Review: Terrain Putty

Terrain Putty is a two part resin marketed by Kraftmark as a terrain builder’s solution.  The product is light weight and produces a dough like putty when mixed.  Combining the resin and hardener is a messy job, frequently getting putty all over one’s fingers.  The resin half is a bit “lumpy” and requires careful attention for a smoothly mix.  The baking analogy continues with the combined product as  the putty feels and acts in the fashion of a sugar cookie dough.  The putty pushes and shapes very well, but has limited ability to pull or stretch. Water functions as a tool lubricant & smoothing agent.  While working time is advertised as 2 hours,  I had no opportunity to work the putty past 90 minutes.

Three Tests

Sculpting: Terrain Putty did a fine job of taking and holding sculpted detail.  The putty is very receptive to finger shaping and able to hold a respectable edge with little work.  Care needs to be taken with the uncured putty, as it has little strength.  Only after 24-48 hours does Terrain Putty develop its full durability.

Patching: As a gap filling product for a resin kit, Terrain Putty does poorly.  The lack of elasticity in the putty makes working a “sausage” into a gap a bit of a chore.

Molding: Terrain Putty does take a texture stamp with some success, although the putty does leave residue on the stamp.  The putty can also be used as a casting material in an RTV mold (such as the Hirst Arts molds).  Terrain Putty is adequate at taking detail & could be used as a substitute for a limited number of pieces if casting resin is not available.

Over all I rate the product a B. The ultra small grain of the epoxy holds detail and takes compression molding very well.  Finally, the price does seem a bit high when compared with other product s on the market.

Project photos: Terrain Putty on the gaming table.

Hirst Pipe Mold Terrain

The 5th ed 40K rules put a new spin on terrain building.  LOS now strictly governs what a model can see.  Area terrain, the abstract fuzzy space of trees or ruins on a platter, is gone.  The solution adopted by Adepticon is to place all terrain objects on 3 inch disks with matching sockets in a MDF base.  The Hirst Arts Pipe molds, along with the Sci Fi molds, provide an excellent resource to build all the required objects.

Pumping station made from 5/8 Pipe mold, 3/8 Pipe Mold, Station Builder, Star Ship Wall mold and the Star Ship Deck mold.

First Rule of Resin Casting …

The first rule of resin casting is to keep moisture away from the resin.  Any contamination & the resin will bubble and will create a flawed casting.  But what happens if water is deliberately introduced to the resin?  Will resin form huge bubbles?  Will the resin geyser like Coke with Mentos?

The experiment mixed 1 part water with 2 parts resin.  The heavier resin floated to the bottom of the container & resisted mixing with the water.  Only after the excess water was drained from the container did the resin begin to set up.  I was disappointed that the resin/water mix only created a substance some thing like oatmeal.   No 10x expansion in volume.  No flowing river of bubbly resin.  Looks like I need a Plan B to make my toxic chemical soup.

The rest of the project is part of a terrain building surge for Adepticon.  The project will mix the Hirst Arts Pipe molds with Imex plastic kits and a bit of kitchen garbage including water bottles & soup cans.  The resin does serve one purpose – the fragile plastic bottle is now supported by the internal coat of resin.

Quick Links: Xedrodome

Add one more casting material to the list:  drywall!  The paper/plaster hybrid seems a natural combo for first sketching out the design, then carving with basic tools.  Check out the results at Xedrodome where the Xedric uses this method to create large scale chaos stars for a scratch built chaos titan.  Follow his most recent work on the rest of his Noise Marine army on Dakka Dakka.

Photo credit xedric

Full Set Lava Bases

The new demon armies provide gamers the opportunity to play one set of models for both 40K and WFB.  The lava bases project is for a friend of mine who wanted a complete set of bases for an upcoming chaos army project.  All that’s needed is either a pinning or magnet system to flip an army from one system to the other.

