The Most Wonderful Time of the Year...

Very sorry for the delay.  Unexpected copyedits showed up in my inbox last week.  Well, I mean, I was expecting them, just not right at that moment.

Anyway, I wanted to give you all a little heads up, as I have once or twice in the past.  We’re approaching Halloween, and we all know what that means.  Cheap decorations!  For the next few weeks, discount stores will be filled with little bones, skulls, coffins—I’ve seen all sorts of things.  You’ve probably seen some great stuff, too.  They make fantastic detail bits, or sometimes even whole scenery pieces, for either 40K or Age of Sigmar, depending on which way your tabletop swings.  I mean, have you ever really seen too many skulls in the grim darkness of the future...?

And, best of all, they’re all usually for a dollar or less.

Actually, looking at that photo, it just struck me that I could make a really cool fallen giant/ skeleton scenery piece, all overgrown  with vines and grass.  Or maybe even a Bone Giant, if I felt really ambitious...

Hmmmm...

Helpful Hint

Just a quick reminder...

We are now in the Halloween retail season.  That means your local discount stores probably have tons of really cheap plastic skulls,  tiny coffins, weird glasses, and tons of rings and necklaces that are decked out in tiny bones of all types.

You can go drop three or four dollars and come home with a pile of items that could make decent objectives, super-heavy details, scenery details, or even whole scenery pieces.

So go check it out and see if there’s any gothic you could add to your grim future.

Landing/ Teleport Pad

I’ve mentioned before that my girlfriend has a large tract of land down at our local community garden.  When we go shopping at the 99 Cent Store, she indulges my quests for cheap scenery and I help with some of the garden stuff she looks at.  Every now and then they overlap.  Like when I found a bunch of three-inch plastic army men (five to a pack) and decided we needed some to protect the garden.  Well, once I’d made a few small conversions, anyway...

And then there was this time, when I found something right there in the garden section while she was looking at herbs.  This is a plastic saucer to go under flowerpots so they don’t drip when you water them.  They come in a couple of sizes.  This one’s the 10”, but there was also a two-pack of 8” ones and a three pack of 6” saucers.  My brain started working with these immediately and I ended up grabbing the largest one.  I also grabbed a tube of “Fix-All Adhesive” glue because it works on plastic and rubber.  So this project is going to cost all of two dollars.

I flipped the saucer over, peeled the label off the bottom, and cleaned it.  I didn’t want any little pills of paper left here, so I actually put this in the sink and used some soap and water on it. 

Once it was dry, I put a few threads of regular super glue in the indents from that large “10” at the center.  Arguably, you could keep it as extra detail, but I wanted a large, flat center on my landing pad.  Once that dried I used a few last drops to fill in low spaces and gaps.

Helpful Hint – It’s tempting to use the super-cheap glue I just bought, but it’s too thick.  It’s never going to settle down and smooth out, and I’d just end up with little wrinkles and peaks in the center.

I cut a bunch of card strips at 1 1/8” x 8 3/4” (your own measurements may vary depending on your saucer) and folded them into consummate V’s.  I set these down inside the saucer and glued them with the adhesive  This was the most time consuming part of this project.  The glue needs three hours to set and a day to cure completely.  So, I glued them and set it aside. It’s a long time, but it makes the whole thing rock solid.  I can actually lean on it and it will hold up my weight.

Another Helpful Hint – While the V’s were drying, I put a piece of paper across the top of them and set a book on top of it.  If one or two of these curl up, the landing pad will never sit flat, so it’s important to keep them all in position.

At this point, this piece is effectively done.  I primed it black and gave it a very light drybrush with some Boltgun Metal paint (Leadbelcher for those of you who’ve already moved on to the newer paint colors).

There’s a bunch of ridges and valleys on this thing that make for fantastic detail.  It’d be very easy to paint concentric circles, or a few of the small “buttons” as lights.   I used a yellow base and did white over that to make it look like a bright light.  It's big enough that I could clean up any messiness with a black magic marker. You could also extend the lined all the way to the center to make it look more like a cross-hairs target for landing, or use all eight of the radiating lines in bright red to give it a Chaos feel.  You could even do the little ridges/ tubes on the outer ring in a glowing/ electrical color scheme and say they’re force shield projectors, allowing you to use it as a raised/unfurled Skyshield.

