Wednesday, December 11, 2013

11DEC13 Where is Sudsy?!

Well, I just wanted to let my followers know I haven't fallen off the face of the earth (yet, though I keep trying to convince my wife we need to take the kids and exit the earth gravity well and live on the Moon or Mars...).

Obviously, not much time for games and the like.  I took to continuing my education and am currently in the Winter Quarter of my first year in obtaining my Associates Degree in Applied Science.  I'm going into Precision Machine and am going nail down a job as a machinist.  Considering the way 3D printing is going...  That is going to be where I'm going to try to grow.  I already see 3D printing in the gaming world alongside sculpting and resin casting!

Speaking of sculpting, I've become addicted to Howard Tayler's Schlock Mercenary web comic.  Here is a fan sculpture and learning sculpture of a 28mm version of on of his characters, a Unioc named Lt. "Ebby".  If you read the strip, you'll know who...  If not, well I'm not telling you much beyond that to get you as hooked as myself!

 Nearly finished green
 Phase 2
Phase 1

Thursday, March 21, 2013

21MAR13 And now for something a little different...


I am a sculptor. I know this shouldn't shock any of you as one of my very first blog posts years ago was about my first 1:6th scale figure... I've just started on another direction here recently, a massive drop in scale down to somewhere between 25mm to 32mm scale figures (as measured from toe to the top of the head, or toe to eyeball; depending on the sculptor and/or figure manufacturer). My photos are from making some dollies (what you call a very small scale figure armature) I made using a tutorial by Jason Miller on Matakishi's Tea House (http://www.matakishi.com/). I've been following Jason's sculpting work on Deviant Art for some time now taking mental notes and planning my start up. Obviously I had to have a stable place to set up and that wasn't happening for some time from 2011 onward as my family began our move from Alaska down to Nebraska starting in 2011... Yup, it took THAT long, almost three years to finally have real art space again (and even now its a bit, well, temporary as we are just renting a house...).

My workbench is a piece of 3/4” MDF board that measures about 3' by 5' across set up on some extra tall saw horses I made using brackets and 2x4's I cut myself, its a standing work bench, but when I sit in my pneumatic stool, it puts the surface at just below eye level allowing me to rest my elbows on it and work. Will this help? We shall see...
Everything I used today...
Dollies pre-solder.
How to avoid burns with the soldering iron...
About the right proportion, soldered...

A torso added with Green Stuff
The bench with the works in progress, and inspirational figures...

I pulled out about six corks I had in my sculpting tools along with some 24 ga. Copper wire and good ol' rosin core 60/40 electronic solder. I followed along with Miller's Lesson 1 and proceeded to build some dollies for figures pretty much following the designs he had to a letter with one exception. Instead of using a bit of green stuff to hold my twist together I soldered at that joint. Why? Well why waste green stuff on that? I'd rather solder it at this point, and in fact if it were a larger figure I'd use a cheaper epoxy for that part underneath anyway as Citadel green stuff is over $10 USD for .7oz/20g worth... Its running neck and neck with the street value of some illegal drugs being run by violent cartels (and with the way GW is with creatively interpreting IP and going ofter anyone who sells their product and posts pictures of it on their online store, or sells left over parts, or creates fan art one wonders if GW isn't their own cartel...).

Some notes on that epoxy price...  
Citadel Green Stuff in Omaha NE is about $10 USD for .7oz/20g
J-B Weld SteelStik in Omaha NE is about $9 USD for 2oz/57g (granted its not going to get the fine details, but I have used it for holding my armatures for larger figures in 1:6th and 1:12th scales...) with Locktite and other comparable brands being close in price for the same size.
A search on Amazon yielded some fruitful results for other model grade sculpting epoxy compounds:
Gale Force 9's version of Green Stuff is about $22 USD for 4.5oz/130g

Not too shabby GF9!  However, the winner overall for product quality and value has to be Magic Sculp with a close second being Apoxie Sculpt...  Both of which I have used extensively in the past before moving forced me to give away the remainder of these fine products.  
Apoxie Sculpt can be found in 1 lbs and 4 lbs weights for $12 and $33 USD respectively (sorry no metric conversions here on these, its late!)
Magic Sculp can be found in 1 lbs and 5 lbs(!!!!!) for $16.50 (okay, Apoxie wins in the 1 lbs weight class) and $33.50 USD (here we have the 5 lbs class title at only about $2 more for a whole pound extra).

Difference between green stuff and the Apoxie/Magic stuff is going to be the manner in which you work.  Green stuff is going to give you a more immediate satisfaction for working time, and therefore its pretty nice in that regard as its hard and sculpt ready moment you mix it.  My experience with Apoxie taught me the value of patience, I couldn't sculpt with it for almost an hour as it needed that time to set up a bit.  This is a severe disadvantage in my current stay-at-home dad mode with kids teaching me that Chaos is the natural state of the universe...  Magic Sculp was workable in about 10 to 15 after mixing if I recall, and I greatly appreciated that its labeled as 'resin' and 'hardener' instead of just 'A' and 'B'.  Both are superior products, equal to green stuff/Kneadatite in their own way, and value wise blowing green stuff out of the water completely.