Ikea Avgild Cork boards are Incredibly cheap for making excellent stone plateau bases.
Any kind of texture on them to stop them looking entirely flat.
This is sort of a step by step.
Spray black, stormvermin, nuln oil, heavy drybrush stormvermin fur all over, medium drybrush around edges and corners, administratum grey on edges.
Flock for breaking monotony.
Still gonna add water effect to the bottom of the Base. Wipe.
Menswear isn’t really my area, but as far as I can tell, yup, this checks out. @miyuli has done a bunch of costume/dress reference sheets, an they’re all pretty good 😀
This genre is often urban and gritty. The morality of noir is ambiguous and the tone is dark, cynical, and corrupt. Noir has a pessimistic style and voice. X
Alright, time to talk about my belt (the green one), with step by step pictures of how I made it! Hurray. I decided that I need a beautiful belt to go with my 14th-century kit, which I’ll be taking to Winterfest, Abbey Festival, Pennsic, Bicolline and beyond over the next few months.
The rest of my garb is still in development, but it’s going to be knightly yet still feminine, made from linen, wool and silk in the colours blue, green, brown and mustard. My costume is deeply rooted in historical 14th-century references, whilst remaining a bit fantasy because it’s mostly men’s clothing with ladylike adjustments. Alas, women were rarely knights, and I’m basically never caught in a dress. Oh well.
So, the planning stages – basically, I sketched it out. A lot. The picture below is one of the better looking ones that I actually coloured. I decided early on that I was going to use hardware from Make Your Own Medieval because they’re a local company and I really appreciate what they’re doing. On top of that, my boyfriend ordered some stuff from them previously to make his Viking pouch and it was awesome, so there was a bit of initial trust there.
In my concept sketches I experimented with two sizes of belt: 15mm and 25mm. Whilst the 25mm was a little bit heavier and knightly, the 15mm looked better on my slim figure. On top of that, it ended up looking a little bit more ladylike and the aesthetic seemed to work.
An intelligent person would now cut out a paper/ fabric strip and do a measured mock up to figure out exactly how many belt fittings they need. Alas, I am an impatient person, so I kind of just took an educated guess about how many I needed. I was lucky enough to be basically spot on, with a few extras for when I inevitably screwed up the riveting process.
Okay. So I got my 3mm veg tanned leather and some green leather dye from my local leather supplier and waited for my buckles and fittings to arrive in the mail.
First, I cut the belt. I squared off the edge of the leather all nice and then cut the 15mm belt with a belt cutter. Super satisfying feeling. For seriously.
Next, I bevelled the edges. This is done with a bevelling tool that cuts away the leather to put a chamfer on the edge. In english, it puts an angle on the edge instead of just leaving it square and it adds a much more professional finish.
After this came the dye. I chose to just use a store purchased dye instead of making a dye myself. Whilst that’s something I’d like to try eventually, today wasn’t the day for that. The stuff I bought went on really really dark and I was a bit unimpressed, but it eventually lightened up. After two coats of dye I rubbed it down with a cloth to get off any excess. If you’re going to dye leather, WEAR GLOVES! Remember that it is a special product made especially to dye skin, so it’ll do a great job of giving you some colourful hands. I applied it with the supplied wool swab that came in the dye pack.
Next up I finished the edges, which, IMO, is one of the most important parts of any kind of leather working. Sealing the edges is what makes your work look professional and will help it stand the test of time. A correctly sealed edge will look at nice and glassy, instead of raw and fuzzy. Basically, you apply a bit of moisture (in this case, I dabbed a cloth into water and lightly wet the edges) before going to town on it with a burnishing tool. It’s a funky looking piece of wood that, with the help of a bit of friction, turn the hairy fibres into a smooth edge. Think of it like felting. My friend is smart has one that he attached to a drill press – we, unfortunately, do not.
Take the look at the difference, the one on the left has been roughly finished, ideally, I’d put a bit more into it. But you can see the one on the right is still raw and fuzzy.
Finally, I took some leather paint and carefully painted the edges with a slightly darker green. Looking fab.
I’m a few hours in at this point, so I took a break for dinner, stopped drinking coffee and start drinking wine. The leather was pretty upset/ dried out from being dyed/ abused, so I rubbed some dubbin in to get rid of more excess dye and sorted it up again.
Now it’s time to put the buckles on! I punched the allotted holes and hammered them in. Again, I got these beautiful pieces of hardware from Make Your Own Medieval.
After the buckles, I used math to figure out where to place all of the fittings. I had two types – some little rectangle ones which I used sparingly, and these gorgeous little flowers that I put along the whole belt.
I punched a billion holes and hammered in the little flowers. They were an absolute jerk – very finicky. Some of them ended up a little wonky but were alright for the most part. Oh well, it means my belt has character.
