuStudio).
It took me a few iterations to get something that would print ok. The models are so tiny I got a fair few that just came unstuck during printing so I had to add a raft to the print and even then the whole raft lifted off! Some more refinement required but at least I have some useable prints now.
PLA filament plays pretty well with the plastic glue we use on our models so I was able to use that to glue my new icons down. As an added bonus as it melts the icon a bit it, it smoothes out any rough edges left from the printing or raft removal process, much like you can use plastic glue to smooth out models after sanding or scraping mould lines. The end result is not perfect by any stretch, but I think it should look good after painting. I guess we’ll find out!
The arts and crafts sound like a blast. It is very relaxing doing that sort of thing to be sure. I also really enjoyed reading your process and inspiration on the Chaos Warrior. That is always interesting to me and I do some similar things when I need inspiration.
If you’ll permit me to offer some constructive criticism, I love the idea behind going all black. It also saves painting time as trim will slow you down a bit. However, I think the miniature will really benefit from one more warm color in the mix, especially on the front side of the model. Gold, Bronze, or Copper would really do the business here, I think, unsurprisingly. At the same time though, I fully admit that it will make the miniature look more conventional so I can understand if you choose to avoid doing that too. It also looks really cool as it is. Very imposing as any Chaos miniature should!
That is very cool that you can solve the shield problem on your own! I look forward to seeing how they paint up as they look very nice already.
That’s a good suggestion on the warrior model, I do have a bronze introduced already but just in tiny amounts on the buckles and the chaos star next to the shoulder. I’ll look for more opportunities to add bronze to on the next ones.