How to turn a picture frame into a display plinth

Hello and welcome if you are new and welcome back if you are a regular reader! 😊

Today I will show you how to create a very simple and very cheap display plinth for scale model tanks (Example 1), airplanes ships or dioramas. You could even turn it into a squad display (Example 2) if you are into wargamers.

The very long list of requirements for this is:
A dollar store beveled picture frame.
That's it.

10*15cm beveled picture frame 

For this specific display, I picked a 10cm x 15cm frame, but you can pick whatever fits your project.

So first remove the back of the frame and the glass that is supposed to cover your picture.

removing the back of the frame

Get rid of the stand and any other bits they might have added to hang it on your wall or anything.

Place the back of the picture frame in front of the frame like shown in the picture.

I used a sturdy sculpting tool to remove the metal bits

Now place your model(s) on it and start planning how to build your base. Thus could be an ocean, beach, landings trip, a simple road or a more elaborate scene. Whatever you want. If you want, you can paint the whole thing in a uniform color to get a better idea of how it will eventually look. 

Final result!

Example 1

Example 2

I hope you found this article helpful! What do you use for plinths? Please share any tips or questions you might have in the comments!

Good luck and happy painting!

Small animals on bases and models

Hello there highly regarded friends, readers and followers! (even the haters get some love from me!)

Today I would very much like to share a product with you that I recently purchased. It is the Small Animals set made by Busch Modelbau. (special link for dutch readers) It is a German product and according to them the animals are in scale 1:87. At this scale a 6 foot or 1.80 meter human at this scale would be 20mm. This makes them small-ish for hero scale miniatures which are commonly between 28-32mm. 

They work fine however. For me they are meant to set a scene on the base or give people some little extra details to look at while looking at my models. 

The set contains 8 butterflies, frogs, rats, snakes bugs and fishes, 4 salamanders and squirrels and 2 rabbits hedgehogs, crows, woodpeckers and owls. That's well over 50 animals! 

Okay time for some pictures! 

The small animals set comes with 6 sprue's

This sprue contains the rats, snakes, bugs, fish and frogs

This spue contains the birds, hedgehog and rabbits

 So that is everything you get for a RRP of about €8 - $10 - £6. I would personally say that is good value. Painting these little critters can be hard so the manufacturer suggests painting them on sprue. In most cases I recommend you follow these instructions because some of these animals (like the frogs and salamanders) are really, really small! 

After painting you simply glue your animal where you want it. Wanna see what that looks like? Here are some pictures!

Owl sitting on a tree branch

Little green critter performing an excellent wall walk

Little mouse/rat just minding his business

Okay so that is it for now. I find this set to be very useful as it can be used for a wide variety in model and base building.

I hope you guys liked this little article and if you did (or didn't) feel free to write a comment in the section below. If you have seen other products you would like me to cover you can also let me know through the comments.

Thank you all for reading and enjoy your hobby!

Airbrush 101: looking for an airbrush

Hello my friends and newcomers,

Today I want to tell you about airbrushes. I personally currently own two airbrushes and I have worked with four different models. In this article I would like to show you and explain some general aspects and features of the airbrush itself, as well as personal preferences. I will cover things like compressors, techniques and cleaning in future articles.

Let's start by answering the the most general question when people talk about airbrushes.
'What is the best airbrush?'
I can answer that really easy, there is none! There might be the best airbrush for a specific paintjob, but then again, 99% of this is personal preference.

My two airbrushes

The airbrush I use the most is the Badger Krome. The reason for this is that is has a really wide cup and it's really easy to access the needle through the cup making it super easy to clean for me. For the really fine details (eyes, subtle OSL or glow effects a.o.) I prefer to use my Harder&Steenbeck Ultra. This is their most basic dual-action, gravity fed airbrush. the craftsmanship is more refined resulting in better control and smoother handling. (in my opinion ofcourse) I also really like the ball-jointed trigger on the Harder&Steenbeck. This all comes at a price though as Harder&Steenbeck is more expensive, especially if you don't live in Europe.

So you want to buy your first airbrush. What to look for. Well if it is for anything more then just basecoating entire armies at a time, make sure to get a gravity-fed, dual-action airbrush. The bottom and side fed airbrushes need higher pressure to spray the paint so you won't be able to use it for single models or details as well. Other then that all the extra features are just that, extra's. Both of my airbrushes have a distinct feature. The Krome has a nut on the back of the handle that can be set to restrict how far you can pull the needle back, limiting the amount of paint coming out of the airbrush. This can be useful when painting super small details like a subtle glow on a miniature's eyes.
My H&S Ultra has a removable cup. This can be useful when I want to preserve some of the paint still in the cup. It can also be useful when cleaning.

My Krome with the handle removed.
Note the little nut on the end of the handle as described above.

The removable cup of the Harder&Steenbeck Ultra

Other things you need to consider when getting an airbrush are things like nozzle and needle size. Both my airbrushes are around 0.2mm in size. For priming or basecoating I would personally recommend something a little bigger like 0.3 or 0.4mm. On a side note, when cleaning your airbrush, handle the needle and nozzle with care, if you bend or break them, you can't just fix them.

