Atomic Warlords

Tuesday, April 9, 2024

Sons of Horus, Pt.II

More tiny Marines! I have finished enough squads and Rhinos to form a combat company.

The itsy-bitsy Rhinos have a bunch of parts, and require a bit of care to assemble. They do look great, and a have a few weapon/hatch options.

More tanks to come! And I contemplate the world's smallests decals.

Go Build Something

Good Lighting And Sharp Brushes Help

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Sons of Horus, Small

Back to the small scale! After some trials and lots of errors, I figured out how to paint my Epic infantry.

A lot of people paint them on the sprues, but that was a bit klunky for me, and a few (tiny!) figures had to be assembled. Those Dreadnoughts are SEVEN @#$% parts. Ahem. So that was not going to work out for me. After trying blu-tack and crazy glue, I set upon good ole hot glue to temporarily attach the wee figs to a piece of wood.

I find this method fast and really easy to paint. Removing the little dudes does take a sharp X-actor and a bit of patience though. It also makes painting the bases much easier without anything on them.

I have some more infantry to paint up, then it's tank time!

Work Smaller, Not Harder

Wait. That's Not Right

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Star Destroyer, Large

Imperial Star Destroyer. One of my all-time favorite starships (Galactica '78, Yamato, Enterprise-Refit, and the K'Tinga are the others in my top five). I have made a couple of the older plastic models, and I have the super fancy Bandai, and the big Revell/Zvesda kits, still unbuilt. But I have always longed for a really big model, maybe not the studio scale eight foot long monster, but larger than any available plastic kit.

Along comes the 3D printing revolution. I'm not (yet) a CAD artist, so I had to wait for someone to make a really nice STL that could be printed out...FAB365 makes a wide array of very nice files.

So we just scaled it up by 200% and about a 120 hours later, Mrs Blackheart's fancy Prusa XL printer made a 30" long beauty.

The one thing I didn't really take into account was the huge amount of paint it took.

It was a lot, six-ish pots about three drybrush layers. Printing it in black saved a few painting steps as the model has very nice panel lines. Now to hang it up in my office.