Paint Table Saturday 216 - Epic Fail of a week

Hi All,

This week was mostly me fooling around trying to cast up some shields because I was absolutely convinced I didn't have enough. I was wrong and wasted the last couple of days trying, and failing, to make a mold.

I did do some painting over the weekend. Here that is.

As you can see I finally fixed the Standard bearers hand, put a finial(?) on top of the banner pole and primed him grey. The mounted Knight needs a little more work and priming.

I went with variations of red and blue for the peasant archers. I have until the 30th to get these guys finished. This is how far along they were before I packed them up to go on holiday.

 Now I'll take you on my diversion of trying to make a mold to cast some shields. I was convinced I did not have enough to do all the figures that required shields. Over a year ago I had bought an Alumilite casting kit at Michael's and then approximately a year ago I bought a Classic Lego set to make a mold box. I thought that it was all just rectangular blocks. What is pictured is 95% of the blocks in the kit, so fail #1. Fail #2 was that my B part resin bottle has cracked and leaked, but I never made it to the resin stage. As you can see I used plasticine to make the bottom and was going to make a two part mold.

I had some trouble mixing the right amount of silicone, but got that sorted only to have the sprue bend and lift up one corner, thus ruining the mold. This silicone has a 24hr cure time, so I was basically screwed.

Then I remembered I had some Amazing Mold putty, cure time is about 30min.  I made this mold fairly quickly, but didn't notice I had some areas that were voids under at least one of the shields.

I went ahead and made the second half, thinking it could be saved. The second half was as bad if not worse. So double the putty, and time, wasted.

I demolded the first one, if it hadn't flexed like that it might have been usable, but you can see some other problems with how I made the mold.

After all this, someone offered to help me out with shields. I did another count and actually looked at all the models that had a stud to hold a shield, turns out I do have enough. So double Doh!

One good thing I did is tried out my Green Stuff World rivet mold with the excess green stuff I had from fixing the standard bearer.

I need to work on my technique, and will probably buy their metal scraper in my next order. I made the top three sizes of hex rivet.

Oh and if you need plain flat shields for knights Magister Militum has some shields here. (Hopefully that link works for you, I had trouble finding it this time.) For the style of shield used by the Knights of the Realm you might try these from Fire Forge.

Also welcome to Tilean Merc. I see you are a person of taste by the blogs you follow in addition to this one. If you have a blog let me know, I'll link to it.

Thanks for looking.

More Shield Press molds

While I am still working on the units for Oldhammer USA weekend, I've taken a slight detour trying to figure out how to reproduce the old plastic shields.

So here's what happened.

I showed you the molds I had made last time. Here they are stuffed with green stuff. I used a roller to squash the balls of green stuff into the molds. It stuck pretty horribly to the roller, I used water to try and stop that. Next time I might use vaseline. It was particularly difficulty to get the green stuff to stay in the instamold.

Press molding shields

I finished the other five figures of the red & black arrer unit, but I still haven't done the shields. One thing that is holding me back is that I wanted to see if I could make press molds of them.

An assortment of the old plastic shields. In the middle is the Super Sculpey mold,  flanked by the same shields done in Instamold. I wanted to try both as I wasn't sure if prying the shields out of the sculpey had deformed the shapes. I'm going to try and do some green stuffing today, so I should have the results soon. I think I may have over baked the sculpey, hence the dark brown color. The original is pink.

The hazards of working with 25 year old plastic. This one shattered when I tried to clip it off the sprue. I may try to use it as a scenery item.

Just a WIP of the standard bearer. the extension is sprue. I've since glued the spearhead on top, after clipping the pin wire to size. I find it easier to make a long wire straight and then clip in place when the glue had dried. I'm going to need to green stuff the gaps and get to work on the banners.

I'd also like to welcome The Responsible One to the blog. His blog, The Responsible One's Wargaming Blog has some nice oldhammer stuff and some new that is evocative of the era.

I'm a green stuffin' fool

More of an update than any real pearls of wisdom.

After several tries I got a decent mold with the Instant Mold. As you can see I still have a bit of flash and I bent the cast trying to pop it out too early. This was only my second time ever using green stuff and I'm not sure if my yellow to blue mix ratio was off. The axe is a tad bendy, I thought it would be harder.

I also did a bunch of gap filling and repair of a void in a miscast figure. I can't show them to you yet, as they are for the challenge, but I'll reveal them shortly. I had meant to show them before base coating, as I was really proud of my work.  Of course I got carried away and sprayed them before taking pictures. I learned my lessons from my first experience and kept a little bowl of water to wet tools and fingers. I just used my craft store Sculpey sculpting tools and they worked great. I did see some fancy sculpting tools on sale for $9 on Amazon, so I splurged.

I usually focus on what went wrong, but I had a really positive experience this go round. It really made me want to work on sculpting more.