Just back from a month-long field assignment, as mentioned in my previous post. I have more photos of the sculpting projects to post, and some new photos to take of progress on the treemen and other sculpting projects!
There’s also some slightly dusty projects left behind when I left… and two packages of good stuff I ordered while away which are waiting for me to pick up later this weekend. Details on the new shiny soon.
I’ve got the Russian Civil War bug again, caused by reading the Mud & Blood rules and associated scenario books in PDF form while away. Speaking of which, a few weeks ago TooFatLardies released Chris Stoeson’s From Empire to Revolution scenario supplement for M&B, covering the Eastern Front of WW1. It talks about the Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies in some detail (the Germans already have coverage in the main M&B book, of course) and should prove useful for our RCW adventures, as well as providing inspiration to maybe start a force of Austro-Hungarians or Germans sometime this winter. I’ll likely do a proper review post of From Empire to Revolution soon, but for now the short version is: go pick this up, it’s very well done!
It’s good to be back! I have a few days off so I’ll unpack the sculpting tools and press on with that soon. The first two treemen are so close to being finished I can taste it; hopefully a couple of evenings of sculpting will get them done, dusted and onto the Blood Bowl pitch.
They have hands! Well, hands are in progress, in any rate. I used thin wire superglued to the forearm or wrist of each figure, then built the fingers and wrists up by looping and folding the wire. Very thin strips of greenstuff after that, then some detailing and additional very thin bits of greenstuff.
Hands in progress. See text for details, and click for larger.
Above, the larger treeman has the first coat of putty on his hands, while the shorter one has wires glued to his wrists waiting to be formed into hands.
Dread Altar (now with skulls!)
The altar that started life as a way to use up leftover putty has taken on a life of it’s own, as projects tend to. I’ve been practicing the fine art of sculpting skulls on it.
Hands and the start of faces. Also, sculpting tools.
I’ve started doing the heads and faces on both treemen, in Milliput because I’m still happier working in that than in greenstuff. Shorter treeman has also had his fingers and hands formed from wire, but no greenstuff yet.
You can also see my three primary sculpting tools here. The all-metal one is from the Army Painter sculpting tools set; it has a bent paddle sort of shape on one end and a spear blade sort of thing on the other. The pale wood handle is an embossing tool, usually used by scrapbookers and other crafty sorts but very useful for sculpting. It has a small round knob on each end, perfect for eye sockets in skulls, rounded grooves in things and similar shaping. The final tool is a homemade one, using the handle of a dead paintbrush and two bits of paperclip wire. One end is bent into a sort of hook, the other just has a gentle bend in it.
Heads and faces progressing, and yet more skulls on the altar! Click for larger, as always.
Final photo for now from just this morning. The heads and faces on both treemen are progressing, although they both have a fair way to go before I’ll consider them complete. The amusement of sculpting skulls has taken over the altar. I haven’t counted yet but there have to be at least a dozen+ skulls on the thing now…
A gallery post of work-in-progress cellphone photos from Project Hotelroom Treemen!
Many of these were taken late at night under a desk lamp and they’re all cellphone pics, so quality is… variable. They’re still a decent record of the progress of the hotel room projects to date, so enjoy.
I’m away from home in northern Alberta for four to six weeks helping run a field project for the company I work for. It’s hard but fascinating work with long hours and we’re living in a hotel suite for the duration.
I’ve brought figures and paint on previous field assignments, but the lighting in most hotel rooms is terrible so I’ve never painted much.
I couldn’t take the thought of not having some creative outlet, though, so this time I packed putty, sculpting tools and some other supplies and resolved to use the time to practice the dark art of converting putty, wire, and bad language into usable figures. Specifically, I decided to start with a couple of treemen to use on the Bloodbowl pitch.
Why treemen? I’ve seen a lot of treeman figures out there I didn’t like for various reasons, so I wanted to try my hand at a treeman that satisfied me, and also because the exact details and proportions of something like a treeman are less fixed than a human or similar humanoid would be.
Just by way of a teaser, here’s where Project Hotelroom Treeman started!
A washer, paperclip wire, scrap paper, and superglue. Everything has to start somewhere!
I’ve also just bought new greenstuff putty finally, to replace the very, very old strip of the stuff that’s been hanging around my desk for far too long. The old stuff had the consistency of used old chewing gum and was pretty much impossible to work with; the new stuff (along with a couple of new sculpting tools!) has reminded me how much fun messing around with greenstuff is. There’s a pile of YouTube video tutorials showing basic greenstuff sculpting techniques – one I rather like is The Dizmo’s skull tutorial.
