Time for glue! I first glued the feet onto the base, because their positioning was the most important. Then I dry-fit the electronics six or seven times to make sure it all worked, checked the connections again (placing the LED against the wires). I glued the top piece of cork to the two pieces of cork on the front and back, as well as the top and bottom of the switch to the top cork and the base. These were the second most important parts. Not as much holding and stability as I’d like, but it’ll improve as we go.
I let that sit for a few minutes, then started filling. I pulled apart small pieces of cork and glued them into place where ever I could see into the insides. When this is all dry in the morning I’ll use oxid paste to fill all of the remaining gaps, but it works best if you don’t have to fill more than a few millimeters of hole.
Here’s a photo of where the LED will end up inside the torso. I’ve left the wires long for now, but will obviously be cutting them down to fit the light in.
Here’s what the underside looks like. You can see the switch on the right.
When I’m completely done, I’m going to fill some of the bottom with white glue to keep the battery holders in place, but for now they are snug-fit against all of the cork on top.
And here’s the next morning, with all those gaps filled.
It turns out that I haven’t posted Kaeris at all, but she had some work done as part of an assembly line basing process at some point. 🙂 I’m working on focusing on my Arcanists, and I wanted a few more Masters to get some more flexibility in crew creation. Ramos tends towards model spam which isn’t great for Reckoning, and Mei isn’t great where Assassinate or Deliver is in the Scheme pool, so there are a couple holes. Kaeris is my plan to fill those holes (and translucent Rasputina will be pretty cool too!)
She snapped at the ankle earlier this week. So I pinned her ankle and puttied around it, but wanted to try to get some more stability, so I glued two piece of paperclips into the base and then puttied EPIC FIRE coming from the ground. YES.
I had to take a small break from my LED project to put some paint on a few models. I’m playing Malifaux this weekend with some friends. One of my friends is brand new to the miniature hobby, and we’re trying to encourage him to put some paint on his models. Or get his wife to put some paint on them. Which means I probably should avoid having bare primed models in my game. 🙂
Arcane Effigy! I got this model last year at the Wyrd Holiday Exchange and have slowly been making him presentable. The model is gorgeous, but apparently I’ve lost his book somewhere, which sucks. But having just put some paint on this guy, now I’m excited for the new models!
It’s vomit brown on the scrolls, snakebite leather on his jacket, ice blue body, ice blue+codex grey underjacket and sunburst yellow flames and OSL. Considering the OSL was done in literally seconds, I think it worked out ok. 😛 I’m working from this amazing source drawing.
As for using him in the game…one of the reasons he hasn’t been painted yet, is because I’m not convinced he’s worth it. He’s a Construct and has some good defenses. He has a shitty attack that you probably should never use (he’s better off re-positioning himself). And then he has the reasons you bring him — he can buff your leader to maybe give extra Burning and he can remove Conditions from friendly models within 2″. And he’s 4ss.
The extra Burning is pretty ok, particularly since he has Accomplice so you don’t lose your momentum, but Metal Gamin have a ton of Burning on their own (still for 4ss). The Condition removal is the main reason you bring him, I think, but because it’s a 2″ range and a 5″ Wk, that means you have a 7″ zone of effect, which isn’t enough unless you’ve planted him very carefully. And you’re in trouble if you need removal over there and your Effigy is over here. I think I’d be less hesitant about him if he had a little more range.
But since every single person I’m going to play this weekend (…today, really, since this’ll be posted just before they arrive at my place :)) has a Resser crew, Condition removal is required in every crew. 😛
I had some legs to run wires through. It turns out that 90 degree angles suck, and that I haven’t used my hands to really and truly pin something for years. My fingers hurt to type. >.<
In the end, I said fuck-it to the 90 degree angles – despite drilling connecting tubes, the wire wouldn’t bend and flow that way no matter how shallow I made the angle, and there’s only so much space to try to shallow it out more. Instead I drilled out in straight lines with the bends outside of the model, and then ran the wire through the tubes. Once it was in both sides, I pulled on the wire to bring it as close to the model as possible. I’ll sculpt something over it, it’s fine.
I think this is one of the harder parts of this whole project.
