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Yes... I could find room for Clamps in my AdMech as a servitor.

Mr Clampy was from Crooked Dice. I can't seem to find that exact model on their site at the moment though..

Yesterday was a much quieter day in terms of finished models, though a lot of work got done on today's submissions... but you won't see those until tomorrow

During the challenge there is a theme map that you have to journey through for bonus points. At various stages of the journey you can paint up a bonus figure, but it has to be a strong female character (not some exploitative thing). As I've got plans to try and paint up my GS Cult gang for Necromunda, I needed a new Magus




I know, I know. The magus isn't supposed to have a third arm... but who cares

She's so strong she has a 3rd arm for added strength!

Love your treatment of the figure endtrans...

I hope you all had nice relaxing christmases!

I spent today building my shiny new Ender 3 v2 Pro, which went well. The levelling has been a pain in the backside though. I can get 3 of the 4 corners to give some resistance to the paper, but the 4th corner seems to be too loose... as is the middle of the plate*. This means that the print is lifting during the test in some areas that seem to be too far from the nozzle. This middle part is my fault, but the corners are certainly off a bit. There was an initial calibration issue that seems to have gouged out a circular area on the glass plate with the print nozzle *face/palm*. Need to order a new plate already :/

Question for those of you with Enders. How long should the Benchy boat take to print? I've seen reports that it should be about an hour, but my cura seems to think 3.5+ hours? Cura is currently claiming it will take about 4 hours to print 5 pretty flat 25mm bases which seems excessively long so I think I've got something off with my settings

I did another round of levelling the bed this morning after reading some more advice and guidance on that. I now seem to have all of the bed pretty level and, thanks to a clean, it doesn't seem to be peeling in the middle any more so I don't need another plate after all.

Reinstalling Cura also seems to have reduced the print time a little too, so I must have done something to the settings. The first prints coming off it at the moment are some upgrades to stop filament getting caught in the Z axis as those can be done at low resolution to speed things up a bit. I'm still a bit bemused that a 6x1 paint rack takes 8 hours to print though. It's going to take months to print enough

It's all Greek to me, but I have every confidence that you'll sort it out!

 endtransmission wrote:
I did another round of levelling the bed this morning after reading some more advice and guidance on that. I now seem to have all of the bed pretty level and, thanks to a clean, it doesn't seem to be peeling in the middle any more so I don't need another plate after all.

Reinstalling Cura also seems to have reduced the print time a little too, so I must have done something to the settings. The first prints coming off it at the moment are some upgrades to stop filament getting caught in the Z axis as those can be done at low resolution to speed things up a bit. I'm still a bit bemused that a 6x1 paint rack takes 8 hours to print though. It's going to take months to print enough

I wonder what your infill density was set at, that can really kill time in prints. The paint racks I made took about 8 hours for the two sides and another 6-7 for the shelves if I remember correctly (probably wrong there). Still after a week my bench was cleared up quite a bit.

I might try and create some new racks that take less time to print as everything I've found that does what I want has quite a long run time.

On the plus side, I now have some dividers for my Arkham Horror case, some token holders and some pointers so I'm pleased with that and the spool doesn't seem to have shrunk by much. I'll have a look through the Patreon buildings backlog tomorrow and give one of those a go. I'm also looking to use one of my older Pis to run Octopi for a little bit more control once I have a few more prints under my belt. *touch wood* things seem to be going smoothly now

Time for a catch-up on the painting photos

First up was a 3d printed ogre cook. He's been modified pre-printing to become a necromunda gang follower



The first Necromunda gang to get some paint is the Van Saar




To go with the SW droids, there is now a small clone army with General Kenobi. The clones are a mix of experienced 501st troops and a bunch of shinies




Apart from the Ogre, everything else is an experiment in Contrast paints. I think I'm slowly getting to grips with it, with some additions like highlights or detail using normal paints

Extremely crisp. Very lovely, and I definitely do not want to get into Legion Clone wars!

I did want to get into Legion, but after painting those, I really don't any more

The Butcher!

I love that Titan Forge cauldron but good Happy to see paint happening - including a real abundance of white!

The chef looks great, really wishing I had gone with a resin printer instead of more models . Oh well, I have enough to keep me busy now, and I like the idea you had to make him for Necromunda.

Great work on the ogre! Lovely mini and paintjob. So much white on this page - contrast is working for you!

Very nice Ogre, if you had not said it was a 3D print I would have thought it was a GW mini. Going back to that Magus, she is a great conversion and I really like the paint job too.

Thanks guys. Theo, you're missing out on the resin printer... just imagine how much you could be printing with one of those *and* your Ender?

So I'm a bit behind on posting things here, so lets do a bit of a catch up shall we?

The next theme was Hatchery, so we had to find something to do with eggs, or things hatching out of eggs. While trawling MyMiniFactory, as I tend to do these days instead of the GW shop, I came acros The Chicken King. I have no idea what I'll use him for, but the concept was just hilarious and gave me flashbacks to the chicken kicking contests in Fable



He is 100% contrast paints, so I think I'm getting the hang of these things and enjoying most of the colours. The blues, greens and purples still need some trials to get right though as they seem to be either very washed out, or horribly dense like the blue.