The bases are green stuff/procreate over plastic bases.  Texture is applied with a concrete rock, then lava channels are added with a wire hook tool and a standard sculpting tool.  Hardest part of the whole project was mixing up all the green stuff – the bases used up a 30 inch roll of GS.  I spent more time mixing than sculpting.   FYI – don’t let your green stuff lay around too long.  The roll I used was stored in the freezer for 6 years, causing the yellow portion to develop a skin that mixed poorly with the blue portion.

The bike/cavalry bases are designed to go from square to round.  The square cav base slots into the open space on the round bike base.

40K collection

25mm round – resin bases

WFB collection

25mm square

Spectre Hobbies now stocking CTF castings

Spectre Hobbies is now stocking gaming products cast by Chicago Terrain Factory. The initial release includes:

• 40mm Urban Bases
• 25mm Urban Bases
• 25mm Rune Bases
• Fallen Banner objective marker
• Alien Pod Mouth terrain piece

Look for the Chicago Terrain Factory products in the Bases category.

Hex Nut Challenge: Clay Molding

Using art clay to mold and manufacture scale Hex Nuts.  Jedion357 threw down a challenge on TerraGenisis to create a DYI Hex Nut.  Colonel Shofer suggested a latex mold using 2 part epoxy as the casting agent.  Brain storming on the idea, I suggested using art clay as an alternitve mold material.  The Colonel asked that I follow up with the project.

Hex Nut casting using 2 part epoxy and resin as casting materials.  Resin on the left hand side, epoxy on the right.  Impressions taken from a 4mm hex tool head and a 1/8 square plastic rod.  The resin setup without bubbles and cleaned up from the clay with minor effort.  The epoxy suffered a 50% failure rate from bubbles and still seemed a bit rubbery 24 hours after casting.  The cleanup was a bit of a pain – the epoxy is clear & it is rather difficult to identify what material is the casting and what is flash.  I would recomend resin as the prefered casting material for DYI Hex Nuts.

Hirst Arts site update

Hirst Arts has updated their site with a host of new molds & new Tips and Tricks. The new molds support building dungeons for a pair of old, dungeon crawl, board games.  Plus there are instructions for making Gelatenous Cubes – and who would not like that.

PS – this is a test post direct from Google Docs.  

PPS – had a bit of trouble getting the post to publish, needed to fiddle with the post time.  I may start using Google Docs a bit more, just need to experiment to see how well Docs can post pics.

Hirst Arts Seminar at Adepticon

If you’ve ever wanted to try out the Hirst molds system without having to invest in molds and plaster, or if you’re already a plaster junky and want to hang out with like minded hobbyists, come on out to the Hirst Seminar at Adepticon 2008.   The Hirst Arts Seminar page has all details about what, where and how.

Alien Drinking Hole 3

The Alien Drinking Hole is painted in a purple with red accept scheme.  Base coat was first a spray of black paint, then a spray of purple paint.  The rough ribbed base dry brushed easily, taking coats of paint with little effort.  As usual, I had a bit of trouble with highlights.  First efforts were done with purple mixed with bleach bone, but I was left with an underwhelming pasty color.  At that point, I added red as an accent & pounded on the high lights to bring the eye up the body of the terrain.  Final touch is a bit of two part water effect in the basin to add the “drinking” portion of the “hole.”  The water effect is tinted with a bit of orange, but the ink effect is very minimal.

 

Alien Drinking Hole 2

Sculpting for the alien drinking hole is complete. A standard one-piece mold was created to copy the base of the hole, but for the tusks – I was able to try out my first 2 part mold. Art clay worked like a charm to hold the master while the first layer of RTV was poured. I used Smooth-On’s Universal Mold Release to little effect, the RTV halves firmly bonded to each other. My only recourse was to cut the master out of the rubber. Fortunately, the RTV smoothly cut away from the master, giving me a functional mold. Four casts later & I have all the parts to complete the project.

