Paint Table Saturday 216 - Epic Fail of a week

Hi All,

This week was mostly me fooling around trying to cast up some shields because I was absolutely convinced I didn't have enough. I was wrong and wasted the last couple of days trying, and failing, to make a mold.

I did do some painting over the weekend. Here that is.

As you can see I finally fixed the Standard bearers hand, put a finial(?) on top of the banner pole and primed him grey. The mounted Knight needs a little more work and priming.

I went with variations of red and blue for the peasant archers. I have until the 30th to get these guys finished. This is how far along they were before I packed them up to go on holiday.

 Now I'll take you on my diversion of trying to make a mold to cast some shields. I was convinced I did not have enough to do all the figures that required shields. Over a year ago I had bought an Alumilite casting kit at Michael's and then approximately a year ago I bought a Classic Lego set to make a mold box. I thought that it was all just rectangular blocks. What is pictured is 95% of the blocks in the kit, so fail #1. Fail #2 was that my B part resin bottle has cracked and leaked, but I never made it to the resin stage. As you can see I used plasticine to make the bottom and was going to make a two part mold.

I had some trouble mixing the right amount of silicone, but got that sorted only to have the sprue bend and lift up one corner, thus ruining the mold. This silicone has a 24hr cure time, so I was basically screwed.

Then I remembered I had some Amazing Mold putty, cure time is about 30min.  I made this mold fairly quickly, but didn't notice I had some areas that were voids under at least one of the shields.

I went ahead and made the second half, thinking it could be saved. The second half was as bad if not worse. So double the putty, and time, wasted.

I demolded the first one, if it hadn't flexed like that it might have been usable, but you can see some other problems with how I made the mold.

After all this, someone offered to help me out with shields. I did another count and actually looked at all the models that had a stud to hold a shield, turns out I do have enough. So double Doh!

One good thing I did is tried out my Green Stuff World rivet mold with the excess green stuff I had from fixing the standard bearer.

I need to work on my technique, and will probably buy their metal scraper in my next order. I made the top three sizes of hex rivet.

Oh and if you need plain flat shields for knights Magister Militum has some shields here. (Hopefully that link works for you, I had trouble finding it this time.) For the style of shield used by the Knights of the Realm you might try these from Fire Forge.

Also welcome to Tilean Merc. I see you are a person of taste by the blogs you follow in addition to this one. If you have a blog let me know, I'll link to it.

Thanks for looking.