3D prints, an emissary and progress on the Artisan’s contest dwarf
After vacation, a family visit and an involuntary temperature-induced hobby break, it’s about time for an update.
First of all, an expedition force spearheaded by a particularly vile individual by the name of Yzenor Anvilbrand has arrived on our shores (a while back I might add). I did not manage to document this earlier here, so thank you once again for the lovely miniatures along with the nice & unexpected emissary and letter @MichaelX! Yzenor is a fairly tall fellow but he will certainly find a new home in my force. I’m fairly impressed by the quality and level of detail of the prints. And no mould lines to scrape off! If there is a single argument for me to get a 3D printer in the future it would be this. I don’t think that Fabelzel’s miniatures mix particularly well with mine, so I am planning a Mordheim spin-off with them.
Work on the Artisan’s contest dwarf has continued. I decided to redo the hastily applied lacing on the armour and added arms, shoulder plates and a beard. @Admiral asked me to do a tutorial on how to do the armour which I will do in the future but not on this model as I had to figure out by myself how to do it. The whole project so far was a steep but invaluable learning experience as I was consciously doing multiple sculpting steps at once instead of ‘quick-saving’ all the time. This not only accelerated the whole thing but also made it easier in some places to get the desired results (the helmet tutorial mentioned above truly was a sculpting epiphany for me): doing the lacing together with the panoply armour plates (as on the shoulders) was a lot less frustrating than applying them to the already cured plates.
I also got some dollies from Michael, so I might contribute to the Brazen Bastards project in the future. However, after my contest dwarf is done, I want to focus on clearing out my WIP back log and work on a non-CD project I have planned for a long time, so no promises that this is going to happen this year.
I also moulded and did a few test casts of the hobgoblin sculpt but more on that later in a separate post on my casting blog.
Cheers. I did start with the dwarf sculpt before I got the dollies, so I did not bother with scale or customizability. This guy is going to be monopose. If there is an interest in my sculpts, I’m quite open about digitizing them (be it for Brazen Bastards or otherwise) since I don’t want to bother with the logistics of having an external caster and selling them myself. My only condition would be that they shall be available for free similar to Fabelzel’s sculpts.
These evil dwarfs are seafaring descendants of the Dawi Zharr hailing from the volcanic island of Min. Frequent, not always peaceful contacts with Elven and Human slave traders made them painfully aware of their own shortcomings which led them to form regiments of infantrymen wielding long pikes (sarissae). Their even for Dwarven standards exceptional discipline makes them sought-after mercenaries in the armies of the Dark Lands.
If you remember, this guy was my unfinished contribution to the Artisan’s contest in early 2022. I tend to have regular hobby breaks every few months, so I left him 95% done in my cabinet since I last posted. Very eager to start a new sculpting project, so I added some hands, finished the lacing and made sure that there are no problematic undercuts. The missing cavity in the raised hand is intentional to make him cast better as the hand will be drilled out anyway. I plan to cast up a whole regiment of them when the outside temperatures are warmer again and run them as heavy pikemen in the DoW list (and just have to accept that their stats are human). My hope is that if I add custom plumes to all of them they won’t look too uniform although phalangites are not very demanding in that respect.
Speaking of casting. I did cast up another 100 or so miniatures last summer (the Dwarf and the Hobgoblin sculpt from above) and I have to say I’m impressed about the mould material quality. I probably did around a hundred casts with the dwarf mould in total and it still holds up! The Hobgoblin was more tricky: The two legs + a small casting channel in between were not enough to allow enough mass to flow in, so I had a lot of rejects due to soft details. Next time, I will first try to increase the channel size. But nonetheless, a few of them are good enough that I can work with them.
For the regular chaos dwarfs, I’m a bit torn between sculpting the arms myself (still fed up with arm anatomy – I don’t know why but doing them in a multi-part fashion is 100x more difficult to get the scale right compared to just sculpting them directly onto the miniature) or using arms from various kits. However, there is distinct lack of unarmoured dwarf arms without long sleeves out there. @Admiral kindly pointed out the Avatars of War slayers although they are a tad too muscular for my likings.
I love that sculpt! Both in design and execution. All the best for the casting project. I’m already looking forward to seeing a regiment of them painted up are you planning to add a cowhide shield, perhaps even a figure-of-eight body shield?
@Antenor Cheers mate, and yes, absolutely! My plan is to go for a small cowhide dipylon shield. I love the figure-of-eight shield but haven’t figured out a good way to scratch-build them from aluminium sheeting and putty. Styrene would unfortunately get obliterated during vulcanization. Maybe I could source them from third-party models or STLs…
Fantastic work on the spearman! Love the sandals and beard, and the lacing is cherry on top.
Interesting casting thoughts. Complicated, convex shields as loose pieces are damn difficult to make by hand. The easiest way to handsculpt them would be to cheat and make them an integral part of the cast model, rather than multipart. Third party producers and STLs might be your friends here.
Yes, multipart is always a lot more tricky. One way to make it easier could be to ask @MichaelX for printed arms in use for a certain something else. Or take the odd route of sculpting an arm on a full miniature, and then clipping it off and repairing. Food for thought.
Yzenor is a fairly tall fellow but he will certainly find a new home in my force. I’m fairly impressed by the quality and level of detail of the prints. And no mould lines to scrape off! If there is a single argument for me to get a 3D printer in the future it would be this. I don’t think that Fabelzel’s miniatures mix particularly well with mine, so I am planning a Mordheim spin-off with them.
are you planning to add a cowhide shield, perhaps even a figure-of-eight body shield?