New Pieces

 I've finally made some noticeable progress on terrain pieces for the first time this month. My workbench is littered with pieces that are slowly creeping towards completion, but I decided I need a side project that I can make some rapid progress on to get up on the web and motivate me to keep working.

These pieces will be featured on more than one of the tables for NorCon, so I've made a bunch of them. Currently I have 12 of the tiles pictured here, plus another 8 3"x3" tiles.

Now I really need to get down to painting...

One of these things is not like the others.

Every time I try a new technique my first attempt always ends in failure. It's sort of a tradition in my family to plan very carefully before doing anything new, overlook something in the process, and end up blowing it.

In this case I planned to make plaster or resin copies of the cargo containers in the picture to populate the space port table for Norcon. I took the original cargo containers and very carefully built a frame to make a mould of them. I sealed the hollow containers with vaseline to keep them from filling with my mould material. I purchased an expensive quantity of silicone rubber to make my moulds out of, and then carefully planned every step of the process so that I would not make any mistakes. After all that work and expense, however, I made one incredibly stupid mistake: the hollow shipping containers float.

As you can see from the picture above, the plaster copies are a mess. It's hard to see just how bad the copy is in the photo, but the sides of it are not even straight. The outside is covered with strange bumps caused by air bubbles formed when the originals shifted and started to float away, and the only nice part are the container doors on the back.

Fortunately, some good has come out of this. First, I had enough silicone left over to make a couple of moulds of plaster tiles to speed up my production of the starship interior table. Over the last month, as I have not been making any new posts, I've been producing a huge pile of plaster bits. I have not made much from these bits yet, but I will have some new projects to share in the near future.

Secondly, even though I've had to scrap the spaceport table due to my misadventures with mould making, Joel (of Brush Zealot fame) has been making some amazing Japanese Sectorial Army themed terrain. Very soon I will get some pictures to share, or hopefully he will put them up on his blog.