   

Site Review: Shifting Lands

Shifting Lands is the home of Geboom and his marvelous resin cast boats, buildings and docks. The linked page takes you to a tutorial on how he builds his manor house kits but be sure to roam about the whole site.

The tutorial boils down to four steps:

• build a rough structure with exact over all measurements
• construct a mold & cast the rough in plaster
• carve incredible detail into the plaster
• construct a new mold & cast the detailed pieces in resin

Aside from the “insert artistic ability here” step, the process is a good guild to scratch building large objects using plaster as a base. One modification to this process that may save a bit of RTV would be to use the craft foam method developed by Dlmos. The craft foam process uses layers of 2mm foam to create a rough mold for plaster casting. No great amount of detail is going to be applied by the foam mold, but that’s OK – the goal is to create a basic (but accurate) shape to carve on.

In a way, you could call Geboom a graduate of the Hirst school of plaster. His earlier works with the Hirst blocks show a great deal of creativity but it appears that he has grown beyond the Hirst bricks and moved on to 100% self created projects. I see more and more of this sort of thing happening on the Hirst message boards – long time builders having been exposed to casting & mold making skills are now busy on their own projects.

Hirst Ruined Fieldstone WIP

Picked up the new Ruined Fieldstone mold from Hirst Arts  at Gen Con.  After a week of casting, I finally have enough bricks to start building.  The most interesting parts on this mold are the 2.5 inch arch and the pillar pieces.  The arches use a new 3D connection point – makes the arch much easier to glue & keeps the bricks at the proper angle.  The ruined stones are interesting, but I’ve been able to ruin fieldstone with a bit of work.  Cleverly, the ruin pieces stack on each other to create intact bricks.  The only downside to the mold is the number of casts needed to complete a project – each size of brick has only one socket on the mold.

     

After building a “ruined” set of arches, it dawned on me that the structure is not all that ruined.  What’s missing is any sort of ruin along the height of the walls.  The fourth pic is an attempt to build the ruins vertically.  Aside from a bit of sanding, the bricks also work well as worn or damaged spaces in a wall.

Blast Wall 2

Completion of the Blast Wall project. I attempted to detail the plane plastic card wall using Apoxie Sculpt cut with water in a similar fashion to how UltraWerke uses green putty and acetone. Unfortunately, the Apoxie would not dissolve in water despite how mushy the epoxy may become in the presence of H2O.

Plan B was to use Foam Coat from Hot Wire Foam Factory with a bit of play sand. The mix was applied in a very thin, watery coat to the smooth surfaces of the blast wall. Once dry, the sand/plaster mix added a concrete type finish to the model. I would have preferred the epoxy finish because when a mold is created from this item, most of the plaster detailing will stick to the RTV, requiring a bit of re-detailing if a second mold is made.

Gear and Piston Base Kit

Gear & Piston Basing Kit for use with 40K, WarMachine, AT43 and other miniature gaming figure bases. Each kit contains 12 resin cast-basing pieces, which are applied ad hoc to manufacture supplied bases. Now each figure can have a unique presentation, adding character and interest to individual bases.

Brain Storming a Tank

Apocalypse is coming in October & that calls for bigger guns. I’ve been hanging out at Work in Progress way too much lately & the folks there have filled my head with ideas of scratch built tanks. Most scratch built tanks are either GW clones or some sort of real world want to be. My plan is to come up with something completely different – based on construction equipment! Ever look at an excavator? It’s a pair of tracks with a superstructure hanging in-between & a big rotating turret on top. Not a very practical military design – but then the 40K universe has never been accused of being practical.

Step 1 is to build up the track bodies. The tracks themselves are in route from Tower Hobbies, two sets of Academy Plastics 1/35 Tiger I Treads should be more than enough. Keeping with my normal desire to mold everything, once 1 track body is built – I’ll create a 2 part mold & bam, crank out all the copies I need. Great plan, but it’ll be my first 2 part mold and the masters will have a lot of delicate detail. Lots of ways for this to go wrong.  Hope I don’t need to start pressure casting.