The needle from my Badger Renegade: Krome airbrush

The last thing I will talk about you might want to consider when looking for what airbrush to buy is how easy you can pull it apart en put it together again. Airbrushes like the ones Iwata produces and some cheaper brands usually require a little wrench to remove some parts like the nozzle. These parts are often very small and either damage or get lost easy. My Krome and Ultra don't require tools to get disassemble. The Krome does have a very small nozzle that can fall out if you remove the nozzle cap. Be sure not to drop it because standing on it can damage it!
The Ultra I selected because it has a very large nozzle. This makes handling and cleaning easier for me. It also doesn't require tools to dis- or reassemble. You can chuck the nozzle into the nozzle cap and it will seal when you screw the cap to the body.

Nozzle of the Badger Krome

nozzle of the Harder&Steenbeck Ultra

As you can hopefully see, I don't believe in the best airbrush. What works for me might not work for you. You might have bigger or smaller hands, making these airbrushes uncomfortable to work with.

My advice, don't buy an airbrush because some guy on the internet says it is the best, no matter how good he paints with his airbrush. Buying that airbrush won't make you paint like that. Making sure you have an airbrush you an work with and practice with it a lot does!

See you all next time! 

Painting a Mantic zombie step-by-step

Hello there readers!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. 

On this beautiful Monday I would like to share article where I show you how I painted a Mantic zombie. This article is not a tutorial that shows the techniques I use and how to paint, but it gives you an impression how I painted this miniature and I'll explain why I did some of the things the way I did them.

First off let me talk about the Mantic zombie. It is a really easy to put together, plastic model. If you are looking for some amazing zombie models I can really recommend them!

I used a light grey airbrush primer to prime the model. I wanted to make this a quick paintjob using light colors to give it a very undead look. The primer I used is the AMMO grey surface primer. This is a very good primer but it needs 24 hours to really dry and harden.

grey primer

After the primer fully dried I began painting the shadow color. I planned to paint the skin using a technique called zenithal highlighting. This is a technique where you spray increasingly lighter colors from decreasing angles where you spray your lightest color directly from the top. This will create a nice overall highlight. I used a nice moss green as a basecoat. 

moss green basecoat

Next color. I was looking for a color that was obviously lighter to create a strong shadow effect. I used a light brown / greenish looking khaki color. I sprayed it from a 45° angle on the miniature, leaving the moss green in the shadows. 

khaki highlight

For the last color in the zenithal highlight I chose for pure white. I made sure it was diluted enough so it would only tint and not really cover the previous colors. I increased the pressure I was painting at to about 20 PSI and increased the distance from my airbrush to my model to avoid pooling. A few sprays and a little extra focus on the face gave me the desired effect. 

white highlight

Okay so this is the skin tone so far. Time to get some brushpainting done! I chose some basic colors to block in the rags and spikes. For the clothes I picked the good old Ultramarine Blue. It kind of has a denim blue color to it in my opinion. For the spikes I used a medium brown. I painted the highlights on the rags by mixing in a little bit of white in the base color.

basic colors blocked in

Next up is the face. I used the top of my brush to paint in the eyes and teeth with an off-white. try to paint the teeth separately. 

closeup of the face

Looks boring right? Well that will change soon. After filling in all the colors I wanted I sprayed the miniature with gloss varnish. This is to A) protect my work so far and B) help the washes flow nicely. The latter is the most important for the next step. Acrylic washes usually tint the surface they are applied to. Now I don't want to loose the beautiful, undead skin color I worked so hard for. I used a purple wash on the skin. This will create a nice and gruesome effect as purple is a natural shade for green and where it pools it will give a nice dead flesh effect. 

zombie face after purple wash

For the rest of the body and mainly the rags I made a pigment wash out of water and AMMO europe earth pigment powder. This will give the rags some shading but mostly will give them a nice worn, dirty look. When the washes are dry seal in the pigments with a matte varnish. This will also counter the gloss varnish you used earlier. 

Time for some blood effects! Any self respecting zombie needs a good bite of living flesh so every once in a while so some nice blood and gore effects will finish the job. To create the blood I got Tamiya Clear Red and Tamiya Smoke. The clear red is an alcohol based paint (that smells really nice!) that is usually used to tint clear plastic lenses or headlights. It is a really bright so to get some realistic blood effects you need to make them darker. The Tamiya Smoke is a nice dark color for this job. Use different mix ratio's to get different results. I like really dark blood so I use 1 drop of Clear Red on 2 drops Smoke. Place the blood using either an old or a synthetic brush because the alcohol will destroy your sable hair. I placed the blood on the spikes, hands and around the mouth. I made sure the teeth where still visible. 

blood effects done!

closeup of the blood effects and final result

I hope this step-by-step helped you get an insight in how I paint my miniatures. If you have any questions or suggestions please don't hesitate to post them in the comments below.

Thank you for reading and I hope to see you here again!

Basic weathering test

Hi everybody!

Today I want to share with you a step-by-step weathering project I did a little while ago.