Green Stuff Industries host a good mix of basic messing-with-green-stuff tutorials, including this Sculpting Bas-Relief Flames tutorial that I want to try out sometime soon.
I’m off next week to northern Alberta for three to six weeks of field work, helping run a project up there, so posting might continue to be fairly light but I’m going to take some putty and sculpting stuff with me and practice the art – it should be more forgiving of hotel suite lighting than painting, which I’ve tried in hotel rooms in the past and always quit because even at a hotel room desk the light tends to be lousy…
Looking to assemble unique teams for Blood Bowl without spending a lot of money, I’ve been poking around the Reaper Bones collection – Reaper’s relatively new collection of injection-molded figures in a relatively soft plastic.
I ordered a couple of figures from my FLGS that seemed usable in Blood Bowl, just to check them out. I got an Ogre Chieftain, a Minotaur, and a Spirit of the Forest, intending to remove the weapons (in the case of the minotaur & ogre, at least) and use them as, respectively, an orge, minotaur and treeman in BB teams.
I’ll talk more about all three figures in future posts, but first I have to say that Reaper’s online customer service is awesome. I bought the figures Thursday and realized that evening that the Spirit of the Forest had been packed with two right arms. Friday I confirmed on the Reaper website that the Spirit is indeed supposed to actually have both a left and right arm and sent a short email off to Reaper customer service that Friday evening.
Monday morning first thing I had a short email from Reaper asking for a shipping address so they could send a replacement left arm; I replied around mid-day and that afternoon got another email saying my part would be packaged and shipped soon. Wednesday morning I got a notice (with tracking number) saying my package had left Reaper.
I’d always heard Reaper had good customer service, but because I can order Reaper figures through Curious Comics & Games here in town had never had any reason to deal directly with them. I’m happy to say the rumours are entirely true, and I’m looking forward to getting the replacement part for my Spirit of the Forest soon!
Finally getting paint onto all the Blood Bowl sideline buildings, which means it’s worth pointing a camera at them again – neither bare pink styrofoam nor black primered styrofoam are really all that photogenic.
The BB temples get some paint! Not done yet, mind you. Click for larger.
For scale reference, the figure on the black base in the centre of the photo is an Impact Crocling (Skink) on a 25mm slottabase.
Left to right along the back row, we have the finished scoreboard/scatter temple, the Visitors dugout, then the Home (Crocodile) dugout. Front left corner is the dice tower, and next to the tower is the dice catch basin/ceremonial pool that attaches to the front of the dice tower.
Quite a bit of stuff still to do – all the buildings need black washes here and there to tone the colours down and weather some of the stone back down where the drybrushing has gotten too bright, then I need to do at least one pass of much lighter drybrushing with a paler/brighter stone colour to pop the edges and textures a bit.
I’ve already mentioned the magnets to keep the dice tower and it’s catch basin/pool together while they’re in use, and the Home team dugout also has a pair of simple croc-head statues underway to go at the front corners of the centre dugout area, where you can still see unpainted pink foam.
I also need to figure out what symbols to put in the large blank circles in five of the six dugout areas. Blood Bowl’s dugouts are Reserve/Knocked Out/Casualty (RES/KO/CAS) and aside from the obvious skull for CAS I’m not sure what to put for the other two areas. Anyone got any bright ideas or inspiration there? If you do, please comment below, I’d love some help…
It’s been a quiet stretch here mostly because I was away from home for just over a week housesitting for a family member on the other side of town, but the Blood Bowl pitch setup has been progressing slowly.
I posted my stencil tests recently and have since finished the full set of field lines and a logo on the fabric pitch.
Masking the field off for most of the field lines. Newsprint and lots of masking tape! Click for larger
For the field lines, I used masking tape over the fabric to mask off the edges of each line. Because of the width of the tape I had, I wound up doing the outer lines of each endzone separately. The photo above has the centre line (Line of Scrimmage), wide zone and long edge lines masked off, as well as the inside edge of each end zone. After masking it off I sprayed along each line with white spraypaint, making two or three passes down each line.
The red crocodile head logo in the centre of the pitch I did differently. I laid out the image in the size I wanted in Inkscape on my computer, then printed it on a sheet of full-sheet label paper — the sort of paper where the entire sheet is one giant sticker. After printing it I used an Xacto to cut the stencil out, mostly freehand but using a small steel ruler where needed. Once cut I peeled the backing paper off and stuck the stencil down to the fabric.