Step 2 is to throw together a super simple superstructure to hold the track bodies together, then add a super sized gun turret on top. (Other wise known as, I have a plan for the tracks & I’ll wing the rest.) I have an order of magnets coming in a few weeks, I can see it now – detachable weapon pods, even a whole train of tank bodies strung together by little magnets.

The last bit is, who are the tanks fighting for? The tanks will look archaic which suits both IG and CHAOS.  Not quite sure which side will get the nifty new tanks…..  Probably will depend on how noticable the air bubbles are!

Gears

Gears are an under used basing theme in 40K.  Trying to find found objects with the large, stylized, cogs needed for hobby work is a tough challenge.  In this project, I’ll see about making my own gears for use in an objective marker.

Time to fall back on my stand by:  clay molding.  Way back at the beginning of this blog Scott asked – “how much detail will the clay hold for the plaster?”  The answer is, a whole lot.  I set about making my gears using several diameters of PVC pipe to shape the main wheel and a 1/8 square of styrene to shape the cogs.  The clay faithfully held all of my poking and prodding, even the square edge of the 1/8 shape.  Scott asked if a skull shape could be used:  unfortunately, the undercut from the roundness of the skull will be lost.  The one thing clay can’t do is snap back into place to hold an under cut, only directly vertical strokes will be captured. 

Resin is used to fill the impressions in the clay.  If cast in plaster, the small sized pieces will not have the strength to survive the demold if cast in plaster.  When cured, remove the shapes.  The resin did not release cleanly from the clay (unlike the plaster) and I had to spend quite a bit of time cleaning the product.  Over all, the process was too time consuming, although I did get a good feel for the shapes I wanted to create.  In the future, I’ll cut rounds from the PVC using a pipe cutter & glue on cogs from styrene.  The one item that did work well was the 60mm base.  The impression was clean & I now have a raised tile pattern (which is not something you see every day.

End product:  sealed with super glue, gaps filled with Apoxie sculpt and ready for the mold box.

Objective Markers: Fallen Banner, Cannon Balls

WIP objective markers with a fantasy/ancients theme.

Fallen Banner:  nothing is more important than the regimental banner.  Troops will fight to the last to preserve their honor for the colors of the unit.  The ground is littered with broken and discarded weapons in a last effort to stand the banner up right one final time. 

The ground works are plastic card weapons & armor, most created from .015 inch styrene.  A shattered spear is made from a length of green stuff, large rocks are broken sheets of Apoxie Sculpt (left overs from the rune stone base project) and a few arrow shafts are made from thin rounds of plastic card with .015 inch styrene fins.

The banner is green stuff, rolled out on a flat surface & cut to shape.  The banner pole is two lengths of brass rod glued in a T.  Hidden under the green stuff is a re-enforcing length of plastic card.  This bit of support might be the pieces undoing, it might not be visible in the pics, but the banner shaft makes a large lump in the middle of the banner.  I’m not sure I’ll need to re-work the piece to correct the problem.  C&C welcome.

    

Cannon Balls:  A simple objective marker made from 4 wooden balls sourced from Wood Shoppe Turnings at Hobby Lobby.  Green stuff fills the gaps at both the base and between the lower/upper cannon balls.  Base is a wooden 1.5 inch round with sand.

Tips for Designing Mold Masters

A new round of objective markers is on the workbench for Adepticon 08.  This year all of the event organizers are interested in markers for their tournaments.  In addition to 40K, I’ll be casting for WFB, LotR and WAB this year.  Several people have offered to help, and the first question always is:  how do I make something like this for casting purposes?

A one sided mold works just like an ice cube tray – everything needs to slope down (up) to a genital point.  The RTV generally use is flexible enough to allow for a few undercuts – but avoid any cuts that curve back on themselves.  And a big no-no is any sort of loop – if the RTV makes contact with it’s self the master will be locked into the mold.   The second item to avoid is any small, upright points such as a sword or gun barrel. 

