The airbrush

My big gift this birthday/Christmas season was this airbrush package from Amazon.com. For $99 it’s hard to beat. Three airbrushes and an automatic air compressor. So far I’ve only used the two gravity-feed airbrushes, I haven’t even used the siphon airbrush.

The first project I tackled with the airbrush is this set of cut stone walls and a couple accessories and doors:

I had put them together a few months ago now, but had not painted them. I had even used them in a couple of game sessions unpainted. So lazy. Anyway, they are painted now, so Yay for the Airbrush!

Now, I learned a valuable lesson from painting them. Airbrushes create a huge mess if you aren’t using them in the middle of the Sahara Desert or something like that. With temperatures hovering in the range of techincally freezing to freeze-your-damn-ass-off freezing, I’ve decided not to try to paint outdoors. So after a couple days of painting and learning how to use (and how not to use) my airbrushes, and creating a massive mess in my craft/gaming room, I decided to make a hood to keep the paint from spraying all over kingdom come. (It’s actually not that bad for the type of airbrushing I do, but I did make more of a mess than I wanted.) After looking online for some options, I made this hood out of cheap dollar store foam core posterboard and some hot glue.

The only problem now is that the hood is sorta bulky and I don’t have any place to put it. So I may just use it as a GM screen. 🙂

Fort Pringles – rough painted

OK, here’s Fort Pringles with a basic paint job.

It’s amazing what you don’t see until you take a photograph. Clearly I’ve got some touchup work to do. But not a terrible amount. Here are the things I’d still like to do to “finish” this project:

1. Get some lichen and/or moss and glue it around the base of the fort’s outside walls as shrubbery.
2. Line the road into and out of the fort with some bricks or maybe more shrubbery.
3. Do some ivy or vines climbing up the walls.
4. Do at least two more floors for the interior part.

Still, it’s at a point now that I’d actually put it into a game.

My first “2.5D” terrain

So, I knocked these together over the course of two days. Mostly I did the work while watching TV. I had to spray paint in the garage because it was cold outside. Still, for a couple hours work over a couple of days, not too bad. Tried it out on my group tonight and they seemed to like it.

Much easier than the Hirst arts or other terrain techniques, but not as fulfilling either. Still thinking about this stuff…

Maxi-minis

Here is a photo of almost my entire collection of miniatures. It’s not quite the entire collection because I don’t have my “carry around” boxes of minis included, I didn’t put all my regular animal minis and it doesn’t include my currently active PC minis. But it’s probably 90% or more of my minis:

They pretty much cover my gaming table from one end to another.

My goal in pulling them out of their custom foam cases was to reorganize them to be more easily accessible during gaming. My foam cases are nice for long-term storage or moving from place to place, but they are a pain to deal with at the game table, and I really need something that I can quickly open, find a particular mini, and put it (or them) on the table.

But doing this has made me realize several things:

1. I have a freaking lot of game minis.
2. I have a freaking lot of crappy game minis.
3. I have relatively few nice game minis.
4. I need to paint all the bases on this thousand or so minis black, or do something so they don’t look like they are unfinished.
5. I need to figure out a way to store these that is both convenient for use and keeps them from being broken.

Any ideas?

Bat-demon

Here’s the “finished” batman conversion to a demon lord.

It sucks. totally. I really couldn’t focus on this and just finally gave up.

I’m the damned Batman (literally)

So I found these pretty nice Batman miniatures at Michaels for a buck each. I figured they were too big to be playable as PC miniatures, but I might find some use for them.

Here’s the first one turned into a Demon Lord or something…

Seriously, that’s Batman. I cut off his cape and did some buildup with green stuff. I had previously painted him to see if that would help, but he ended up looking like Johnny Storm (the Human Torch) wearing a Batman costume. So I did more stuff. When the green stuff fully cures, I’ll do some shaping and sanding and then repaint him.

I might even add wings. Thinking about it…

Quick lighthouse

Here’s a quick lighthouse I did just to check on some new techniques:

It’s mostly made out of a cheap plastic cemetery vase and some stuff I had laying around the game room. Here’s the cemetery vase ($3.79 I think):

And here’s the rest of the stuff I used, mostly it’s foam core posterboard, some cardboard, a cheap plastic cup and a “tea candle” which I got at the local dollar store, two for $1.

And a different angle on the lighthouse: