More Wee Planes

 

I've been 3d printing and painting some 1:144 WW1 aircraft, for playing Canvas Eagles, a tabletop WW1 dogfight game.

I can't say that I've been exceptionally productive: these three (plus a Fokker Triplane that I gave away as a gift) are the sum total of my completed work so far.

However, I've just ordered some 1:144 decals, which will make painting the little things much less of a chore. Painting the markings is the hardest part of the whole process.

 I do have some more in the offing though, along with another Sopwith Camel on the printer even as I type, and an Albatros D-III and a Nieuport 17 in the print queue.

I've printed the occasional one on my Mars Pro resin printer,  and when it works it does give me cleaner surfaces, but for the most part I print them in FDM on my Ender 3. It's no slower when printing a single plane, and the resulting models are considerably stronger and less prone to distortion of wing tips and things.

I need to figure out a process for painting the lozenge camo scheme on the Fokker D-VII. That could be a bit tricky.

The aeroplanes in the little white dish are 1:200 scale, which I thought would be a good compromise size between 1:300, of which I have quite a few but which are tiny to see from any distance, and 1:72, which are readily available in kit form but take up far too much space. And so they are, but the resin I was using to print them (eSun water-washable) had a tendency to warp horribly. The spirit-based resin I'm using now is better in that respect, but is more trouble to clean up. I'll probably stick with the larger 1:144 FDM prints.

 Later on...

Printing biplanes can be a tricky affair, due to all the struts between the wings. This Albatros D-III has proven to be especially problematic for some reason. 

It's not the printing of the struts per se that is the problem, but rather that the printing supports tend to wind around them, so that they can be difficult to remove without breaking the struts.

Another issue, especially for FDM printing, is that skinny structures like wing struts, when the layers are printed  vertically with very little connecting surface between them, are very weak. You want to get the layers as long as possible, with as much contact area between the layers as possible, to maximise strength.

For that reason, I've separated the top wing from the rest of the model for printing as a separate component.

I may find I have to do the same with the undercarriage, but we shall see when the test print is complete. 

 Later still...

Success at last, on the seventh attempt. I now have a printable Albatros D-III fuselage. I've had to print it tail-down rather than nose down; why that makes a difference I have no idea.

 I'll have to print upper wings and and undercarriages for them separately, but I haven't had anywhere near the problems with those components that I have with the fuselage, for some reason.

 

1:300 Heroics & Ros Hannover

 Here it is, fully assembled, and primed with Vallejo Surface Primer.

The raw white filament is very difficult to distinguish detail on, and even after cleaning up as much as I can see of it, I almost always find more work to be done after I've primed the model.

This still has a bunch of zits that need smoothing. 

Doors for Dungeons

 

These 3d printed doors are some that I found on some site some time in the past, and I don't recall when or where or who the designer was. I printed them at 0.2mm layers on my Ender 3, and painted them with some home-made washes.

The tall one in the middle is the original design, but I enshortened it, mainly for the sake of cutting its print time in half. 

The figures are the flat card standees from OkumArts that I've taken to using these days. The doors themselves could also just be print-and-snip 2d standees, since they're essentially flat anyway,  and if I find that I need a bajillion of them, that's probably the way I'll go, since the 3d ones take about an hour and a half each to print.

Skaven (Wererats)

 

Some time in the 1990s I bought a pack of GW metal Warhammer Skaven. I didn't have any interest in Warhammer, but I did want something I could use as wererats for my AD&D game.

The skaven are a bit more heavily equipped than your standard AD&D wererat, but they looked ratty enough for my purposes. 

DTRPG Loot

 

I got these today, four AD&D adventure books, PoD items from DriveThruRPG, bought mostly on a whim.

I must confess, I bought Halith Vorn and Zorth mainly because the illustration appealed to me, but they also had pretty good reviews on DTRPG. 

They took a bit longer to arrive than PoD stuff usually does, though only a bit. I made the order on June 8th, and today is the 24th; I normally expect a turnaround of about a week to ten days. 

Flocking Flock

 

I'm trying to make some modelling flock, with only limited success.

This is made from bits of a kitchen sponge, whizzed up in a blender, coloured with ordinary house paint kneaded through, dried in the oven and then ground again in a little electric coffee grinder.

It's not utterly worthless, but I was hoping for a smaller grain size than this. Also, the sponge is yellow, so that affects the final colour.

As it is, this is really no better than the sawdust flock I made some years ago. In fact, it's probably a bit coarser.

I'll give it another go with some white open-cell upholstery foam, which should colour more accurately, and will hopefully grind down to fluffier bits.

First paper figure from 1981

 

Since I'm on a cardboard standee kick at the moment, I thought I would show you this — my very first hand-drawn paper AD&D character mini, from 1981.

