Pimp My Game: Laminating Components

Came across this in Walmart the other day, for about $30.

Looks to be very handy for preserving game components and cards.

It can also improve functionality.  Here's an example using a Zombicide player dashboard.

No more fiddly little tokens to track levels and chosen skills, tokens that be dislodged if you look at them funny.  Once laminated, just use a dry/wet erase marker.

Easy-Mode Pinning

On any mini's base that is not unpainted-plastic-to-unpainted-plastic, I prefer to pin for stability and strength.  The trick is often how to line up the pins on the mini's feet to the holes in the base.

Remember this thing from your cheap elementary school geometry set?  Calipers take all the guess work out of lining up pining and making properly spaced holes.

First, take a measurement on the pins where they meet the feet of the mini.

Then use the sharp tips of the calipers to mark pilot holes in your base.

And there you have it, a perfectly positioned mini.

Building a Wet Palette

When I first put a brush to a D&D mini in high school, the internet was a much more limited resource.  You had dial-up speeds, few clear images to accompany any instructions or tutorials (videos? HA!), comparatively few people who had the coding skill and/or money to maintain a website devoted to their hobbies, and pterodactyls kept nesting in the server clusters.

Getting back into miniature painting after many years of of absence, I started reading up on the subject.  Probably the single best thing I learned was using a wet palette to counteract the drying out of paints (which couples nicely with the universal advice to thin your paints before applying them).  You can buy them at most well-stocked hobby/art stores, and there's dozens of instructables to make your own.  This is my variation that addressed my particular needs.

Ingredients:

 

- A water-tight container (eg. a Lock and Lock sandwich box from Walmart)
- A piece of sponge foam (eg. 1/2" thick from a miniatures storage tray.  I tried a kitchen sponge, but they're typically too coarse to properly hold the water)
- A piece of shop towel aka J-cloth
- A roll of baking parchment paper (cut it into squares smaller than the J-cloth/sponge).

This is also a travel palette for me, and sooner or later it's going to get tipped over.  Hence the value of a truly sealed lid (with a gasket, no less), as opposed to a lid that's merely snug but where water could still leak out if it it tips.  The easy-open lid means you don't have to struggle with it to open it, unlike ordinary tupperware which you might have to bend and flex (and disturb your paints inside).

Fill the container at your sink.  Sponge goes in the water, J-cloth goes in the water.  Shark's in the water, our shark.  The finer pores of the grey foam keeps the water pulled upward and right to the top of the sponge, unlike a kitchen sponge:

Why the J-cloth?  Because the grey foam is still not going to stay wet enough on top, and the fine fibers of the J-cloth provides better contact between the wet sponge below and the parchment paper above:

As soon as it gets wet, the parchment paper will start to curl and roll up.  When I experimented with other set ups, getting the paper to stay flat was a nuisance.  With these components, all I need to do is use my finger to push the air bubbles out from under the paper once and it'll cling as long as there's any moisture left in the palette:

Why bother with the sponge, then?  Why not just fold up a bigger sheet of J-cloth to act as a water reservoir?  You'd get an uneven surface, and your paints would pool together in low spots.  The grey foam not only holds the water, it creates and maintains a perfectly smooth and flat surface.

The parchment paper lets just enough moisture through to keep the paint wet (assuming you keep the sponge below topped up).  Whenever it gets too full, chuck it or rinse it off in the sink.  The ~$4 roll of baking parchment will last for months, if not years.

Airbrushing a Nebula

First post, might as well post something worth looking at beyond a "Hello world."

The FLGS I usually haunt was recently putting together some boards for X-Wing Miniatures.  The initial plan was to take some 4'x3' (6" for player cards and tokens on the ends) MDF boards, spray them with black spray paint, then put stars on them by loading a toothbrush with white paint and flicking the bristles.  I offered instead to try my hand at painting some nebula effects with my airbrush.  Worst case, we'd respray the boards.

I skimmed a few Youtube videos, then plunged in.  The initial layer is Vallejo Grey Surface Primer (white can be too bright), and I simply painted a monochrome cloud effect:

Many airbrush colours are too thin, and will just vanish on a black surface.  Instead, they are used to tint the monochrome layer, like so:

After that, some careful addition of bright points of light for stars, and a satin clear coat to fend off some of the wear these boards experience:

A second board soon followed, a little more ambitious.  The effect I was going for was a space storm:

And coloured:

There's still 2 boards unpainted.  Some kind of black hole is at the forefront of my inspirations.  But the 4th board I'd like to try to create a Death Star Trench Run, working up some mix and match stencils to paint a simulated mechanical surface.