We’re on the polishing stage with the ring. A lot of filing to even out the imperfections from the cast, and also I discovered it didn’t really fit Miranda’s finger properly so I filled out the inside a bit more. Then sandpaper, to remove the marks from the files. Then…the jeweler’s rouge!
I started here.
And ended here.
Next is to confirm that Russ thinks it’s polished enough (he’s more patient than I am with this sort of thing…), and then we figure out how to put 4 white sapphires into it!
This is the really damn cool part of the process. I enjoy the carving and designing, but in this part we get to play with metal that is so hot it’s gone liquid!
We started on Saturday night with a mini-session of mixing the investment. I still don’t know what “investment” means in this context, but I can tell you that it starts as a white powder that is apparently a mix of some fibrous material, and silica. You mix it with a specified amount of water and stir gently. It becomes a magic-mud consistency liquid, and you have to try to keep the air bubbles out of it lest you get air bubbles in your final cast (ie, a bubble on your ring). We gave it a little tapping to help release the bubbles.
The next day Russ started early at 9am by setting the temperature on his kiln to 300 degrees and waiting. I arrived around 11am, just in time to set the temperature to 700 degrees. Then we got started playing with yet another hobby (which I’ll write about shortly).
4 hours later, we set the temperature to 1350 degrees. Another 2 hours, 1100 degrees. Then we waited 1 more hour before getting to the good part.
The kiln and temperature controller.
Taking our very hot things out of the kiln.
It’s very hot in there.
Then we had a little problem. It turns out that we were out of acetylene, which is half of the required gas to create an acetylene torch, which is required to get silver hot enough to melt! Apparently we can’t turn the kiln off – the investment goes bad. We also can’t leave it for more than 6 hours, otherwise it goes bad. At this point, we were very close to losing what Russ estimated to be 16 hours of work!
We started calling people desperately. Russ asked me to point his propane torch at the silver, and then he ran off. We found out later that he’d driven to Home Depot to buy a mini acetylene torch which he hadn’t been sure he would be able to get, but about 20 minutes later the silver was melted from the propane (we also weren’t sure it was hot enough, hard to tell!) and he had plan B, a mini-torch.
We used the same swinging arm thing as the last time, melting the silver, winding the arm up, grabbing the investment with tongs, sticking it in front of the crucible and then letting go, allowing the sweet sweet silver to be thrown into the investment to form a ring.
The silver after we’d taken the propane torch away. It’s still a lot molten!
We did two rings this time, because Russ had his press-molded version and I had my carved version and we wanted to have both. Here they are!
Miranda was hanging around for this last, panicky, bit. She got to swish around in the bucket for a ring!
Next up, a lot of polishing! And gem setting.
I played 2 games of WMH this weekend, and enjoyed them. It’s not my favourite game, but it is the game that all my friends are playing so it’s easier to get into. Coming out of it, I really wanted to get on with painting my army so I could buy more toys!
These Cyclopses were easy to “base coat”, although it was more of a layer of tinted washes that give the impression of gold and red. The hope with these guys is to paint them with literally 3 colours, but to give the impression that there is more going on!
It’s an old Baal Red (which I used on that ancient Brute!), Dwarf Bronze and Snakebite Leather. Oh, and the base formula from here.
And these are really old models too, so they are both metal. 🙂
Last time I wrote about how I intend to win the best painted award in my Blood Bowl league. This is my clincher, if the terrific paint jobs on the rest of the team don’t work enough.
I had an idea that I’d taken from reading an old post of mine from Adepticon 3 years ago. This guy had made a display board for his team from mouse pad material. But how to get a logo to put on it?
Enter Fiverr, a marketplace where you can buy anything for “$5”. I looked around and found a guy who would do sports mascot design. I paid him $5USD (like $7.50CAD…) to do a line drawing for me. If I liked it, I’d upgrade. I sent him a link to my team photos from years ago as inspiration. He wrote back a couple days later with this.
I liked it, although obviously he could use a tail and a left leg. I contacted him to upgrade my logo – this service cost much more than $5 to do, but given that I knew it was going to be quality work I didn’t mind paying. After some revisions on the line drawing, he came back a few days later with this.
Pretty damn good! But I wanted brighter, poppier and more colourful! It’s something I’ve always worked into my paint schemes from the very beginning of my painting journey with my night goblins — bright colours bring people over to look at them. We had a couple more revisions back and forth, until we got to this drawing.