To demonstrate this sort of problem, take a look at the Ammo Crate marker.  The circle to the left shows a shell laying flat on the base.  The circle to the right shows two upright shells.  The 3/16 wire used to create the shells was too small & the cavities created failed to release the trapped air.  No amount of poking and prodding would allow for a clean gravity cast. 

The second question asked is:  How much detail will the resin/RTV pick up?  The answer is:  damn near everything.  Very detail little is lost in the molding process.  I would not be surprised at all to find fingerprints trapped in green stuff transferring to the finished product.

The last question is:  What materials can I use?  Nearly any sort of material can be used to construct the master.  The RTV uses no pressure or excessive heat in the curing process and most times the master will survive the process.  Only the most delicate items like paper or sand/plaster attached with white glue will suffer from the demold.

Hasty Fortification 3

Final pics for the Hasty Fortification competition going on at TerraGenesis.  Nothing new – just (in theory) better pics of the project.

 

Hasty Fortification 2

The Hasty Fortification is complete.  The plaster cast came out of the clay in good shape.  A bit of work with an x-acto cleaned up any visible mold lines and opened up the channel for the armored plates.   A MDF base was added for strength and to protect the corners from handling.  A roll of barbed wire was created by twisting 2 lengths of 19 gage wire around each other, then coiling the wire around a length of wood.  The armored plates are floor tile, with a bit of plastic card and rivets.  Over all, the Hasty Fortification was was hasty project with not more than 2 hours work spread out over three sessions.  Some times its nice to have a project that can be over and done with.

   

Lessons learned:  back when I made the clay cavity, I should have textured the wrap of clay used to build up the base.  It was a fast and easy way to add height to the piece, but the surface came out very smooth – a nice look for mud but not much else.   The right to left slant of the wooden floor boards is very obvious now – I’ll need to pay a bit more attention next time.

New casting supplier in La Grange

Reynolds Advanced Materials acquired PSH Industries of La Grange, IL – or so says their advertising flier.  ReynoldsAM carries Smooth-On products, as well as a variety of other casting materials.  

Cool, a local distributor that I can drive to & pick up supplies.  My last resin shipment cost me $14.00 S/H, and that’s only going to get worse as gas prices keep climbing.   Even better, the on line catalog lists a full range of Gypsum products – excellent news, since my last supplier stopped selling Hydrostone. 

Gave the place a call and it all went down hill from there.  The business is still very much a work in progress.  They do have Smooth On ready to sell, but not much else – no casting plaster.  Office hours are 8:30am to 5:00pm M-F, with a show case opening some time in the next few months.  Not the most convenient, but I could manage to drop in if I took of from work early.

Over all, a very disapointing impression after the very exciting web site/catalog & the expense of buying my name & address from smooth on.  I’ll hang on for a few months and see if they get their act together.

Ruin Bases 3

The ruin/rune base project is nearly complete.  The RTV mold is finished, below are pics of the first round of resin casting.  All that remains is to get a batch painted up.

Hasty Fortifications

TerraGenesis hosts a series of monthly terrain competitions – this month, the theme is Hasty Fortifications.  Perfect sort of thing to pull out the Clay Molding techniques I’ve been working on.  The goal is to use clay impressions to cast a small reinforced earth fortification, then add on details like armored plates, barbed wire, spent ammo, or anything else that comes up in the process.

Step 1:  Clay form.  Other than adding more detail to the cavity, the other addition is a lip around the edge.  The extra clay will allow for a deeper pour, and add a sound base to the project.

 

Step 2:  Plaster cast taken from the clay.  The object is about 5×3 inches and no more than 1.5 inches high.

Ruin Stone

At the Games Plus Auction I attended last month, my sole purchase was Cry Havoc #1 & #2.  The artists at Rackam have a way of approaching projects from unusual angles.  In this case, the issues contained articles describing how to work plaster as a sculpting medium.   After a bit of fidgeting, I settled on the Ruin Stone pillars found so frequently in Confrontation scenery.