I let my boyfriend do a few and he put the central one in crooked. He’s supposed to be the industrial designer here?
Ahh, yes. She is a thing of beauty. However, I still felt I was missing something. I pondered on it for the rest of the evening before I decided to engrave some foxes and acorns – both on my character’s coat of arms – into the front of the belt. After that I painted them with leather paint and oulined them in gold paint so that they would stand out next to the gold flowers.
Up close it looks a bit meh, but from a slight distance its pretty swell. And that’s pretty much it! I’m super happy with how it turned out! Let me know if you have any questions – I’m by no means an expert, but I think that this belt is pretty cute.
this was gonna be a tutorial and i guess it still is but if anything it’s just a really long and drawn out “essay” on drawing people with epicanthic folds. one of my biggest pet peeves is people drawing asian people exclusively with the same type of eye they’d give white people or anyone else who typically doesn’t have the fold! however i know that most people are taught with the standard white person eye (google image search for “eye” and it’ll all be pictures of white people’s eyes) so learning to draw epicanthic folds is a consciously learned thing.
therefore i bring you this, which attempts to break the mechanics of epicanthic folds down into something that’s a bit easier to digest and implement in your own art!
style can be argued i guess but it’s not that hard to stylize eyes with folds if you do proper observation and research. eyes with epicanthic folds are as diverse as eyes without so it’s not like you have to adhere to a strict model for them (although many people think that you have to) and all it takes to distinguish the two in stylized art (and even in semi/realism once you think about it) is a few lines! like i said this is a learned process but it’ll make your asian characters (and characters of other races even) a bit more interesting and believable.
Hey there, true believers! Today I’m going to walk you through the tools and techniques required to begin your foray into sculpting/modeling your own custom miniatures/details using Polymerics Sytems Kneadatite (Repackaged with a 300% markup by Games Workshop under the brand “Greenstuff”.
We will start today with a simple 3D Insignia with a relatively flat plane. You can take these tools and techniques and do much more complicated sculpts, but I highly recommend starting simple and getting a feel for the tools and the greenstuff itself. It can be a cruel mistress to the uninitiated, but we’ll get there in due time. First up, the tools of the trade.
In the picture above, you see everything we’ll use to sculpt our insignia, sans the greenstuff itself, and plus my especially ghoulish looking feet.
On the left, you have the silicon sculpting tools. They’re, as the name implies, tipped with a semi-pliable silicon shaping tool. They’re indispensable for a couple of reasons. First off, you’ll find that greenstuff sticks to everything but the surface you’re trying to attach it to, this includes your tools. There is little more frustrating than finally getting a seam perfect in the fold of a cloak and then having the effect mangled by it sticking to your shaper. Silicon tools (plus a touch of good old fashioned MK I saliva) fix that issue quite nicely. Additionally, given that they generate a soft pressure, they can be used to smooth over rough areas in the sculpt without leaving tool marks of their own. I highly recommend finding a set of Size 0 silicon shaper tools. They’re not cheap (around $30 for a proper multi tool set), but if you’re trying to get serious about mini sculpting, you’ll be hard pressed to improve the quality of your work without these at your workbench.
In the middle, you have two sheets of picture glass. You use these to mash balls of greenstuff into flat sheets (sans fingerprints) of the thickness you need for your next detail. With a little vegetable oil (also indispensable) and a straight razor, you can lift anything you’ve sculpted right off the glass sheet, and place it on your model. This allows for a 1:1 transfer of what you’ve sculpted, without it warping or distorting when picking it up. When combined with an illustration of what your attempting to sculpt, it can function like an animators lightbox, allowing you to “trace” the image with greenstuff by laying it in position on top of the glass over the image.
To the left, you have the dental tools. They’re what you use to generate crisp & sharp lines, where you’re looking for hard contrasts between surfaces. They are more fine detail than the silicon shaper tools, but lack the malleability of the silicon tools, every tool mark will show the exact pressure exerted. You have to have a delicate touch when utilizing these (and just get comfortable with the idea that you’re eventually going to accidentally stab yourself with one), but after you’ve gotten comfortable with them, you’ll be amazed at the details you’ll be able to generate, down to the 10th of a millimeter or so.
The rest is just a razor blade, a capful of vegetable oil and the greenstuff, but the greenstuff requires some explanation in and in of itself.
Kneadatite, or Greenstuff
is a two-part epoxy/polyamide sealant/adhesive. It comes separated into two colors, The yellow, which is the basis of the putty, and the blue which contains the chemicals that activate the curing process. When you get it in the strips like this (it’s also shipped in tubes), make sure to cut away the bit in the middle where the two colors are joined. Otherwise you’ll find bits of cured greenstuff in the surface you’re attempting to work with, and I can assure you that they rarely enhance the aesthetic.
