A goose paints minis

I've been tinkering with this off and on for several months now- Originally I had the idea from LED filaments, and thought I could stick it too a base to hide where the filament gets wired in from. It worked kinda, but I wasn't too happy with it and I put the idea aside. But then I found these wireless LED kits you can get online, where you get a handful of LEDs attached to coils, and a big coil to power them with.

Took a bit to get that working with my LED filaments- ripping an LED off one of the coils that come with the kit and attaching my own filament didn't work, but by trial and error I found an inductor that would work to power the Filaments.

Then I had to actually design the ring to hold the inductor as well as the filaments- that was a bit of work, and my final design still has a bump on the inner face of the ring where the inductors hidden, but the alternative is making it too fat to look right.

After that I had a problem where the entire ring would glow, not just the text- except for where the inductor was, making it look pretty weird:

I eventually found I could fix that by using a black acrylic paint marker to cover the ring everywhere but where the engraved text is:

That was the last piece of the puzzle, and all I needed after that was some air-brushed gold and gloss clear coat to finish it off.

This was a project and a half. I actually got a new saturn 16k for this, partly to be able to print multiple pieces at once, but mostly so I could have a heated tank to stop getting failures from it being winter and cold af down in the laundry I have my printer in.

Actually painting this was pretty fun, though it took me a few tries to figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to have it look red and fleshy, since there's so much meat on the model, but also like it was a proper decaying corpse of a thing given how much bone was exposed. The reds as a base, with desaturated greens drybrushed over strategically works really well though, imo.

The hardest part of this mini was actually getting the LEDs into place- the one in the skull was easy, just soldered it to the end of the wires and pull them back through the body to seat the LED. The chest was a real pain in the ass, though, because its using the same wires, and I'd already taken up the slack, giving me no room to work in there- and with the constant worry I'd damage the paint trying.

In the end, rather than soldering it at all, I just cut slits into the wires' insulation, and jammed the LED in there with a battery connected so I could see when it had good contact. Then I flooded it with super glue and called it good. Probably a good thing I'm not an electrician, I think shoving lightbulbs into walls until they turn on is against code or something.

The second hardest part was when I decided that rather than just a simple coin cell battery to power the LEDs at a steady illumination, I instead wanted them to pulse, which required a 9v battery... which I hadn't left space in the base for, so I had to make an extension for the base to fit into that'd hold the battery and pulse circuit. The pulse circuit was another PITA, I prototyped it in a breadboard, had it working, copied it to a prototype board, tested it, though it was good, soldered the wires from the LEDs to it, then realised it only illuminated a steady glow- still not sure what I did wrong. I mean, I know I had a transistor backwards, but after fixing that, it still didn't work, so. ???

In the end, I remade the circuit entirely, and it worked the second time, after I laid it out much more neatly so. I guess that's a lesson.

Fun couple hour paint job on this one! For something different I tried underpainting her skin with blue, red and yellow (shadow, mid-tone, highlight), and painting a thinned fleshtone over top.

I could not find a single warforged jester, or even just a robotic one on any of the sites I checked, so for this mini I ended up actually making them myself in Blender, which was pretty fun. It was mostly just playing with basic shapes and modifiers until I got something that looked fun.

I probably made things a little hard on myself, since I wanted Cacklecrank to look really thin and lanky, and with a sort of V body shape, with those wide shoulders and thin legs, but it worked out pretty well in the end.

This guy was a bit of fun. The design is great, lots of fun textures to work with, and it feels really dynamic.

Good chance to play with my airbrush. (then screw all that work up being too heavy/careless with the washes. [Then mostly salvage it with some rushed stippling]).

I put some effort into the stones on the base, then ended up basically completely covering all of it with at least a thin layer of dirty down moss, which actually came out really nicely, I might have to try doing thin layers of that on more stuff.

I also decided to take a risk and try and make a pond on the base with some UV resin- I really wish I'd had a lighter touch with the ink I used, because its not very see through, but I still think its a good effect overall. I did use opaque painters tape though, so I had to do some rushed UV lighting after pulling it off to fix up the areas I didn't set initially, and then backfill the gaps with more resin. Really should've just waited until I could get some clear tape, but I was impatient.

I got some LED filaments recently, and was looking for something to do with them, when Surge popped up on my dash and I had this idea.

I absolutely love how this turned out, it was a tonne of fun to make. Just finding a scourge STL file was surprisingly hard. I ended up having to use a VRchat model I found.

That actually worked out really well, because I could easily pose it and apply mouth expressions, even with my limited blender knowledge.

Then I went and made that process way harder by deciding I wanted to be able to light up the eyes, meaning I needed to hollow the head, punch eyeholes out and create a tube down from the head out the foot to run wires.

After managing to get that done (had to try several times because I kept introducing slicer artifacts with my 'BOOLEAN MODIFIER IS MY FRIEND' approach), I realised the heads walls were too thin and translucent, so I had to carefully shove milliput in there without blocking up the eyeholes... and in the process didn't realise I'd covered the wire hole, and then had to carve out part of the neck and back to get access again.