 

Step 1:  pour a large slab of plaster to a depth of 1/4 to 1/2 inch.  An unmarked plastic tray from a set of side cutters served as my mold box, both handy and reusable! 

 

Step 2:  use a hack saw to cut the plaster block into 2 equal sized pieces.   The pieces are 4 inches long & about 1.25 inches wide.  The plaster is only about 2 days old & in my musty basement that means the plaster is still curing.  Moist plaster is a bit easier to carve (less splintering) but makes a fast mess of a hack saw blade.

 

Step 3:  tools.  Pen for drawing out the pattern, a scribing tool to start the cut, an x-acto blade for clean cuts and a probing tool from an old dissecting kit to widen out the cuts.

 

Step 4:  plot out the cuts with a pen.  I tried to follow along with the triangular ruins typical of the Confrontation ruins.  The pattern is something like those found at Antenociti’s Workshop. 

 

Step 5:  following about 30 minutes of carving, I have one side of a ruin stone.  In order to distress the smooth face of the plaster, I gently ran a wire brush over the surface to produce wear marks. 

Next steps will be to carve the other face, match the two parts up, clean up the join line between the halves & come up with some sort of base for the project.

Finally, for something completely different:  a cast from an Oreo cookie tray.   Looks like they will make good pump covers for industrial terrain.  Or I may cut the lengths up for detail on a larger terrain piece.

40K 25mm Bases: First cast

The mold for my 25mm bases came out better than expected.  When glueing in the masters, I took extra time to make sure to make sure the seal was even and without any glue build up.  I was rewarded with cleanly cut cavities for each base.

 

Finished Mold

 

Finished Bases

 

After removing the Lego mold box, I got out my handy sculpting tool.  Some times the mold is difficult to release from the master & a bit of soft scraping is needed to get under the mold.  But in this case, all that was needed was a bit of finger pressure to release the mold.

The 10 master bases survived the molding process & are still firmly attached to the MDF base board.  If need be, I could remove the bases & use them on figures.  Instead, I’ll store the bases right on the board in-case I need to create a new mold.

 

Not the best of pics, but you can see a bit of a lip running along the edge of the mold.  Every new mold needs a bit of clean up where the RTV rides up the side of the mold box.  The build up will cause the mold to sit at a funny angle when casting, take a razor and remove the extra RTV. 

 

A bit of an oddity on the cast bases.  If you look closely at the masters, these two bases have a total of four rivet holes drilled into them.  But the cast bases have all manor of results at the drill holes.  The beam on the left has an outie rivet.  The decking to the right has everything from a small cavity to a counter sunk rivet to a full fledged outie.  All of these are caused by air bubbles getting trapped in the drill holes when the RTV was cast.  One of these days, I’ll remember to pick out holes such as these with a tooth pick while pouring the RTV.  Until then, I’ll continue to be interested in the what effects an unintended gas bubble can have.

Bases: Making an RTV mold

Time to create the mold for my set of 10 25mm bases.  The type of mold I work with is generally refered to as one part, open face or dump mold.  The mold is a single RTV piece, with open cavities for casting.  Makes for easy mold building, but does require a bit more attention when pouring the resin and may require a bit of sanding on the completed cast.

The RTV used for hobby mold making is a two part kit, mixed by weight or volume, and cured at room temperature in 24 hours.  My rubber of choice is Mold Max 20 from Smooth On, a 10-1 mix by weight with good strength and a lot of stretchability.   For a while I was using a one to one Micro Mark product, easy to use but lacking the durability of the Mold Max.

