More Cool Stuff for the Hobby!

Lately I've been struggling with getting all my Malifaux crews transported successfully to tournaments and (semi)weekly gaming. I was using a small Feldherr bag to transport my crews, which worked well enough when I got my Viktoria crew well-tuned and didn't need to bring much else. Now in M3E I have completely different crews and a few of my models don't fit the foam bag well at all and have broken. When one of my Bandidos' tiny guns broke from her hand twice I decided enough was enough and I needed to get a new solution. 

I had been messing with magnets for my miniatures for a while now but never fully committed to it. I successfully magnetized my Descent minis, but don't transport them often. I magnetized my Hamelin crew but don't use them and never stored them in a magnetic case or transport. I also successfully magnetized my Zombicide Green Horde minis but made a foamcore box with a magnet sheet to store them. What I really needed was a very sturdy solution for all my Malifaux crews, and working on it myself would have me hesitant on its quality or security.

I debated on turning a wooden cigar box into a tournament tray and transport solution, but felt it wouldn't be big enough, and I'd have to secure a handle to it, and it wouldn't hold my other stuff like cards, tape measure, etc. without more work.

I remember a long time ago seeing these Tablewar Mini Cases at a Warmachine Tournament and realized it was a perfect solution, so I found the site and ended up buying one.

It came in separate shipments but didn't take too long. The trays, due to its modular nature, takes a tiny bit of work to put together but Spikey Bits does an excellent set of videos on doing this stuff. Essentially you use some Gorilla Glue to put them all together and use some clamps to hold the sheet to the frame while it dries.

What you get is an excellent storage/transport unit that fits every one of my needs! The trays slide out and can hold a ton of minis on each one. It also comes with a small drawer to hold all your necessary gaming items. This isn't 100% needed, and I may have to abandon it if I plan on bringing my entire Malifaux Outcasts collection. But for now I've streamlined all the items I need to bring to play in a tournament or weekly game to only this case! I love that. It also can hold my dry erase marker, which I've decided to switch to using instead of a ton of tokens/markers for conditions in the game to downsize the amount of stuff I need to bring to a game.

For now I don't have a ton of stuff magnetized, but my entire Parker Barrows crew is on the left and some of my Tara crew is on the right (with an extra Midnight Stalker because he was already magnetized). By this weekend's tournament I'm hoping to have the Tara crew magnetized and ready to play!

While I was on the same site I saw they also offered neoprene backdrops for Macro photography, and it comes with a cool stand to hold it up so I bought that too. I used to use a printed backdrop on regular paper and it worked well enough, but I saw that the mat could work really well with my light box that I owned and it turned out to be a perfect fit! It comes with three mats for different backdrops, one is cool, one is warm, and another is just a blue to white gradient.

My first test photo using Ashes and Dust turned out pretty good! I've just got to work on my camera settings as the lights are really bright even when diffused and the white colors get washed out.

I highly recommend these products from Tablewar if you have the same needs that I had!

Final Fantasy 7 Cloud WIP

Howdy Folks!

Just gonna show a quick work-in-progress on a cool miniature I got from eBay, Cloud from Final Fantasy VII!

This was purchased as a vanity project, but I'm going to use him as a Wokou Raider proxy in my Parker Barrows crew until the models are available again.

Here is is primed black. Not much of a step but a crucial one :)

I did a very heavy coat of one of my workhorse colors, VMA Dark Panzer Grey. This is a very good color to use when wanting to paint "black" without just being, well, primer black. Black is a very tough color to show values for and easily steps into grey when done too much, and this color being used as one of the primary colors is what helps keep it dark while showing value.

Next step is a highlight of my other workhorse color, VGA Cold Grey. I love this color so much, it's probably one of my most used ones.

Add a little white to the Cold Grey for the next step, you can see it coming together on the NMM of the sword (which I drastically change later). I believe I keep this highlight to the sword and base only.

Then a final highlight of White on the sword. Bling!

I felt like experimenting on the base so I did a recipe I only did once before, and I think I will paint over this now that I've seen it in regular light, but for this step I did a heavy wash of Secret Weapons Miniatures Stone.

Then I blocked in some colors for the hilt and skin. The hilt is GW Foundation Mephiston Red, an out-of-production color that I love and will miss when the bottle runs dry. The skin is Reaper Golden Shadow.

I block in the hair to turn him from Zack to Cloud :) and drybrush the base with VGC Dead Flesh. The base ended up being too dark in natural light and doesn't contrast with Cloud's clothes/boots so I'll likely change this to a brighter color.

Here I did a major overhaul of the sword and added some "gleams" to the front and more to the back, along with brightening the edge of the sword. Under my hobby lights the original gleam looked good, but in natural light it was entirely too dark. I also noticed that behind his head was almost completely Dark Panzer Grey so I had to fix that up, it looked extremely odd that it was really bright up at the top of the front sword but then almost black by the head. This was a ton of frustrating work to get right, and even then I just settled rather than keep fidgeting with the sword. The hardest part was getting the edge completed without screwing up the earlier work done on the blade, and you may still be able to see the mess but I'll be able to cover it with the brush highlights.

Somewhere along the way you will see I finished the hilt, I hit it with a heavy wash of GW Agrax Earthshade then highlighted with a mix of GW Mephiston Red/Reaper Golden Skin. I also finished his skin tones for the face and arm, although I'm going to go back and add a bit more to the arm and clean up his cheek bone area to make him look less gaunt.

That's where he's at for now, once I do the brush highlights he will look a lot better.

Wow, it really has been a long time...

It has been the better part of two years since I've posted. I am going to try to revitalize this blog, with the hopes of better motivating myself on completing some projects that I plan on soon.

I won't bore you with long reasons why I drifted away. Essentially my job had me prioritize my time differently than I used to before my promotion, and cutting this blog out was one of the ways for me to get things done.

But I've really missed updating this, even if it was mostly for myself. So I'll do my best to keep posting stuff, starting with a photo dump of various projects I've done since the last post.

Granted, this isn't absolutely everything, but really just the ones I've managed to find from my phone. Some are complete while most are in various stages of progress.

Enjoy!