It’s been a while since I did any hobby stuff, but with my Black Friday order coming in I have a new project! I’m getting on the translucent lighting train! I had planned to try this for the Wyrd Winter painting contest, but the cat is to far out of the bag and to many other people are doing it to make a big splash, so you get on time posts instead. 🙂
Here’s the starting point for the project, some electronics.
That is:
2 3V button cell batteries, with holders for easy replacement.
1 tiny little switch
1 1/4W 180Ohm resistor
1 3.6V 20mA “super bright” LED
some thin wire
I had thought to use the PoweredPlay solution, but after looking at the price including international shipping (no ocean to cross, guys…) I decided, with some help to do my own thing. Turns out there are some knowledgeable people in CHOP!, so they helped me re-figure out the mathematics required to make it all go. (Last time I looked at any of these formulas was grade 12…)
Next post – figuring out how the hell to get the wires into the Ice Golem!
The one on the left was, as for the Fire Gamin, done for the summer painting contest which I won’t shut up about. (or at least, I feel like I’m mentioning it every other summer painting contest). I knew the colours I had used as a base, so I tossed those onto the male and then used washes and glazes to make it look good. I didn’t try to do any colour matching outside of the base coat. I think both of these models kind of look a little bit like ass, so if there’s a new Kaeris/MS&U box that comes out, I might consider re-doing them.
I used these guys in the 4-player game I had a few weeks ago and they are very effective at killing things. Malifaux is not a game about killing things, but sometimes that can be an excellent tactic. In that game, because I had deployed a gunline, Duke decided to walk the other way towards Jordan and against engaging me. This allowed me the space to do whatever I wanted for the first 3 turns of the game.
I haven’t had a chance to use them in a 2-player game yet, but I’m thinking about Sue, whom I have used a bunch. I’ve found that in general, he’s hard to get into a good position. He always needs to walk somewhere before he can shoot, or he’s to far out of range, or you need to organize your activations so your opponent comes closer, etc. I’m thinking about the Charge action and how you spend 2AP to move and also get 2 attacks, but with shooting you can either move or shoot. Charging you put yourself in harms way and also block yourself from moving (because of engagement), so it’s probably good that it’s notably more efficient than shooting.
I don’t know what sort of toolbox model these guys are, if any. Under what circumstances would I want a ranged crew as opposed to my usual melee crew? Is there a scheme/strategy/opposing faction combination that makes you do one versus the other? Or is it just personal preference or your own personal playstyle?
I’ve wanted to play the Kaeris box set with Mei Feng for a while. I had previously painted one Fire Gamin and one Gunsmith for the Wyrd painting contest, so it was a relatively easy matter to paint the last three models.
The one on the right is the one I did for the painting contest. It’s interesting to see here, because the old one is better painted, but in these photos the new ones certainly have a bunch of “pop” from the bright yellow at their base!
I’ve been super lazy recently. Not in life, nor in painting, just in posting. I finished up 2 new Fire Gamin because I wanted to play with them (spoilers, for my opponents this weekend!) and another gunsmith. I got started on Ramos (!!!), finished Chiaki (!!!…wait, she can’t go with Ramos…) and spent some quality time on Chakax for Foodhammer (or is he…surprise ringer for Malifaux!)
Last night I realized I needed to apply pigment to Johanna, so here’s a cell phone photo of her and the finished gunsmith.
I just haven’t felt like I’ve had time to pull out the photography equipment to take any decent photos of the 4-5 posts worth of models I have sitting on my desk. A lot going on, and when it isn’t going on, I’m hanging with my sweetheart.
However! One of that many things will be a 4 player Malifaux game on Sunday! We’re going to play Prison Riot, from the Schemes and Strategies deck. I said this about it, when Duke picked it from the list:
Yes, PrisonRiot sounds like rounding up lemmings while 3 other people are also trying to round up lemmings in the other direction. 😛
Since I have an interest in miniature photography as well, I’ve got one last post here on how it all came together after the painting was done. Here’s two photos for reference.
Setup
Getting this all set up was a bit of an ordeal!
First, I was glad the kitchen table had been cleared – I was playing a 3-player game of Malifaux with some friends that afternoon, so I didn’t have to move our crap from it!