My friend Ivan (a wonderful man, now sadly deceased) was running what I think was his one and only AD&D campaign for our group, and wanted to try out the use of figure markers. Up until then, we'd always done pure theatre-of-the-mind stuff. 

For the most part, our markers were just chits with the character names written on them, maybe 15mm tall. But as usual, I couldn't resist being more decorative, so I drew a little character portrait on mine.

She was not a long-lasting character. She was a pixie, very curious, and her curiosity was her downfall as it led to her being electrocuted to death by a will-'o-wisp. 

Standees for Mythic China campaign

 

Many years ago I ran a short-lived campaign set in a Mythic China milieu. I didn't have any 3d minis suitable for the aesthetic, so I made a bunch of standees.

Naturally, being set in Mythic China, none of the players elected to play an actual Chinese character. Not one. We had a Japanese sumo wrestler, a Japanese samurai, and a Mongol warrior. And a donkey. The only vaguely Chinese character was an NPC, the Immaculate Po, a monk. I give them enough credit not to think that they actually saw any old Asian people as culturally interchangeable, but really.

I get that people want their characters to feel special, but I do get a bit tired of the never-ending torrent of Special Snowflake Outsider Loners that crop up time and again.

More Paper Minis

 

Ive printed and cut out a new batch of paper minis from OkumArts, bought via DriveThruRPG.

David Okum's minis are my favourites, when it comes to card standees. My main regret is that he doesn't seem to have done a great many fantasy RPG character class variants, or if he has, I've missed them. There are a few, but not a particularly wide variety. If he produced two-sheet PDFs of character minis for each of the main D&D-adjacent character classes, I'd certainly buy them like a shot.

Having said that, I am fully aware that as FRPG gamers in this modern age, we are truly spoiled. Way back in the Before Times, it was quite common for players to have just one or two minis of their own, which they used for all of their different characters. But in those days, actual FRPG minis weren't that easy to come by, and now they certainly are — even if fully 3d cast or printed 28-32mm minis are now ten times or more the price they were back in ancient times. 

Battle Map

 

I have a large (A1) laminated offset-square 1" grid that I use as a battle map for D&D.

It works great, being very quick and convenient to set up with a whiteboard marker, and it's very clear and visible to all the players (and me).

However, it turns out that it's not ideal for exploration sessions, as even on an A1 sheet, a one-inch grid doesn't go all that far. And if the party go off in an unexpected direction, you can run out of space pretty quickly. Moving the map that has already been laid down isn't very quick or easy at all.

So, I've gone and got some A3 sheets of 7mm quad paper to do the exploration mapping on. That grid is still large enough for everyone at the table to be able to see, but if the party wanders off the edge we can just carry on on another sheet. 

I'll keep the dry-erase grid for situations where we actually need a large-scale layout for the miniatures. 

 

SdKfz 251 ambulance

 

This 15mm (1/100 scale) Hanomag SdKfz 251 half-track ambulance is a model I designed and printed some considerable time ago, but the print was a partial failure — the nose of the vehicle is distorted, and the wheels didn't print at all. I just got around to making some new wheels and gluing them in place.

I'll add it to the rest of the ambulances I've been modelling over recent years. I've got a few of them now. 

Found (again)

 

I'm in the process of re-re-re-re-reorganising my workroom, and I found some 15mm WWII figures I've been looking for for quite a while.

They're Battlefront 15mm WWII Mediterranean Brits in BD trousers and shirt-sleeves, ideal for representing troops in Italy in summer. It's quite an old set, and I don't think they're still available any more.

Plus, I found some other Brits that I didn't even know I had, and have no idea where they came from: to the left of the photo are a bunch of prone figures, some in stocking caps, and a couple of Bren gunners in berets.

In the background are some PSC 15mm kits: a "Pheasant" 17pdr on the 25pdr carriage, a Morris Quad and limber, and a Loyd carrier. I put them together some years ago, and then they got shunted to the back of the queue and eventually put away "somewhere safe".

So anyway, there's my next painting project. 

 Next day....

This is what you get when you combine ownership of a 3d printer and the attention span of a mayfly. These have been sitting in their file drawers for who knows how long, and there are more stashes all around my workroom.

I really should do something about getting one or two things finished before I make any more. (It's probably helpful that neither of my 3d printers are operating very successfully at the moment). 

Mystery Mini

 

I got this figure in a mixed lot of 15mm medievals and ancients some time back in the early(ish) 1980s.

 I'm not familiar with ancients though, and I'm not at all sure what it might be. I thought maybe a clibanophoros, but I'm really just guessing.

 I also don't know who the manufacturer was.

Adventures Dark and Deep (Lite)

 

This arrived for me today, a PoD hardback via DriveThruRPG.

Including postage, it cost me about $40 yankeebucks, so about $65 Kiwibucks.

I got it purely out of curiosity, since I'm pretty happy with running AD&D2e and don't intend to change that any time soon.

The author, Joseph Bloch, has said words to the effect that he was trying to write the game that Gary Gygax might have produced as AD&D2e if he hadn't been kicked out of TSR. How well he has succeeded I cannot really say, but it does read very much like AD&D with a few house-rules tacked on. If you're familiar with AD&D1e, there are no real surprises here, at least, none to be found on my initial reading. 

Unlike OSRIC, it doesn't attempt to hew absolutely closely to AD&D1e, but it does hew pretty close nevertheless. 

This is the "lite" version of a much heftier pair of books. The core rule book and bestiary are about 500 pages each, and they're about eighty yankeebucks each too: by the time postage is figured in they'd come to near enough to $NZ300, and my curiosity does not extend nearly that far.

This volume is 170 pages, and includes the usual bunch of stuff: character creation, spells, treasure, and monsters. Its character information tops out at 8th level, but I don't see that as a major drawback. It's complete enough that you could easily run a campaign for years with just this single volume. If you're prepared to spend the extra money for the full rules, there's a lot more stuff in there.

As I said, there aren't really any surprises here. If you want to run an AD&D campaign — because that's basically what it is — with a minimum of hardware, this will do it for you.

It's also available as a Pay-What-You-Want PDF, if you want to go even cheaper. 

Tome of Magic

 

I bought a copy of the AD&D2e Tome of Magic in PDF from DriveThruRPG. I would have preferred a PoD hard copy, but they don't offer one for this volume, and I figured that at least I could print the PDF and bind my own physical book.

For those unfamiliar with it, the Tome of Magic is just a collection of additional spells and magic items for AD&D2e, and it also expands the clerical spheres and what-have-you. 

However, the scans from which the PDF has been assembled are not great — they're rather soft, and they're washed out. I could print it, but the results wouldn't be fantastic.

I also have it in RTF format, I think from a CD-ROM that was published some time back in the Dark Ages, so I thought I would just reformat that in LibreOffice and print it that way. I wouldn't get any of the graphics, but to be frank the illustrations in the original weren't all that great anyway, and it's the information I'm primarily interested in.

So I did that, and a mighty labour it turned out to be. Maybe not a mighty labour, as such, but a labour nonetheless. 

I thought that I would do all the basic text styling in LibreOffice and then the final layout in Affinity, but Affinity's collaboration with word processor output is erratic, to say the least. It doesn't believe in LibreOffice's .ODF format at all, and it crashes instantly if I try to import .DOCX. It will accept .RTF, and it also imports all the text styles information, but doesn't actually apply it to any of the text, so I'd have to go right through the whole document and reapply styles to everything.

At that point I lost the will to live, and decided to just print straight from the LibreOffice output.

 Once that's done, the actual binding will be pretty straightforward. I've done a few books now, and I know more or less what I'm about there.

Later... (2026-05-08)

I got the loose A4 printouts assembled and bound, using some of my (not very good) home-made book-cloth. 

The binding is not great, to be honest, but it'll do the job.  I'm in the process of putting together a proper A5 layout in Affinity, including a bunch of illustrations snarfed from here and there, which I could bind properly in signatures if I can ever be bothered.

 This layout is functional, but not terribly attractive, and includes no illustrations at all. I printed it direct from my LibreOffice word-processor output.

Pill Tray Paint Palette

 

I've been casting about for ages for a paint palette with very small reservoirs, suitable for very small quantities of paint.

I completely overlooked this: my used pill trays.

Thanks to my ever-increasing decrepitude, I have a never-ending supply of them, and they're perfect for my purposes — compact, disposable, and white. 

Grenadier "Night Hag" - 1986

While I was looking through some accumulated boxes of stuff, I found one containing a whole bunch of old white metal miniatures from Ye Olden Times.

This is a Night Hag by Grenadier, dated  1986.

The bottom of the base

 Back in those days, the standard nominal figure size for roleplaying minis was 25mm instead of 28 or 32mm, as it is today. This one is quite small even by those standards, and probably stands only about 22mm tall (though I haven't actually measured her).

As a result, the old style white metal miniatures from back in the '80s don't really mix well with modern sculpts, especially when you take into account the propensity for "heroic" sculpting, which might swell a nominally 28mm mini to 35mm. 

It looks like when I painted this figure, all those years ago, I varnished it with a satin enamel varnish, as was my wont at the time. I found the satin more hard-wearing than matte, and it didn't dull the colours the way that matte varnish can. 

