Painting Small and Expensive Plastic People

[Sigil]

Finally got around to making this guy I painted a while ago a base:

[Thaluikhain]

Oh, not old school as such (being a mere 23 yeas old), but GW's latest made to order thing seems to be the models that came with the 3rd ed 40k boxed set, minus the sprue for the flamer, missile launcher and sergeant.

[Sigil]

Honestly it seems kind of weird to have like, a less complete nostalgia box. Seems like they'd have had a slam dunk if they just went and included the other models and terrain.

[Thaluikhain]

Oh yeah, they had terrain in there as well, forgot about that.

Possibly they don't have the molds for those anymore, been discontinued for ages after all. When they had the old metal IG, and made to order Valhallans, they didn't have lascannon but had more or less everything else, I suspect the lascannon molds aren't around.

[Sigil]

They did lose a lot of molds to neglect and mismanagement, so it wouldn't be surprising. People do seem pretty keen on the set, so I guess it kind of is a slam dunk after all anyway. I'd never seen those specific dark eldar models so I picked some up... on ebay, for like 15 bucks for 10 lol.

[Thaluikhain]

They also seemed to have sold a bunch of old molds off. Old school skaven models are being made and sold under the name "Ver-Men" by some other company in the UK. Not knock offs or imitations, seemingly the original models being legally made by someone other than GW.

[Sigil]

There are some cases in the early days of Citadel/Games Workshop where the rights to various miniatures were retained by their sculptors or by companies that were working in association with, but the ver'men appear to be a dedicated line of skaven knockoffs (now also OOP) by Harlequin.

[Thaluikhain]

Huh, googling it looks like you're right and I was completely wrong. Could have sworn that someone (not Harlequin) was making really old skaven models under that name some months back.

[Sigil]

I mean, to be fair, even those ones just look a lot like skaven. It's not like skaven are a hard style to copy, model wise they're kind of basic and havent been updated in eons, they all still have a 90s hand sculpted look, anyone could ape it.

[Sigil]

Decided to do something silly for fun, the first truly tactical set of "Tactical Dreadnought Armor"

[Koumei]

That's incredible.

So last year, I painted all of the following: 16 dark eldar (5 winged fuckheads that are a fucking pain to assemble, 10 wyches, 1 succubus)

Here are the flying assholes

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[Koumei]

And here we have the succubus:

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[Koumei]

So, looking at these photos, I've realised I need to clean some hair off them. Anyway, here are the wyches. Part 1...

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[Koumei]

And part 2.

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Yeah, that's it, an entire year. For what it's worth, I have assembled and undercoated (yes, zenithal style) a new plastic Canoness, some Deathwatch marines and some genestealer hybrids. And did some base layers on the hybrids. So I hope to do more this year.

[Sigil]

That's more than I painted in 2021, they look great. Love the scheme, and I especially like the winged assholes.
I actually ended up getting an air purifier for the room I paint in because of cat and dog hair.

[Thaluikhain]

Oh yeah, GW loves making models that don't want to be assembled. Modern flying things especially, in the old days you'd have a normal model, maybe in a more dynamic pose, and wings or a jump-pack, and that worked fine (and stacked up in ranks in WHFB, I guess). Nowdays it's all ballerina poses with as little contact with the base as possible.

[Koumei]

Yeah, the wings are actually individual pieces you glue on. I don't mean "this pair of wings is glued onto the back", that's normal, but two separate wings, each with a 1x4mm area of contact.

I'm going to add some neon grass tufts to the bases, because I have them and it needs to happen. It clearly matches the colour scheme. Also the green paint isn't glow-in-the-dark, but when you hold them in a normally-lit room, against darker minis and stuff, they kind of look like they are glow-in-the-dark. It's really good. For my paints, I largely use a mix of Warcolours, Vallejo and Green Stuff World, but I also have a few GW things still, and recently purchased some Turbo Dork colourshift paints. If I end up being the kind of person who does a lot of painting, I'll start looking into pigments and airbrushing and all that, but that's for when I'm actually using what I already have. I'm sure you all know the trap.

[Sigil]

I gotta say, I think GW has always made minis that just don't want to be assembled. The older metal marines, especially the '88 renegades I've been painting, just straight up can't accept their backpacks without clipping and sanding on something. The little smokestack backpack I print has absolutely minimal contact area needed because I designed it for rogue trader models and it still doesn't work on some of them.

Most of my paints are Vallejo and citadel, but i have a few scale 75. Honestly each brand seems to have at least a few stand out paints, and I've been slowly building a palette of favorites. I've got an air brush that I should use more often, but to be honest I'm still learning how to paint with a brush and I'm kind of trying to push myself as far as I can there.

[Sigil]

Okay, I enjoyed doing the first one so much I made him a friend

[deaddmwalking]

I like the Tactical Dreadnoughts. Did you 3D print them at 50% size? Is that something that 3D printers can do?

[Sigil]

Yeah absolutely, you can take models and cut them up or shrink them and change things before printing, it doesn't take a lot of experience to do a digital kitbash like this, it was one of the first things I did, the 3d printing community calls it 'remixing' generally. I took the top of a dreadnought I liked that still had its parts as separate bodies, imported a set of marine legs to have a something to scale it to, and removed some details that just werent going to print at the reduced scale, I think they're roughly 60% scaled down.

[Foxwarrior]

I like the Tactical Dreadnoughts. Did you 3D print them at 50% size? Is that something that 3D printers can do?

So the way a 3D resin printer works is, there's an LCD tablet screen (mine uses an off the shelf screen, newer ones have monochrome screens instead of RGB) with an ultraviolet backlight. On top of that is a vat of deadly poison. The printer head goes down, the screen displays an image of a cross section of the desired model, the UV light turns the deadly poison into a layer of the miniature, the printer head goes up and down again, and repeat. Basically like that scene in lord of the rings when the uruk-hai are being made with a couple extra steps.

So any software procedure that produces a valid sequence of cross sections of a model will work.

[Koumei]

The Tactical Dreadnoughts look great, I love the idea. Great work on the freehand details too.

[Zaranthan]

On top of that is a vat of deadly poison.

I read the remainder of this post in the voice of GLaDOS.

I keep considering getting into 3D printing, but I'm too much of a trial and error programmer. I'd go through a hundred bucks worth of material to print a friggin d6.

[Sigil]

I definitely wouldn't consider 3d printing to be a money saver unless you really plan on going into it hard, I don't think I've 'recouped the cost' of my machines and materials and it's not even close. That said I do really enjoy it, it offers me a lot of freedom in the miniature painting hobby, and its fun in it's own right. When I started I definitely had to learn and had a good deal of failures, but at this point I don't run into that much anymore, and its more about squeezing out quality from my machine.

The Tactical Dreadnoughts look great, I love the idea. Great work on the freehand details too.

Thanks
I've got their sarge printed and partially painted, he's a little tiny Mark IV, gonna try to finish him this weekend.