Not exactly what I’d imagined when I saw his example art. But just because it wasn’t what I would have drawn, doesn’t mean it isn’t great work!
Then the easy part — I paid the gentleman, made a 1900×1600 version of it and sent it off to London Drugs online to be printed on a mousepad. I’m ridiculously happy with the end result!
(I forgot to put the newly finished apothecary into this photo…he was still drying on my desk as I was taking photos!)
I’m going to destroy this painting competition! 😀 😀 😀
P.S. When I had initially contacted rafatha, he was actually the second person I’d asked about doing it. The first person I did an order for $7.50CAD, and then noticed their order queue was ~40 orders and they were going on vacation in September! I’m glad I found rafatha, since his work was much more in line with what I actually wanted done!
At the same time, I should point out the work of this other person, because it’s damn good! This was one actually just $7.50CAD, rather than requiring an upgrade to the base order. This logo may find it’s way into my team literature somewhere, because it’s pretty amazing!
Really happy with how this guy turned out! It was a lot of little painting sessions that added up to a lot of good shading and highlighting. My Blood Bowl league is counting down to the Finals in October and the league commissioner has put a bonus out for “best painted” and man, do I intend to win that!
This model is the most recent model I finished, after having focused since I last wrote. There’s about 2 weeks of “final” posts upcoming that have actually been done for months, but haven’t been photographed until this evening. 🙂
I took a lot of inspiration from my posts on previous skink paint jobs for my Warhammer army.
The base was looking pretty terrible at one point. It was a layer of watered down Snakebite, I think, followed by drybrush of Codex Grey which looked just awful. I did a few spots of glazes to try to make it “interesting” instead of “terrible”, but in the end had to Seraphim Sepia the whole thing to get it to good. I think it really worked in the end, because of the variety of hues under the Sepia.
The feathers are my first time using a Vallejo Game Color Fluorescent Yellow. I like it, but it’s a careful tool to wield. I had to use a lot of glazes to bring the colours back down to a more natural colour!
After draft #3 failed to produce geometric perfection, I went back to the drawing board. Literally.
I took a photo of the ring on Miranda’s finger and cut away everything but the ring, and then drew every brainstorm idea I could think of that was within the realm of what we were trying to do. #1 was my favourite — maintaining the essence of what our original design was, but ending up with 3 rings instead of 2. #6 is what Miranda chose. Back to carving!
A day later I had this rough draft. The plan was to show it to Miranda to ensure it was what she wanted, as we go.
Another day, and I had this “getting closer” draft.
Seen here in the casting frame. We took a “save point” at this point, as it was the closest I’d got to success so far!
While I was carving up a storm and praying, Russ was working on another idea. Since carving the relief of the ring into the wax was proving difficult/imperfect, he’d go the other way. He took Scuply and formed it around the existing ring. Then he cast that so he could carve away the unnecessary parts! It was an excellent idea, except that the casting material was miserable to carve, so while the ring impression was perfect, everything else was messy and frayed.
In the end, I decided to go with the wax I’d been carving, as I’d gotten it close enough to perfection to be what I wanted to run with. I took it home again to show m’lady, who approved, and now very soon we’ll be dealing with silver things again! YAY HOT THINGS! 😀
It’s been a busy summer, and it’s been hard to get time to play games (and when I am playing games, I’m playing Blood Bowl as I’m in a league that has 2 scheduled games a month!). But a good friend is moving across Canada shortly, and he wanted to get some games in before he left forever.
We tend to play 3 player, since there are 3 of us in this group, so I’ve gotten inventive about writing multiplayer scenarios at the end I’ll share the scenario we used.
Arcanists #1 (me!)
Arcanists #2 (Derrick)
Resurrectionists (Duke)
Duke pretty much takes the same list every time. It worked out well for him this time! Here’s a photo to break up this text. 🙂
Marcus ran at me in the first turn and Raspy and the Ice Golem tanked him for 3 turns.
The scenario was Mistaken Identity, which I wrote originally for Breaching the Faux. I was pretty happy with how it looked, but I hadn’t had time to playtest it.
There is a 30mm marker in the middle of the table. Any player gets 2VP if they end the game with the marker on one of their models stat cards, and they gain it by taking (1) Interact Actions. If the model dies, it’s placed into base contact before removing the model. If you have 2 models within 3″ of the model with the marker at the end of the game, gain 1VP.