You could do this step with ordinary printer paper (ideally a good quality slightly heavier-weight sheet) and secure it in place with masking tape around the edges, but I happen to have a stockpile of the full-sheet label paper around and it does work better than ordinary paper for things like the spirals in this stencil and some of the smaller details — see around the nostrils and eyes, for example.
Cutting out and placing the stencil on the felt. Click for larger, see text for details.
After it was carefully pressed into place on the felt I loaded up a regular 1.5″ wide housepainter’s brush with red craft paint and went at the stencil in the classic Martha Stewart-approved way of painting a stencil without getting paint under the edges of it and ruining the outline, namely short vertical stabby strokes down onto the surface, working slowly and being careful not to disturb the stencil as you work. It works on Blood Bowl pitches just as well as it works on bedside tables or whatever crafty random thing Martha does!
Logo done in the background and stencil lifted off in the foreground. Click for larger.
After getting a reasonable layer of paint into the stencil I lifted it carefully off while the paint was still wet, to keep the stencil from getting stuck to the fabric. It came out very clean, no fuzzy edges or paint bleeding under, especially given it was painted onto fabric!
Later I went back and masked off the last field lines around the outer edges of the endzones, same tape-and-newsprint method I used on the main field lines.
If (when!) I do another fabric pitch, I’m going to seriously consider just doing all the field lines and other decorations with a brush instead of spraypaint; protecting the rest of the project (and the rest of the room!) from overspray is a massive pain when using spraypaint. All the masking seen in the first photos of this post took most of an hour to do, while the spraypainting itself only took a couple of minutes after the masking was complete. Brush painting stencils produce no overspray and don’t generally put the rest of the room at risk of being repainted…
The felt pitch is done at this point, except that I might eventually go back and add some colour to the endzone areas, or a team name across one or both endzones if I get really ambitious.
Work on the various sideline temples (last seen here) is also progressing, although taking pictures of black-primered buildings is fairly pointless so a proper progress report from that segment of the project will be a couple of days from now.
Still loads of things to finish on the project, but after doing the crocodile head logo in the centre of the pitch this evening I just had to lay everything out on the dining room table and see it all together for the first time!
The whole in-progress Blood Bowl pitch laid out. Still lots to do, but it’s nice to have everything set up together! Click for larger.
The pitch still needs white field lines at both endzones, as well as possible decoration in the end zones – I’m thinking of doing a coloured background in each endzone, probably red at one end and blue in the other. I might also do the name of my Lizardman team, the Saltwater Slaughter, across the endzones as you see in a lot of American football fields, “Saltwater” across one endzone and “Slaughter” across the other.
Left to right behind the pitch, there’s the newest dugout/tracker temple, still bare styrofoam with decoration just barely started. Next to the right is the dice tower temple, which has been basecoated and still needs more paint. The plan is to have rare earth magnets built in to hold the temple itself and the sacred pool/dice catch tray in front of it together when it’s in use, so that’ll be some putty work to get the magnets mounted.
The scoreboard temple next is basically complete, except that I’m modifying the centre socket above the stairs with the scatter diagram so it holds the weather indicator cube more securely.
Finally on the far right is the first of the dugout temples, which still needs decoration and detailing on the roof but at least is partially painted on the rest of the building.
Much done and much left to do, but it’s nice to see it all set up!
I’ve got a felt Blood Bowl pitch that I have marked the standard grid on (15×29 30mm squares) but after months of using it I hadn’t gotten any further than that in transforming it from a useful but plain piece of fabric into a proper, good looking BB pitch!
Toward that end, I used some full-sheet self adhesive label paper to create a couple of test templates for stencils, cut them out with an Xacto knife, and stuck them down to a scrap piece of felt.
Phone photo of my test stencilling – the top lettering is with spraypaint, the bottom partial logo is with craft paint and a paintbrush. The stencil I used is just above the felt piece. Click for larger.
I tried red spraypaint on one part of the stencil, then used red craft paint and 1.5″ brush on the other part of the stencil, with the classic crafter’s method of brush painting a stencil – vertical stabbing of the brush down onto the stencil, so as not to get paint under the stencil or dislodge it while working.
Both methods worked just fine, and I’m not sure which I’ll ultimately use for the logo and lettering stencils I want on the actual pitch.
The pitch itself finally has a light spray of green spraypaint over it to make it look grassy (the felt itself is tan) and tomorrow I’ll mask off and spray the field lines a Blood Bowl pitch needs – centre line, wide zone and end (touchdown) zone lines being the most important, although I’ll probably do the field edge lines on all four sides as well, eventually, just to properly finish the pitch.
