Walking Dead Switches To 3D Prints

08.29.2021

My new route of working slowly on a mini, one at a time instead of all the colors of a batch at once, has leant itself toward not much content worthy of a post very often. Part of that is because I still wait until 3 or 4 are finished before I spray the final coat of sealant.

This batch of minis is the first of the Walking Dead since they switched to (I think) 3D printed + some assembly required. I'm not sure what I think about the new minis. I can play around with the poses a little. I can hold off gluing pieces until taking care of hard to reach places. One of the reasons I switched to painting minis instead of just old fashioned models was to skip the building process, as the building process used to be "tear off sprue and glue" but has transformed into "snip carefully, sand mold lines, fill seams with putty, sand seams" and then add too much glue. It's different. And I'm old, so how things used to be was good enough!

Old man griping aside, these minis were pretty good to put together and paint. It feels like taking my time and working on just 1 is paying off with better results.


gaming miniatures walking dead

More Studio Miniatures

07.23.2021

Lots of puttering around since my last post. While I was mostly working on each of these one at a time, I would mess up something on one and decide to make progress on another. It ended up the bases were all ready for whatever I was going to wrap things up with around the same time, thus making it look like once again I was working on a batch of 6 minis at the same time - for the past month.

These are also from the Studio Miniatures order that Chuck came from. My new thing to try this time - 5 o'clock shadows. Overall they turned out better than I expected but not as good as I had hoped. For my first time trying it out, I'd say it's acceptable.

My major screw up came in with my John Wick skin color. Somehow I added a shade or wash along the way that turned him overly orange. I didn't want to start over so I tried to save what I had, but he still is more on the orange side of the spectrum than I'd like. Roddy's blue shirt that he ended up with is the 3rd attempt/coat for trying to do a plaid pattern. On attempt 1 my lines were too thick. On attempt 2 lines bled into each other and weren't lines at all. Attempt 3 isn't as crisp as I would have liked, but from 6 ft away it looks ok. I should have taken the picture from 6 ft away...

I have a list of structures to work on, along with some old fashioned plastic models. I have no idea who the next batch of figures will end up being for those times I get the urge to work on something for 10 min. So many options to prep for when the mood strikes!


gaming miniatures studio miniatures

Charles Noreese

06.16.2021

Today's update is another bit of a change from normal posts. Instead of a whole batch of minis showing up painted, there's one. The Not Chuck Norris from Studio Miniatures. While I had primed a batch of minis when working on the last mall update, I decided it was time to focus on just 1 mini instead of cranking out a batch since I haven't been overly pleased with my last few painting attempts. Chuck made it to the front to get painted, mainly because there weren't any hard to reach spots on the mini, and thanks to the painted pic on the Studio Miniatures site I wouldn't have to pick colors myself.

Using the reference pic worked well. Granted, my paint job isn't nearly as good as what the pros make (my pockets lack stitching) but looking at my version next to the pro version... not bad.


gaming miniatures studio miniatures

The second floor nobody can reach

06.02.2021

For fun I decided to put the pieces of the mall together to (1) see what I've got while (2) making sure I wasn't missing anything. While I don't have enough 1st floor stores to support all of the 2nd floor stores, it looks like I'm ok. I've now got a mall where you can't reach the 2nd floor. I'll lower the rent on 2nd floor store space.

Is it ok to have a short post? I sure hope so.


4ground-mall

More Empty Stores

05.31.2021

After waiting so long for an update last time I found myself oddly motivated to crank out more empty store space. As it is, these 3 are the last "stores" for the mall. Everything else is specialty areas - like a food court. And bathrooms.

To mix up the floor plans, I left the office off of these 3 stores. I did a better job of filling over the gaps in the wall where the extra wall slides in. It's still not perfect, but it's an improvement over my previous attempt. Plastic-Wood filler and sanding it down again, but this time I made sure to over-fill the hole a little more, so that sanding it down would better cover the lines of the gap. I also put a strip of painters tape on the back for support, instead of just using the mat I paint and glue on.

Out side of that, there wasn't really anything special for building these.

I had primed a batch of 7 Studio Miniatures minis when I finished the last round of mall buildings. I've yet to touch those. There's specialty areas remaining for the mall: 2 double-wide areas (food court and bathrooms) and 2 single-wide (security office and loading dock). All of these come setup to sit on the first floor. I'm not sure if putting these together will fit in my current mode of building the basic structure and leaving the details to fill in until later.

And with that, there's no telling what the next post will contain.


4ground-mall work

Blog Archive

As always, correct spelling is optional in any blog entry. Keep in mind that any links more than a year old may not be active, especially the ones pointing back to Russellmania (I like to move things around!).

Tags have been added to posts back to 2005. There may be an occasional old blog that gets added to the tag list, but in reality what could be noteworthy from that far back?

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