Alternately, with a slightly different color scheme and detail-pattern, this would make a fine teleport pad.  You could probably go down to the 8” saucer and still fit a full squad of Terminators there.  Paint it black and green, focusing on the buttons more, and it could make a very passable Necron array of... well, probably some kind of death.  Necrons are big on that.

All for just two bucks.

Helpful Hint

Hey, real quick.  It’s that time of year again.  When stores put away all their summer goods and start laying out their seasonal aisles for...

Halloween.

Which means if you go hit your local discount store right now, you’ll find tons of stuff to add onto larger projects or use for scenery.  Last year I found a great plastic skull for a dollar that became a wonderful set piece my lovely lady and I use all the time.  There are skull shot glasses that can make great columns or further scenery pieces. A few creepy cameo necklaces were hung on almost two feet of 40K scale chain.

I even saw a few necklaces that had tiny skulls and bones instead of beads—easily a hundred of them.  For three or four bucks, you could cover a one-foot square tile with bones and skulls.  That’s a Khornate demon world or maybe the Bone Middens of Commoragh.

I’ve got some super-cheap scenery coming up in the next month or so, but I thought I’d give everyone the heads up now.  Go check it out.

Cheap Jungle Plants

We were told by our landlord that we had to clean the garage out this weekend, so a lot of work did not get done on the Thunderbolts.  However, we swung by our local 99 Cent Store for drinks and I saw this little piece of cheap scenery goodness which I thought should be shared.

One of my many armies is a Catachan force, so I have a love of jungle scenery and some of the great gaming tables Games Workshop has made along those lines.  Even though I don’t play fantasy, I also love the Lizardmen in their steamy Lustrian home.

When GW released their Jungle Plants a few years ago, though, I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated.  Over twenty bucks for what were essentialy aquarium plants?  I decided to stick with my old plastic palm trees.  I was pretty sure another option would present itself.

Sure enough, my local discount store ended up with a whole shelf of “fake grass” in their gardening section.  It’s a good sized square with about sixty-four tufts on each one.  There are two different textures, with thinner blades on some and wider ones on thers that would be broad leaves in 40K scale.

Each tuft pops off so you can mix and match textures.  Or you can attach them to bases or other scenery pieces.  You could even pull off all the tufts in every third row and suddenly this square’s become a farm with crops growing in rows.  Set up four of them like that with a river and you’ve got a verdant agri-world just waiting to be defended, devoured, or pounded into the ground.

All for less than five bucks.

Shooting Phase

Okay, this really isn’t strictly a 40K thing, but I thought it was fantastic and needed to be shared.

I love getting good pictures of my projects and miniatures, but it’s tough.  My phone camera has a fixed lens, and even my digital camera doesn’t have a good focal length for such small subjects.  I usually end up taking very large, wide photos to make sure they stay sharp and then crop them down to show the subject.

Then my lovely girlfriend stumbled across this website and realized how well it applied to my work here at In The Grim Cheapness of the Future.

Go to your local 99 Cents Store or similar merchant.  Grab a pair of +2.0 reading glasses.  Depending on the frame, you’ll either be able to pop one of the lenses out or you’ll need to give it a little snip with a pair of clippers.   However you do it, get one of the lenses free and loose.

Now, step two.  Get some regular scotch tape and fasten that lens over the lens of your camera.  Try to center it as best you can, but don’t sweat the small stuff.  If you’re pretty close to center, it’s going to work fine.

That’s it.

Helpful Hint—Really, any magnification will work, it just changes your focal length.  If you can only find a +1.5 or so, it’ll still help, it just means you might have to hold the camera back a few more inches.

The best part is, your camera’s probably going to do 99% of the work for you.  Since the new lens is outside its system, it’ll just treat it as an incoming image and process accordingly.  You may have to play around a little bit to find the sweet spot for your particular camera or phone, but not much.

Check out these two pictures of my Kroot warrior who counts as a Ssslyth.  It’s one of my first attempts, but it’s much sharper and has better resolution.

Here’s the Cryptek I made a few weeks ago.

