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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Sometimes you paint some crazy stuff...


When you do this for as long as I have, and paint thousands of minis from all sorts of different companies, you will end up painting some very unusual figures!

These are from an Australian company called Maidenhead Miniatures.  They are still around actually.  I painted these years ago.


The concept drawings were very nice.  I don't know if those are still shown on their website...




I will be posting some centaurs that I painted as well.

Time to bake some sculpey!


Well, with the supplies coming in fast and furious (a box of Reaper figs just showed up!!!!), I can finally get into a lot of the prep work for all the videos.

This big old box came in, courtesy of Amazon.  Very nice price on it, and free shipping, which was pretty amazing given how heavy this was!


This is the original white sculpey that you see me using for almost all the bases.  You get a whole lot in this giant box!  Best to keep it wrapped up when you are not using it, as it will go 'stale' and crumbly otherwise.


The set up.  Some ceramic tiles, a roller (even a piece of PVC pipe will do) and a 'clay extruder'... AKA pasta maker!


You have to work the sculpey a bit so that you get the air bubbles out as much as possible.  Here I am making one of the thicker sheets of sculpey, which I use as chunks of concrete.


Instead of the clay extruder, I use the roller, since the extruder only has a maximum thickness far thinner than what I wanted.  


For the more typical sheets, I put the worked sculpey through the extruder...


Back to the thick sheets.  I let this 'cool down' a little bit before I started rolling it, as the heat from your hands and the friction of kneading it makes it very smushy.


You can see me rolling that sheet, and the extruded pieces on the other tile.


More extruding!


You will want to keep the crank rolling without stopping, to avoid any uneven results.  You also should keep your hand under the stuff coming out, as it will simply pile up at the bottom, and get messed up!


Since sculpey has a bit of a 'fragrance' when baking, I tend to use the toaster over these days.  The disadvantage is that it is pretty small, but the advantage is that I can bake the stuff anywhere there is electricity, and I won't turn the house into a furnace in the summertime.

That is a lesson learned the hard way!


And the final result after a few rounds of baking!  Sculpey sheets ready to turn into bases, tiles, walls, concrete, wood planks, doors, and so much more!!!!