After the Hatchery, we had the Armoury. Rather than going with knights or soldiers like everyone else I did two more tanks for the Tallarn. The first is the repaired print of the Reptilian Overlords tank that I showed off in the other thread



the other is a repaint of the FW hellhound from my old guard army. Better to make it fit this army than sell it with the rest and print a new one.



More tomorrow... there's quite a backlog

That weathering is the tits, mate.

I'd be divorced if I had a resin printer . Plus the Ender is sidelined currently, no problems with it, but it is such a distraction to getting anything done paint wise.

Though a Chicken King I could definitely use

Really lovely weathering on those tanks, they're suitably weathered without going over the top.

 Theophony wrote:
I'd be divorced if I had a resin printer . Plus the Ender is sidelined currently, no problems with it, but it is such a distraction to getting anything done paint wise.

Though a Chicken King I could definitely use

My wife wasn't *ever* so pleased when the ender turned up at Christmas from my parents, so I know what you mean.Thankfully she seems to have come around to it now she's seen it in action as it has mostly been printing storage bits for the last few weeks and slowly tidying up my office

endtransmission wrote:

 Theophony wrote:
I'd be divorced if I had a resin printer . Plus the Ender is sidelined currently, no problems with it, but it is such a distraction to getting anything done paint wise.

Though a Chicken King I could definitely use

My wife wasn't *ever* so pleased when the ender turned up at Christmas from my parents, so I know what you mean.Thankfully she seems to have come around to it now she's seen it in action as it has mostly been printing storage bits for the last few weeks and slowly tidying up my office

Lol this is like my parents buying me a 2m projector screen and projector for my birthday, the wife really objected until there was a life-size Chris Hemsworth in our living room She bought me my resin printer for xmas, though I think she's starting to regret that for all the stuff its generating

 inmygravenimage wrote:

endtransmission wrote:

 Theophony wrote:
I'd be divorced if I had a resin printer . Plus the Ender is sidelined currently, no problems with it, but it is such a distraction to getting anything done paint wise.

Though a Chicken King I could definitely use

My wife wasn't *ever* so pleased when the ender turned up at Christmas from my parents, so I know what you mean.Thankfully she seems to have come around to it now she's seen it in action as it has mostly been printing storage bits for the last few weeks and slowly tidying up my office

Lol this is like my parents buying me a 2m projector screen and projector for my birthday, the wife really objected until there was a life-size Chris Hemsworth in our living room She bought me my resin printer for xmas, though I think she's starting to regret that for all the stuff its generating

Print her a Chris Hemsworth statue for her workspace

Man that weathering on the tanks, is as Graven said, "the tits". Chicken King is very good too, your use of the contrast paints is excellent I have never had those results.

I'm finding the more contrast paint you put on, the better it looks, though the greens, blue and purple still aren't great. You do need to do it in panels to give you time to clean up overloading some areas, but I'm getting there. My early attempts were to use it very much like it was a normal paint, so it ended up looking streaky or grainy.

Still not quite got the hang of large smooth planes like Space Marines, but most of what I paint isn't that anyway, so that's cool. I need to buy the ones I'm missing as I'm using the more and more... and hopefully they come out with more colours.

I forgot to put the next figures up, sorry!

For 7TV I started to put together a Cult of Dagon as they are going to be running a mythos scenario pack on KS early Feb. These cultists are from the Crippled God patreon a few months back. The guns came from another patreon, I forget which. The deep ones had to be scaled down quite a lot to be the size I wanted as they were ogre height originally




Then we're on to Christmas Presents that I painted up. For one friend I sent him a halfling version of Indy


Another friend got a 54mm scale Mando dwarf. Believe it or not, a lot of this is contrast paints with some slight highlights on top.


and another one got a bear star player for his Blood Bowl team in his favourite team's colours with his player number on from when he used to play professionally in the UK.


And my wife got Space Mom. I just noticed that I need to go back and paint her thumb as I've caught it with the black contrast!

Space mom and Mandadwarfian are both top notch, lovin' the cultists too.

Properly grungy vehicles!

The bear star player has me thinking of Michael J Fox and Teenwolf for some reason . Not a bad thing at all .

Time for some more... we're nearly caught up as I've not had much time to do painting since going back to work in the new year

The main batch of work was done on actually putting paint to a small Cawdor force, bringing me to two painted gangs now. The Golden Sons are convinced they are the hand and shield of the emperor; so far it's not going so well for them. Yellow robes do not equate to golden armour...



Given that the kit is somewhat devoid of options I decided to use parts from the empire flagellant kit to change things up a bit, including giving my leader a real zealot look with the flaming head






These guys are about 90% contrast paint. The lessons learned on them are:

- Nazdreg Yellow works really well as a shade for Iyanden Yellow. A fairly thin/non-pooling coat of Iyanden Yellow so you get some distinction, then paint some Nazdreg into the shaded areas and feather the join with a little water as you go around
- Basilicum Grey isn't great as a single coat, but if you go back and do another smooth layer in the areas you want to be darker it comes out really nicely
- The green doesn't work so well for flat areas without a second layer in the darker areas, but actually looks pretty good for the bottle (imo)
- Agaros Dunes and Skeleton Horde are different colours... but not enough to be distinctive when put next to one another. I also seem to use Skeleton Horde *a lot*