Try it out.  You'll be amazed how much it can help.  At the worst, it’ll cost you a dollar.

Skull Rock

Hey, a quick post for whoever’s interested in cheap scenery...

It’s Halloween again, which means your local discount stores probably have a ton of cheap skulls, bones, and other odds and ends that can be used to great effect.

For example, check this out.  My local 99 Cents Store had a couple dozen skulls like this.  A seven-inch skull for a buck!  There are a lot of uses for such a thing in Warhammer 40,000 or Fantasy.  Enough that I figured it was worth reminding people to keep their eyes open for such things.

However, I was inspired by a post I’d seen at the Bell of Lost Souls.  Brent showed how he made a really nice, inexpensive skull monument with the Halloween skull he found.  And he posted it on the internet, which is pretty much akin to smacking the whole world with a gauntlet (in a good natured way).  And I found myself thinking, “heck, I could make something faster and cheaper than that...”

So, I headed out this morning to put my money where my mouth is...

11:55 – I arrive home from errands with my new plastic skull.

12:10 – With groceries put away, I scraped off the big mold line running down the center.  I also figured out the three points where it makes contact when it sits.

12:20 - I superglued it to a CD base.  A plastic plate would work well, too, and the 99 Cents Store has tons of those, too, if you wanted to go a little bigger.  I also added a few wedges of foamcore and card that I had kicking about.  I trimmed a few of them to give it more of an uneven, rocky look.  I also piled them high, because I want this to look like one big chunk.

Honest Disclosure – Okay, the CD base is a bit of a cheat because I’ve got three or four of them sitting around waiting for different scenery projects.  If you’re building one on your own, it’ll probably take an extra hour for that glue to dry and cure.

Helpful Hint – I didn’t do it, but it probably wouldn’t be too hard to put a few small lumps of green stuff or chunks of foamcore on top of this thing as “balance points.”  They’d make it look a bit more rough and uneven at first glance, but actually create a level spot where you could stand figures.

12:35 – Union-mandated lunch break.  Well, not really.  But I did need to give everything some time to dry and I hadn’t eaten yet.

2:00 -  Once the glue was dry, I hit the whole thing with some textured spraypaint.  You can buy it at Home Depot or Osh.   It’s a little pricey, so you might not want to buy it just for this, but if you use it for the right things it’s worth it.  I’ve had two and a half cans of it kicking around for a while from an old film job.  

You can also get the same effect by buying a bottle of white glue, painting the whole thing, and then just dumping some coarse sand on it—it’ll just take a while longer.  You could even leave it as is, basecoat it black, and just drybrush it with a lot of different grays.  The goal is to make it rock-like.

4:30 – Done.  The textured paint takes a while to dry, but in the hot sun it did just fine.  In less than an afternoon I have Skull Rock for less than two bucks (less than three if you went for the larger plate-base).  A perfect scenery piece or an objective.  I almost hit it with a coat of gray spraypaint and some drybrushing to make it look more like granite, but I’ve decided to go with this basic, sandstone look.  It fits the desert tabletop my lovely lady and I tend to use at home.  I might do a little work around the edge of the base, but that’s it.

If you’re a Fantasy player, it might even work as an Arcane Fulcrum, yes? Although it may need a few magic symbols painted in blood or some such thing.  Not really sure how those work...

Later this week... well, I’m going to miss the rest of week, to be honest.  I’m one of the guests at ZomBCon up in Seattle.  Maybe I’ll see some of you there. 

Helpful Hint

Stepping away from the Defiler for a moment, I thought this was worth mentioning.

If you’ve got a 99 Cent Store or something similar near you, go check out their Halloween section. I just found a four pack of plastic shot glasses shaped like skulls. Yeah, plastic shot glasses aren’t that great, but the real way to look at this is it's a pack of four 1 3/4” skulls for a dollar.

Imperial scenery. Chaos scenery. Super-heavy vehicles. Doesn’t matter what color they are once you prime them and paint them like granite, marble, or steel. If you can’t think of something in Warhammer 40K you might want to build that would benefit from a skull bigger than a Space Marine... well...

For a buck or two, there are worse things for a scratch builder to have in his or her bitz box.