Happy Little Accidents
“There no such thing as mistakes, there are only happy little accidents” Bob Ross
The miniature gaming hobby is a weird one. It takes in a lot of different stuff, doll house crafting, traditional painting and metallurgy are three I can name off the top of my head that I have known people to do for this hobby. And if you think metallurgy isn’t a part of it… where do you think all of those classic homemade minis come from for years before 3D printing?
So I have done a fair bit of experimenting over the years however let’s start out with something recent.
Ferrus Manus the long forgotten Primarch because his the first one to be killed so no one remembers anything about him, except sometimes when they remember he has metal hands.
See that chrome effect on his hands? Pretty cool right, wait you don’t because there is something so shiny on his ankle guard it blinds you?!
THAT IS MY DARKEST METAL!!!
So why the hell is it so shiny?! Well… I don’t exactly know why but I do know why. Usually… What I do is this for true metallic metals. I start with something I like to call lead belcher black which is a 50/50 mix of Abbadon Black and then I go up. This time I did something different on two fronts.
I started with Scale75’s Flat Black
I went straight to Scale75’s Heavy Metal
So… That Black is SUPER smooth, and the 75 is the starting point instead of the second, I am not sure what made this shine 100% like it did but I know that if I experiment I maybe able to repeat this effect.
This is the thing you can look at is as a failure and it is, I was trying to have a smooth transition to a true metallic metal giving the idea that all of that black armour is actually a metal but you can only see it when the light hits it. So it fails, in that regard but somewhere down the line, I am going to use this knowledge to make it something great.
You have to crack a few eggs to make an omlette so… use some cracked eggs and make a lava base? Sure why not?
Because its not going to give you that shattered and cracked look like super large areas of crackle effect? Yeah go figure… but you don’t know until you try! Try something different!
Can you tell which are eggs and which are not? I hope you don’t end up with an egg on your face when you do. Because in the end… I think they turned out pretty well. Sure not the most traditional of ways to get that lava base but… it’s something fun and interesting.
Straight up failure or is it?
So I was making these large rock formations for a armies on parade board and well… They didn’t go the way I wanted them to… the cut marks were way too obvious.
So I tied a few things, I tried sand I tried thinner flock to give it a different texture and I just couldn’t get anything right… So I decided to get things wrong… very very wrong.
I knew the plaster of Paris was shall we say fragile? And it was likely that someone would bump into this at some point in time… HOWEVER… I thought why not… why not just add some cement and some PVA to give it strength… and uhhhh well it did… and it also added 20 times the weight.
It really didn’t seem that heavy when I was applying it but… thought it was a ‘failure’ in the lightweight department. It did its job. 100% I thought it looked great. But would I do it again?
Okay one straight up failure…
Good looking prints right?!
Great organization! Your a hobby hero! Right? I mean come on this had to turn into a great and fun project right?… Right…
Yeah… so here is the thing guys… Sunlight is like no joke when it comes to 3D prints. I thought I was safe, I had the blinds down, I had them stacked and organised in boxes off to the side well away from the ‘light’ of the window which was closed and always blinded…
The majority of these are now cracked…
But… now there are sheets that black out those windows. Failure is only failure if you don’t do something about it after… So. Here is the thing… Can I use those? No not really… BUT What I can do is this… I can… I can maybe try and intentionally use that later. Or maybe not… who knows…
I know one thing that won’t lead to failure…
