The Little Things in Life

Moved recently, into a new house. Well, it's an old house, but new to me because I just moved there. Accordingly I get a new workspace to set-up in. This is always pretty exciting, to go through stuff, get rid of stuff, organize it, test it out, see where the tools can go, discard the dried up old paints, see how the desk fits best, get the CD player plugged in etc.

It's comforting. It's comforting to know there's a place where I can sit down and pay massive amounts of brain activity to tiny little objects, things often less than 1" tall. It's so strange really, it's a big world out there with a lot of big things, but a corner of my mind is fascinated by the tiny little things. That's at the root of any collector/painter's passion I suppose.

A static miniature, painted up and sitting there on a table is a big idea, an imaginative environment, compressed into a tiny little icon. I like the idea of beholding this tiny little icon, picking it up (with clean hands, mind!) and eyeing it carefully, respecting it as a catalyst for thought, a little three-dimensional illustration of a snippet of a larger universe.

Go into any museum that has ancient Egyptian artifacts: the magnetism of all of those tiny little jewels and sculptures buzzes so palpably. Same thing with a visit to an antique shop that has a display case filled with lead toy soldiers. I love it. I can't define it, but I love it.
If you're reading this I'm sure you do too.

Looking forward to sharing more items soon - thanks for reading!

The Ambull Complete. My First Sculpt: Cast and (roughly) Painted

Here is the Ambull sculpt cast in resin, having been assembled, primed and roughly painted. I was eager to give it a wash to pick out all the details to see how I did sculpting-wise, so it's not given the royal-treatment as far as painting goes. Not bad on the exposure of the details and texture, I'm quite proud of it, and happy to have earned some good Green Stuff experience.

Belched

This blog came to my attention and it's pretty awesome, this is exactly part of what I want to do at some point: take old minis and paint them up real sweet like little masterpieces. Excellent work goes into the minis on Belched From the Depths. Cool stuff.

A Cast of... one, so far

First resin cast was pretty lousy, air bubbles needed some venting, so I cut little v-shaped grooves into the rubber. Second casting came out pretty nice. I've sprayed it with gray primer for the photo (milky-white resin doesn't show much surface detail).

Recently moved living circumstances and am enthusiastic about creating a new work area.

..after a hiatus... Ambull progress

Life went topsy turvy for a while, as it sometimes does, but I'm back with another post showing more progress on the Ambull sculpting project.

I intentionally fused the two halves of the mold together by leaving a small area at the top uncovered by release agent. This helps keep the two sections in register.

The completed mold:

I was pretty satisfied with the detail, only a few small bubbles that would not be so bad to deal with in the final casting:

Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things here and make some more regular posts. I met mold-maker and pewter-caster this weekend who used to work in the miniatures industry. It was a nice opportunity to learn a bit more about the spin casting process. Gave me food for thought about future projects and realizing them in metal (instead of just resin).