 

Step 1:  Glue the bases to a firm base, like quarter inch MDF or a thick sheet of plastic card.  Surround the masters with a barrier.  In this case, I used Legos; handy, reusable and quick to assemble.  Other options include build a box out of foam core board, recycled plastic containers or any other frame that can be made water tight.  Tacky glue (a thick white glue) was used to attach all elements.  The gap filling glue is handy for a project like this and its easy to tear apart at the end of the project.

Once the glue was dry, a coat of Future Floor polish was painted over everything.  The wax will seal any porous surfaces and assist in removing the RTV from  the masters, mold box and base board.

 

Step 2:  A postage scale, a few cups & a mixing stick is all that’s needed.  The RTV comes in two parts.  The ‘10′ is a thick white goop, the ‘1′ is a red fluid.  Don’t let the goop scare you, despite the thickness of the mixture the RTV does a fine job of penetrating small spaces.   For this project I mixed 190 grams of white with 19 grams of red. 

How much to mix up? – good question.  I’m prone to just guessing & then mixing up additional batches as needed.  The RTV takes hours to set up, leaving plenty of time add more to the mix.  If you want a better answer, try filling the master mold with sand, then pour out the sand into your measuring cup to determine the volume of RTV needed to fill the space. When choosing the thickness of the mold I like about an eight of an inch of rubber, less if only small points of the cavity reach any depth, a bit more if the cavity has a large open space of uniform depth.

 

Step 3:

Mix the two parts of the RTV well.  Try not to fold in bubbles as you stir the rubber.  Pour the RTV in a thin stream into the mold box.  The thinner the stream, the more bubbles you’ll break as the RTV is poured.  

Tomorrow night, I’ll be able to take down the mold box & try a first cast.  Always a bit exciting to see if the mold comes out right.

25mm Urban bases PT2

Completed set of 10 bases, suitable for use with 40K or other miniature games.  Now that I have 10 bases prepared,  next set will be to set up a mold box & create an RTV mold of the masters. 

Material list is basic: 

• floor tile
• plastic card and rod
• plastic card with tile design
• variable grain sand
• super glue

Tools are similarly basic:

• exacto blade
• side clipers
• file
• scribing tool

The scribing tool is the only item that may be hard to find.  I purchased mine at a local ACE Hardware for $6.00.   The tool is used to carve the tile etchings into the floor tile.  One method to remember, if your going to smash the tile into bits – carve the lines in first & then be sure to line up the pieces so all the line run in the same direction.

 

 If you are building bases for casting purposes, watch out for over lapping bits.  Laying bits at an angle is a nice effect, but you must seal up the triangular hold between the pieces.  On the left the top piece (where its casting a shadow) forms a significant under cut.  If I don’t get back in there with some more super glue & sand (or some sort of epoxy putty), the mold will get “under” the bit and create a space in the mold that will tear at the rubber with each cast.  The base on the right has an open gap between the tile and the over laying piece of plastic card.  When the RTV gets under and forms a strip of rubber – you’ll have a devil of a time getting this base out of the mold.

Lesson Learned: Smooth On resin 325

I provided a bit of advice to friend for a resin casting project. He wanted a resin to cast medallions in a one sided mold using a colorant. Smooth On (my supplier of choice), listed an easy to color resin: number 320. Somewhere between my recommendation and the purchase, 320 became 325. And an off-white resin became a clear casting resin.

For our hobby of casting gaming pieces – 325 is the absolutely wrong resin. It’s clear and refuses to take paint. If you use a colorant – the result is a semi-clear, lolly pop like finish. Maybe there is some fun application for this resin, but it’s not in the painted miniatures hobby.

CD Terrain: 40K earth works

With this post I’ll be finishing the CD terrain project begun a few weeks ago.  The 40K earthwork is a simple piece, but it illustrates the basic tools needed to complete larger projects.

Step1:  base coat the sand and plaster with a health coat of acrylic house paint.  You can use just about any paint – but the buck a quart oops from Home Depot is about as cheap as paint can get.  If you don’t have the good fortune to pick up miss-matched paint – think about buying a quart.  Model paint is far too expensive to use for terrain work and even those large bottles of craft paint well be used up before you know it.

