Making your own clear bases

I’ve been using clear bases the last couple of years, as you have seen, and I’m really satisfied with that.

A female pulp adventurer on a home-made clear base

I found a YouTube video on how to make your own clear bases from Pulp Alley the other day. I seem to have missed it when it first aired, about half a year ago, but checked it out now.

It’s all about a very simple and cheap way to make your own clear bases, and I decided to try it out.

First you have to buy a punch stamp, and the video recommended EK Tools. I found a Medium Punch (1”) locally in a e-shop selling scrapbook-stuff and had it delivered just two days after purchase.

Then you collect all those blister-packs that you kept, as they could, someday, be useful for windows/water/whatnot. Now they will actually be used!

Use a scissor to cut out all biggish flat surfaces.

Start punching! I found some of the thicker blisters to crack when I punched out my bases, but it all works well enough, and I’m pumping out cheap (as in free) bases. What’s not to like?

Finally - ask your friends to keep their blister packs! One of mine had to do some trash-diving to collect what he had just thrown away (well, he actually rummaged around in a bag of plastic bound for recycling).

When I scrapped a lot of material from courses I took ages ago I found a sheet of clear plastic used as a cover for an old spiral bound collection of papers. The paper and metal tread is in their respective recycling bins, while the plastic is refined into clear bases.

3D-printed cargo piles, barrel cart and more

Got a bunch of 3D-printed stuff ready for gaming.

 

The cargo piles are really useful pieces of scatter terrain. They will be at home in both fantasy, Wild West and pulp settings, and of course other historical ones, too. You’ll get cargo piles for $5 at Printable Scenery.

The barrel cart is a free piece, from Thingiverse this time. It's just great! I have to bind the barrel down with some suitable string, but haven’t found what I need yet.

Finally a marker stone and some stone braziers, also free and from Thingiverse. The marker stone be useful both in Frostgrave and our D&D campaign, while the braziers have a place in the next solo Pulp Alley game I’m planning, not as braziers but relegated to a lesser role as pedestals (the statue is a Reaper Bones figure converted into a bronze). 

This is really the beauty of 3D-printing. I needed five pedestals for a game, looked through my library of stl-files, found something suitable and had them printed in a couple of hours. Great!

A lot of scatter terrain this time. I’m also printing dungeon terrain pieces, and more on those and what you can build with them soon.
(Sorry that I said that the cargo piles were free the first hour or so, as they are not. My bad)

Female Pulp Explorers from Bad Squiddo Games (and 3D printing)

Got these female explorers painted. They are from Annie Norman’s Bad Squiddo Games, sculpted by Shayne Hoyle, and they are great.

When I see the photo of them I think I should have painted their eyes, but when you see them in the flesh (or should that be tin?) they look good enough. I think that is what I should strive for, to actually get minis to the gaming table.

I’ve had some problems with the 3D-printer from early December. Filament extrusion wouldn’t work as it should and everything turned into crap most of the time. I tried everything to solve the problem, but nothing worked.

Well, not until I thought of ambient temperature. I had the printer in our garage, i.e. my hobby-room. It’s the coldest part of the house, and now, with winter in full swing, it was down to 16⁰C in there. That proved to be the thing. I moved the printer up to an empty bedroom, turned it on this morning, and it worked just like it should. Yay!

It’s happily printing away as I write this.

Zombie Wolfs for Zombicide: Black Plague

This is a record for me! 25 minis painted in less than two weeks.

We play quite a lot of Zombicide: Black Death at the club, and, as I had the Wulfsburg expansion in the plastics mountain, I thought it would be a good idea to get those zombie wolves painted so we could get started on these new scenarios.

In the box are 21 zombie wolfs, of three different casts, and one large wolf abomination. There are also four heroes, but I haven’t started on them yet.

I painted the wolfs in my tried and tested winter-wolf scheme, which is fast and looks good enough.

When I was at it, I also finished two wolf zombies from Reaper and a wolf from the Shadows of Brimstone game. The zombies were rather nice but the resin Brimstone wolf really wasn’t. Their resin is crap, unfortunately.

Anyway, I’m really satisfied with how this turned out. Lots of painted minis in a short time and they look all right. What’s not to like?

2018 in the rearview mirror

A game of Dux Britanniarum in full swing. We use Lord of Rings figures and the heroic Free Men are getting squashed (mainly on my flank) in this Xmas-game with Laffe, Thomas and Koen.

Another year gone and even more minis painted.

I had a goal that the tin- and plastics-mountain would actually be smaller at the end of the year, so let’s see how that turned out (for an explanation on the idea and how I count see here)

A shoot-out with  the Fistful of Lead-rules at the Club.

The year in summary:

Bought

Well, my fingers sort of slipped on a couple of Kickstarters this year; Uboot (8 minis, as 1/72 figures counts as ½ a mini), Cthulhu – Death must Die (84 minis) and Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon (38). Minis from these do count, as I count models when they are actually bought. On top of that a box of 40 farmyard animals, a couple of tanks in different scales, a few airplanes, 44 Vikings and a handful of other minis.

234 models bought, far more than expected.

Being swamped at Zombicide: Black Death

Sold

I have really excavated the tin- and plastics-mountain this year. Stuff I know won’t be painted have been sold off or put in the For Sale-box at the club. With another hundred hitting the sales-box in December I’ve reached 285 minis.

Painted

All of the Mesozoic critters.

It’s been a modest year of painting, as I have just finished 139 minis. You’ve seen most of them here already. The year ended with the final dinosaurs from Tamiya’s excellent Mesozoic Creatures boxes (I got two) and a couple of random 28mm figures.

Finished in December: A Prospector from Brimstone and The Major from SMOG: Rise of Moloch (and I painted another 5 zombies for SMOG also, but no pics of those)

Terrain-wise it has been much better, with lots of different terrain finished, much of it 3D-printed.

A game of D&D in the printed dungeons.

So my goal was reached! I actually sold more minis than I bought and with the models painted I reached -190 models. Not bad at all.

3D-printer

I finally bought a new 3D-printer this fall, a Prusa i3 Mk3. It’s been printing mainly dungeon-pieces for my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but also some scatter terrain and a couple of houses. You’ll see more on the dungeon soon.

One of the demo-games of What A Tanker we staged at Smashcon.

Well, I think that neatly sums up 2018. A good year in many respects, even though it was rather weak on painted minis.

So, what about 2019?

I will try to shrink the tin- and plastics-mountain even more, that’s for sure. Otherwise, I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.

I wish you all a very good 2019. Hope to see you all in this and other blogs, and maybe meet some of you in the flesh.