Randomly deal each player an Ace, making sure the Tome is in the pile. The Tome player gets 2VP at the end of the game if no one has seen their Ace. The other players get 1VP if they’ve seen the Tome players card. Whenever you kill a model, flip a card and on a 10+ you get to see the card of the owner of the model.
The necro has just killed Bette Noire, and the Bear is about to pick up the Arcane Heart marker.
Marcus ran at me quickly, I think assuming that he could take me out and deal with Seamus later. Seamus spread out to get Line in the Sand. I…tanked Marcus and tried to kill him while Myranda healed him. I took Frame for Murder (successfully getting the Acolyte killed by Sybelle) and Make Them Suffer. Suffer was harder – I kept killing Minions without Raspy killing them! Marcus lost most of his models around Turn 4. He forced me to put most of my forces into him, then split up a bit and when Seamus came in with his models he lost almost everything.
The Bear picked up the Marker, then died and dropped it, allowing Seamus to pop in and pick it up and then Back Alley out to the far side of the board where he’d be safe with his 2VPs and preventing others from getting 1VP from being close to him.
In the end, I won with 6VP, Duke got second with 5VP and Derrick got 3VPs.
A sweet photo of the Breaching the Faux deck made this year. I bought about 20 of these to give away at a future tournament. If only I had time to organize such a thing…
After playing it, I felt that the Tomes player 2VP were too swingy, either getting 2VP easily or requiring them to play defensively to keep it. I also thought that the “end the game within” 1VP was too difficult.
I changed:
Here’s the updated version.
Still working on this ring thing, as best I can. Last time I’d done 2 different drafts, and the last one had been close, but I had carved to close to where the gems would sit so we couldn’t set them, and I didn’t like how the layout looked. I went back at it, with renewed vigor and knowledge of how to make it work.
And at the end, I’m not sure the design we have will work at all.
I don’t know if you can see the problem here, but we’ll see if I can explain it. The design has a gem on each side, while maintaining the existing ring. So the new ring has to either go over the existing, or under. Over is too bulky. Inside is the way we’ve been going. With inside, we’d need to have a little jutty bit that goes on the inside of the ring and sticks up to put a gem on the other side.
This adds material to the inner dimension of the existing ring. Which means we need to take material out of the existing ring in order to maintain the existing inner dimension. And the existing ring is pretty small to begin with!
Here are some photos I took after I’d carved out a pretty good hole for the existing ring – my best yet, after 3 drafts!
So now we have to figure out a new design, possibly with new gems – we’ll see how it goes!
I’ve had some serious painting ADD recently, floating between projects as the winds blow (and if you were in Vancouver yesterday, that’s a lot of wind!). I almost suffered from it again, first thinking I could paint the murderspider before today and then thinking I could paint a Silent One before today, but still having the Union Miners and Skorne Cyclops Savages on my project list (not to mention the Guild Death Marshals I only basecoated…)
So I decided to focus more. I’ve had an apothecary for my Blood Bowl team assembled for 2 months, and every time I use him in a game I roll double 6s and one of my team members ends up dead. >.> I think he resents being used, but unpainted and ignored.
It’s a fairly simple scheme so far – Codex Grey on the skink, Shadow Grey on the stone, probably Snakebite Leather on the wood and on the ground. I drybrushed Codex Grey over the brown ground, and regret it now.
A month later I added more basecoat and Guilliman Blue in the recesses of the ground…that ground is going to be a problem…
The actual model is the Arcane Emissary, but after this art preview image, people started calling it the murderbull. And it’s not that I don’t love the murderbull imagery, it’s more that I don’t believe I could successfully convert one. Like this guy. That’s a damn fine conversion!
I wanted something with more spider legs, so I picked up the Ramos Avatar model to ensure the proper density of legs. Then scoured my bits box for more legs until I found the new plastic Brass Arachnid model. Not quite the same…but since everyone complains it won’t fit on a 30mm, may as well drop it onto a 50mm!
I also took this opportunity to try out my new Basius pad. I used milliput, which I’m not certain was a great plan. It was really hard to press into the pad, and left big chunks un-sculpted, so I added some random gears until it looked better. Some friends are using something called FixIt, and I might try some greenstuff if I get some cheaply somewhere.
This blurry spider photo is supposed to be showing detail of the basius. The parts that did get pressed properly look pretty good!
And then some photos of murderspider. On his magnificent 50mm base! Going to sculpt some more arcane flames coming out of parts of it, but it’s good start!