The sand is coated in a layer of Black, the plaster earth works gets a layer of medium grey.

Step 2:  Dry brush the sand.  For a muddy look, I first use Folk Art:Dark Brown, followed by a light brush of Folk Art: Mushroom. 

Step 3:  Wash the plaster with a bit of black/brown.  For terrain work, I use a formula of 50% water & 50% Future floor polish, with Michael’s Powder Paint as the colorant.  Once again, cheap is the primary concern.  At $5 each, the two jars of powered paint have been used on dozens of projects and I’ve hardly used a quarter of the paint.  Add half a tea spoon black + half a tea spoon brown to a table spoon of water/Future.  This will give a gritty black wash.  For browns, go with 90% brown with just a touch of black paint.

Step 4:  Clean up the wash with a light dry brush of Folk Art: Sandstone.  I like to add a bit of Woodland Scenics blended turf as a mossy covering to the piece.  To apply the turf, paint on a bit of Elmer’s white glue with a medium detail brush & shake the turf over the piece.  It’s handy to have an empty box to work over – the turf makes a bit of a mess when dumped on.  While it might not always be appropriate to have grass & moss on a battle field, but I find the green breaks up the monotony of an all black/grey project.

Adepticon Tournament Objective Counters

The Gallery page is updated with pics of the three objective counters created for the 2007 Adepticon Gladiator and 40K Championship.  The markers will be a fun add-on to the normal tournament fair:  not only will you compete to control the markers during the game, and get to keep them once the game is over, but you will receive a bonus in the subsequent game!  The objectives are one-piece resin models and will be provided unpainted.

  

Creating and casting the objectives was a fun little project.  Calling myself a sculptor is a bit of a stretch, how about assembler? The markers began life as plastic card, floor tile and a bit of green stuff.  I think I see another How-To article coming out of this. 

One of the bigger challenges was learning to cast in volume.   Because every table at Adepticon needed a marker, that means I needed to cast 90 copies of each objective.   Not wanting to try this one cast at a time, I created “production” molds for each of the markers with 6 cavities.   Saved a lot of time only having to cast 15 sets instead of 90.

Clay Molding

What 40K gaming table is complete with out craters, rubble and trenches.  A fast solution is to  make a fast and dirty (pardon the pun) mold from clay and cast the mold in plaster.

Supplies

Clay – an oil or synthetic based art clay.  Softer the better.  I found a block at my local art store for about $8.00.

Rock – a sturdy piece of textured rock aka concrete to use as the main digging tool.

Assorted cast off pieces – Flat strips, squad bass wood stripping, textured plastic -any thing that can add a bit of distinction from the rock texture.

Flatten the clay into a rough square 4 inches by 4 inches by 1 inch thick.  Right out of the package, the clay can be hard to work with.  Spend some time kneading it like bread to get a softer consistency.

Dig into the clay with the rock or other primary sculpting tool.  Rough out the basic structure of the mold.  In this example, I’m aiming for a ‘C’ like hole to serve as a dug in, fox hold like, position.

The mold cavity is now about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide.  After opening the initial hole with the rock, I used a flat tile to make like concrete panels with re-enforced beams created with a 1/4 inch square of bass wood.

Cast plaster into the mold cavity.  Once the plaster sets, demold the product & check out your handy work.  After a day or two, clean off the excess plaster and sand the bottom to get a flat base.  Depending on how gentle you were demolding the plaster, you may be able to get a second or third cast out of the same mold.   The clay is re-usable, go ahead and fashion a new obstacle & cast again!

Plaster, no matter the quality, is not the sort of thing you want to throw directly on the gaming table.   A few options:

• Glue the cast to a small sheet of MDF or an old CD.  Flock and paint to match the rest of the table.
• Use the cast as a master in an RTV mold.  Switch to resin as the material of choice & cast up a whole battle field of terrain.