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Showing posts from 2023

Space Dice

 For various reasons, I'm playing with making dice again, this with some Star Trek (original series) style planets and two varieties of resin. I have various sizes of hemispheric mold which I squirted with a variety of UV-sensitive resins (mostly pre-colored, but I mixed some pigments into a clear resin as well) and immediately cured so they didn't just settle into layers.  Once those were set up, I put a layer of black two-part resin in the molds, then inserted the planetary hemispheres and filled the rest in with more (clear this time) two-part resin. The result is these dice, as yet uninked. 

Car Wars Minis, Third Batch

Still having a go at these, trying out some new ideas. The short version is that having the right tools and materials is still key, but I've got a way to go with some other stuff. I think this one looks better in person than as a picture. A couple of shades of blue here with a blue wash and drybrushed metallic blue on some components. Oh, and purple spikes. I didn't even try to figure out something clever to do with the windshield. I'm finding that it's hard to make yellow work, but this one wasn't too bad. I initially tried masking the area for the blue stripe with tape, but it pulled off the paint instead. Had to do a swipe with a broad brush, which isn't great but worked better than I expected. Another one that looks better in person than on film. Tried to do a few different shades of green, which wasn't entirely successful. Probably my best out of this batch. I credit the red wash, which ended up being kind of glossy and goes well with the copper accents

Car Wars Minis, Second Batch

They say it's a poor craftsman who blames their tools. Is it a poor craftsman who gives them credit when things work out? If so, I am that craftsman. After my first round of not-great miniature painting, I ran off some more CW minis and tried more painting, this time digging up my well-hidden actually-for-minis paints (as opposed to the standard craft store acrylics I used the first time around), which I had more than I thought I did, and limited myself to my tiniest brushes. I also watched a few more YouTube videos about painting minis just to get a better feel for what it looked like when people did that. How did it come out? Still not great, but better. The first of batch #2 and by a considerable margin the worst. Involved some ill-advised dry brushing and the metallic paint I used for the weapons and I didn't thin the metallic paint I used on the weapons and side windows, losing all the detail in the process. This one...is actually OK. The thinned blue and purple paints gi

Car Wars Printable Minis

I'm old enough to be a player of Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games from the Pocket Box days. Old enough, even, that I've got a copy of Sunday Drivers (clearly a superior title), not Crash City . But it became much too complicated a game to keep playing after a while, or rather my ability to take the time to deal with complexity declined markedly. But I've been delighted by the new, much faster edition of Car Wars which came out not too long ago. My one problem with the game is that instead of tiny cardboard counters, it uses Matchbox/Hot Wheels-scaled minis...no, that's actually not a problem. That's excellent. They look great and make the game more fun to play. The problem lurks inside of that. They're great minis and they invite painting. Indeed, SJ Games as a series of videos about painting car minis on their Youtube channel. The problem, then, is that I want to paint my car minis, but I suck at painting minis. Like, I'm the worst at it. And while I