For this, I used a 1:32 scale oil drum by Tamiya. They come in a kit with oil drums, jerrycans and buckets. These are great for scenery or display bases but are also great to practice some weathering on!

If you want to reproduce what I did here, you are going to need the following:

• a model to practice on
• rust colored paints (I used these) 
• rust colored pigments (I used this one and this one)
• chipping fluid (I used this) 
• a non-rust colored paint
• some rustcolored, enamel or oil paints (I used this)
• white spirits or odorless thinner

To start with, you need to prime your model and paint it in a nice rust color. You can use different browns, oranges and red to create a nice natural effect. For inspiration you can take a look at pictures of rust to get a good reference of what your going for. Accept for paints you can also use pigments this step to get a nice textured look. Don't put too much effort into it, its gonna get covered up.

Once you are happy with the result, kind of like the picture above, give it a thin coat of gloss or satin varnish. This will protect your progress up to now. When the varnish is dry, spray several thin layers of chipping fluid (or if you can't get this, you can try and use hairspray) and give it like 5 minutes to dry. Then you can paint the model in the color you want to. If you use very thin layers you can use multiple colors to achieve some sort of color modulation or camouflage.

Once the paint is dry to touch get an old brush and some lukewarm water. Dip the brush in the water and stab at the model where you want to chip the paint. make sure to hit the edges as those are the most likely to be damaged.

Don't over do the effect. Chipping is only one stage of weathering so try to pace yourself. For destroyed or abandoned vehicles you can go overboard if you want to, but that is a whole different way of painting and weathering. Once you are satisfied with the amount of chipping you can spray a thin layer of gloss or satin varnish to protect your work and to make sure the chipping fluid won't ruin the effect you achieved so far.

Last but certainly not least, is the streaking and staining.
For this I used pigments and streaking effects but you can also use oil paints instead. Start with streaking. Make little streaks from chips leading down or from places where water would run down. If you are using oil paints you make little dots. You can use different colors  to create a bit of variation. Then take a medium sized, flat, synthetic brush and dampen it using white spirits or (h)odorless thinner. (Game of Thrones joke there, sorry) and drag the lines or dots out and fade them out towards the end. The varnish you sprayed on the model at the end of the previous step protects your paint against the thinner, which can strip your model clean of paint.
Once your streaks are done and dry we can proceed to the pigments. There are several ways to use these but what I did was to make a wash by adding some pigments to water, applying it to the model and later cleaning it with water. That way it will sit nicely in the recesses and it will give a nice effect.

Here you see the finished product. The different colors in the rust give the impression of old and new rust and the overall look has a nice aged finish. 

I hope this step-by-step has helped you in any way. There are many ways to do this so feel free to experiment but this gives you a nice impression of how I achieve this effect.

As always, thank you for reading.  

Preparing metal miniatures to paint

Hi everybody, it's Tutorial Thursday!
No, this won't mean I will post a tutorial every Thursday, but it sounds nice... sorry.

Today I will show you how I prepare metal miniatures before painting.

To follow this tutorial you will need:

• A metal miniature (doh!)
• Some clippers
• Diamond-, or jewelers files
• A rotary tool with a soft, metal brush attachment

For this tutorial, I am using a model from my box of Godslayer Halodynes by Megalith Games. These are metal miniatures resembling ancient Greek hoplites. 

Metal miniatures often look kind of matt. This is due to the mold release agent used to stop the model sticking to the mold. This is a good thing for the model, but it's a bad thing for painting. Be sure to clean your model by washing in lukewarm, soapy water before priming. 

A metal miniature can have mold-lines and flash. Mold-lines are a visible line where the two (or more) parts of the mold came together and maybe were not 100% aligned. Flash is where some of the casting material, in this case metal, leaked in between those mold parts. You can clean these easily by using a file or clippers.

Sometimes the metal looks really rough. This can be micro-pitting, caused by the metal cooling too fast, or too slow, causing the metal to sometimes even crack. This is bad, and you really want to get rid of this before painting. For this I use a rotary tool with a soft, metal brush. this smooths out the metal of the filler if you already filled the cracks.
It serves two purposes, because it also ever so slightly agitates the metal so the primer will have a better adhesion to it.

This is what the miniature looks before the treatment with the rotary tool:

And this is after:

As you can see the metal looks a lot cleaner, and generally a lot smoother. This will show in your paintjob, so the model will look a lot smoother in general!
In the final picture you can also see I removed the little vent connecting the foot to the little base insert. I did this using clippers and smoothing the foot out with my file. 

I hope this little tutorial helped you in any way. If it did please leave a comment below or share it with your friends.

Future of this blog

Okay so I've been thinking how best to use this blog. I would really like to post regular articles about progress I made building and painting miniatures, to share community projects like kickstarters, to share tutorials and write product reviews.

I still want to completely change the look, feel and layout of this blog. Reason for this is to give it a unique and individual look and with that make it look more professional. 

If you, the reader, have ideas for this blog, suggestions on what I can do or how to improve, please post a comment down below in the comments.

Again, thanks for reading these initial and rather boring posts and I hope I can entertain you with my articles in the near future.