Neverborn and the Preacher

Last night I was mucking about with my photography setup so I could present to you the fruits of my labours and my Salute-winning (I like how that sounds!) Neverborn crew.

As I have a Nikon camera – a secondhand D50 – I was able to take advantage of their Camera Control Pro software which nicely allowed me to tweak the settings and instantly snap, preview and transfer images to the PC. Nifty stuff.

So I’m getting happier with the way the pics are coming out. Still not sure if the lighting is spread enough, and I think I should try out a darker background.

Anyway, here’s where I ended up.

Max’s Salute-Winning Neverborn

You will have seen this lot individually before, but here they all are. Bases re-coloured and plaque-mounted (with blu-tac). I would quite like to have got big and scary ol’ Teddy done as he’s a nice counterpoint to Baby Kade, but I didn’t have the time.

A note on the name plaque itself. I used the same technique as last year’s Canoness – ie designed in Photoshop and printed onto acetate. This one had silver painted directly onto the back of the acetate which worked fine. However a bit of card on the back does give it a bit more weight so I may go back to that.

Now they come back off that display plinth and will return to the streets of Malifaux – hopefully with some new creepy Neverborn friends.

Kingdom Death Preacher

Sadly she didn’t make it through to the final round of judging. But I’m still proud of her and will be happy to display her in the “cabinet”.

She marked a couple of firsts for me and was a great learning piece. The base in particular saw me using new techniques such as the resin water, and sculpting the carp with green stuff.

I’m pretty happy with how they turned out, though there are things I’d like to address next time I attempt it.

I used a two part liquid mix from Gedeo called Crystal Resin. Very easy to work with and pretty forgiving stuff, though it had a 24 hour cure time so I couldn’t leave it til the last minute. Unfortunately the poured resin has a very high surface tension, which caused it to seep its way up the stream banks and a little way into the moss. Damn that capillary action! It also meant the result had quite a meniscus, and I was forced to re-spray with Dullcote to disguise the glossy moss and stones.

I actually had a little bit of a mixup with the fish in that it refused to sit any closer to the stream bed despite me drilling a hole for its supporting rod much deeper than that. It just wouldn’t go in, and I was reluctant to apply too much force for fear of tearing the fish itself.

Tinting the water was a bit of a trial as well. I did a few test runs to get the colouration right and discovered that acrylic paints are no good. They wouldn’t dissolve and instead left paint flecks swirling through the liquid. Inks did the trick though and I ended up using a mix of brown and blue inks which gave a nice deep turquoise tint.

Another misfortune was in the final mix I lost track of the ratio of each resin part. My final mix contained too little hardener so it took an extra day to solidify – which was something of a worry as the deadline approached!

One nice trick which worked well I think, was the use of soft pastel shavings as a weathering powder. The green worked especially well to represent mossy lichen on the bridge, stones and lantern. I’ll be doing that again for sure.

It’s a great cheap alternative to specialised weathering powder, and readily available in art shops in a full spectrum of colours. Only tricky bit is fixing them as they tend to just disappear as soon as a varnish goes on. I ended up re-applying over the top of the varnish, but it’s a quick and easy job so no big deal.

~ by Max Von Deadlock on April 19, 2011.