The backdrop I’d previously purchased to take photos of my Daemon army (and, obviously, for future things like this!). When I unraveled it and put it on the table though, it was to far away – I’d previously measured that I wanted my diorama to be about 7 inches from the lens. So I grabbed an end-table, cleared the stuff off of it and rested it on the kitchen table to provide some support for the backdrop. Initially I put two glass cups on top, but after thinking about the consequences of glass falling, should I bump the setup, I found some metal and plastic cups instead to hold it up. (what I’m getting at here, with the end table and cups — you find ways to make it work!).
I had some brown material sitting around for another project, and put that on the bottom to provide “dirt”. The goal was that the backdrop would be sky, and the diorama wouldn’t look out of place on a dirt brown floor.
Then my standard 2-light setup, with my tripod. I had to bring over a third light – my painting light from my desk – because I was getting shadows I didn’t want. Because of the heat we’ve had the shutters closed and I didn’t want to open them, and didn’t have enough ambient light from living room light fixtures to solve the shadow problem.
Then, put the diorama on the backdrop.
Photography
Because I had an idea of what settings I wanted to use (in fact, the camera was still on those settings), I knew where to start. I had to remember to set the ISO back down to 200 because I wasn’t taking super grainy test photos anymore.
I took a variety of photos. I adjusted the aperture up and down, and the focus up and down, in order to ensure that I had the photo I wanted. Once I was done taking photos, I didn’t want to have to go back and re-take any, so I wanted to try to get as many as I could. I moved the model around as well, in order to get different angles that didn’t have my living room in the background.
Editing
Here’s a picture of the final image again, just to help remind you.
When you take a ton of photos, you then have to go through and delete a ton of photos. I only wanted to submit between 3 and 5, but I’d taken 30. I loaded them all up in Lightroom, and started deleting. Some of them were super easy – focus was all wrong, lighting was all wrong. Some of them were harder – do I have enough photos that have the Gunsmith in focus? This photo is dramatic, but this other photo shows more of the diorama. And similar to making a resume, or a Magic the Gathering deck, anything you put in that isn’t perfect is just making the whole thing worse.
I got it down to 7 good photos and moved on.
Lightroom has a host of great editing features that I use regularly. I adjusted the white balance on every photo – usually I do this physically with a white card and the camera setting, but I had forgotten. >.< I also click “Auto” for the brightness, contrast, whites, blacks, highlights and shadows section. Auto isn’t perfect every time, but it’s a good baseline. I find sometimes it will adjust my photo to an extreme, so I have to pull it back a bit – most often in the Whites or Brightness.
I also use Lightroom to crop. All my photos are taken 4:3, but sometimes a different ratio works better, and sometimes I need to crop to get a better photo. As well, because my lens (grrrr) has a couple spots on it, I need to use the spot remover in places.
You’ll notice there are only 5 photos in the final image, and during this process I realized that two photos were unnecessary – either not good enough, or showing something I’d already shown. Deleted! Do not be afraid to delete! You’re only making your project better.
I saved all of the photos as JPGs…and then moved onto the step I don’t usually do. I opened each photo up in Paint.NET…and smudged the lines on Killjoys side. I don’t feel bad that I did this – it’s all a part of submitting the best photo you can. At the same time, that line bothers me and I wish I could slow down enough to make it go away on future models!
The very last step was to create a brand new image that was 800 pixels wide, and as tall as the combination of all of the images. The contest rules required that photos be no more than 800 wide, but that you could use as much height as you wanted to show additional angles. I copy and pasted each image into this new one, leaving a 2 pixel white separation between each image to help set them apart.
The contest rules also stated that images must be less than 300kb, so when I saved it I set the JPG quality settings such that the final image was 294kb. It’s good that I got rid of those 2 extra photos, otherwise I’d have had to sacrifice more quality! This was something I hadn’t accounted for, so I’m glad it worked out by accident!
And that’s the end! I’m writing this on July 15th – I was told not to publish any photos or articles before the voting was done on July 27th, so I’ve scheduled all of the last posts. As I write, I have no idea what’s going to happen! Excitement!