You can mix and max the ratios to make it harder or more malleable when cured, and to adjust the working time, but for just starting out, I recommend just cutting off equal lengths and mixing them together. They start out as a tie dyed mess of blue and yellow, but eventually form into a contiguous green ball. When it has softened from the warmth and pressure and you can’t see anymore yellow or blue bits, then you’re good to go.
Well, almost…
I wasn’t kidding when I said that greenstuff is a cruel mistress. Part of learning how to use the material is to understand it’s life cycle. When you first mix greenstuff, it is very soft, and can easily be formed into whatever shape you please, but it will not hold sharp detail. Any fine lines you place in the sculpt at this point will be greatly diminished by the next stage in the life cycle, what I call the “Puffy Stage” about 15-25 minutes into having formed the greenstuff, the curing process really starts to begin. you’ll note that the material becomes less pliable, and that any fine detail work you’ve put into it has been undone as the putty relieves the pressure you’ve accumulated on it with your tools by “puffing” back into the fine lines and rivet holes. If you’ve done deep lines, you’ll note that the edged of them have become slightly rounded and aren’t holding the crisp and sharp edges originally sculpted.
Don’t fret. keep working with the shape until you have what your looking for, as the detail work can begin in earnest in the next step of the life cycle, the imaginatively named “detail stage”.
The detail stage starts about 30 minutes after you first finished rolling the putty, but can be in as little as 20 or as long as 45, you’ll get a feel for it after working with the stuff for a while. You can tell that it is ready to hold detail work, as it ever so slightly attempts to hold it’s shape when you manipulate it. You don’t want it so firm that it won’t take a tool mark (the next stage) but you want to be confident that it is on it’s way to curing in the shape it’s going to set in. Another advantage of this patience is that since the putty has begun to cure, the area around the spot you manipulate it with a sculpting tool will react less. This means you can be slightly more aggressive with your pressure and motions, and not have to worry so much about warping or distorting edges around the detail you’re working on.
The final stage is the cured stage. at this point, you can poke it with a tool, and it’ll hold it’s shape, it can be handled, shaved, sanded, clipped and glued, just like any other bit, but changing the sculpt has long since sailed. You’ll often find yourself waiting until the next day to attach greenstuff bits to your miniatures, as they’ll have ample time to have cured, and you don’t have to worry about mashing a cheekbone with your sausage fingers, or leaving your fingerprints on a pauldron.
SO! How do you apply all of this? Well, I’ll show you!
We start with the aforementioned tools, the surface we’re going to attach the new bit to (in this case, a dragon’s thigh armor) and a image of what we’re going to be sculpting. Sometimes, I do the image precisely to scale with the space I’m attempting to fill, and then sculpt over the top of the image. For this example though, I figured I’d show you how you can use it as a loose guideline.
Using the two pieces of veggie oil lubed picture glass (just a dab will do you!) we mash our greenstuff ball down until it is flat, at the thickness we want and free of sausage fingerprints.
Next, we lubricate our straight razor, and begin making the cuts that’ll form the wings. In this case, it’s a simple geometric pattern. Straight lines are nice and easy with the razor, but symmetry can be hard to eyeball. I generally do this on a grid mat to assist with that, but it’s for Papa Nurgle, so it can be a touch sloppy.
Having gotten our wings established, we use a lubricated tool to make the circular indentations. Can’t stress the importance of the oil enough.
At this stage, we’ve cut out all the shapes of the fly symbol, and affixed them to the model in location using a dot of super glue for each piece. Word of caution. Make sure that you have the piece exactly where you want it to be when you have it superglued. Superglue and greenstuff LOVE eachother and want nothing more than to immediately settle down together forever.
The pounded brass texture was accomplished using a rounded silicon tool. You can really see how they can be used to develop soft and subtle detail work, without leaving individual tool impressions. In the picture, you can see me using a normal (lubricated) mechanical pencil to make the rivets.
Finally, the result. I used the dental tools to create the wear and tear on the piece. took some little knicks out of the side to correspond with the scratches. There is no right or wrong answer at this point, you’ve got to go with what is most aesthetically pleasing to you as an artist. Go wild with it!
Following these beginner guidelines, and practicing, you’ll find yourself turning out professional quality pieces in no time!
If you’ve any questions, feel free to drop me a line will@miniaturesoftomorrow.com. Check me out of Facebook by seaching for Miniatures of Tomorrow or go to My Website to check out a gallery of my completed works, or inquire about painting techniques or commissions.
Keep your bristles damp!
Will Tomorrow
Sharing the basic greenstuff tutorial I wrote for my sister blog, Tutorials of Tomorrow, I hope you good folks find it useful!
From someone who is taking their first steps into the world of sculpting with green stuff, this has been invaluable.
Aliquid de Magis 