Pantherturm (15mm)

 This is a freebie STL of a WWII German Pantherturm, an emplaced Panther tank turret used extensively in the Italian campaign and during the fall of the Reich as a (relatively) cheap protected anti-tank bunker.

 https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_pantherturm

The model is designed at 1:100 scale for 15mm, but it will scale up for 20mm without any issues, and even 28mm at a pinch. It'd also scale down to 1:150 or 1:144 for 10-12mm gaming, though the gun barrel might start getting a little fragile then.

Both the turret and the base have sockets to accommodate round magnets up to 10x1.5mm.

 It printed successfully on my Ender 3 FDM printer, but the print failed on my Mars Pro resin printer — I don't know why. That printer's been getting quite flaky in recent times, and the failure rate has increased markedly. 

The base will need to be embedded in an appropriate terrain diorama. For Italy, that would be most often rural terrain, but in the invasion of Germany they were often dug into city streets to overwatch important road junctions. 

 Here are a couple just sitting on top of a terrain sheet, and they look okay just like this. I'd still like to embed at least one of them in a scenic base though.

2026-03-13

I've now included a groundwork STL that the base piece can be pressed into, for those who don't want the trouble of making a scenic base the traditional way.

 2026-03-14

Here are my prints, now encapsulated with grass and dirt collars so they look more dug-in. 

These are 3d-printed bases, but really it would be a trivial matter to make the exact same thing out of air-drying clay or the like. 

 2026-03-16

Here's one in a base better suited for urban rubble, this time created from scratch using traditional modelling techniques and materials (polyfilla, kitty-litter and matchsticks). 

The Book of Artifacts

 

This just arrived for me, a print-on-demand product from DTRPG.

It's pretty much what it says on the cover: a whole bunch of magical artifacts for AD&D2e. It also includes some notes on the use of artifacts within an AD&D2e campaign, and a bunch of tables with which to generate the various random powers the artifacts are supposed to have.

I like the concept of these artifacts in a campaign. They tend to be ridiculously powerful and unbalancing, but at least they're each unique. I'm not a huge fan of the vast number of generic +1 swords and Potions of Healing and what-not that tend to give player characters their superhero powers.  I think magical doo-dads should be a bit special, or else they just become a stand-in for modern or sci-fi technology.

Plus, I like the idea that magical things should be just a little bit perilous to the user. Knowing that using an object of Mighty Arcane Power™ might make your legs fall off means that employing it becomes a meaningful action, not just a handy deus ex machina. 

Will I actually use any of the contents of this book? Probably.  They're a hoot.

The key is to make sure that they don't stick around long enough for a character to make them the major part of their personality, or else players will get quite upset when they're taken away, one way or another. Unless that would be amusing to me.... in which case, we'll see. 

Giant Hag

 

This is an FDM print of a fairly old Duncan Louca design, one of a set of three hags he did. I've printed it at a height of 75mm, as I had a need for a giant hag in a game session I was running, though that need passed long before I ever got the mini painted.

It's painted entirely with glazes (Army Painter Speedpaint and Vallejo Xpress) and washes, apart from the metallic gold of her piercings and the strings dangling from her waist. It's a very quick way of getting a reasonable tabletop result, though the mini would benefit from some more deliberate shading and highlighting, especially about the face.

My Ender 3 FDM printer is getting pretty old and a bit outta whack now, and I'm getting quite a lot of stringing, blobbing and adhesion issues. It may be time to start saving up for an upgrade. 

Vallejo Xpress

 

Vallejo Xpress is another entry into the colour glaze "speed-paint" style of mini paints.

I noticed them on the rack when I went in to my FLGS  for some normal Vallejo paint, and thought I'd give them a try in my constant search for hobby materials that cater to my laziness.

They work decently well, though there's nothing startling about them. They dry to a glossier finish than Army Painter Speedpaints, but otherwise seem pretty similar.

The part-painted hag in between the two bottles is FDM printed at 75mm size, and not very well printed at that. FDM isn't well suited to colour glazing, as its layer lines are quite apparent. Plus, my printer is a bit out of whack, and I'm getting a fair amount of stringing and blobbing.

Speed-paint glazes, of any manufacturer, are fine if all you want is a quick and okay paint-job, but they're really not a one-and-done solution. If you want a really decent paint job, they're still just a starting point. They work best on models with plenty of well-incised surface detail. However, they're useful for what they are. 

They're a bit tricky to mix reliably, but not impossible.  I assume they'd need the appropriate glaze medium for extending if you want to lower the intensity of the base colour; I haven't experimented with plain water, but I think it would tend to interfere with the paint's pooling and self-levelling qualities.

The skulls on the bottle caps are FDM printed from a file I got on Thingiverse; they provide me with a good visual indication of what's going to come straight out of the bottle. They're just stuck in place with a blob of blu-tak in a socket underneath.

WotC Displacer Beast

 

This is an old mini from the early 2000s, when WotC was newly the owner of D&D and had just published 3rd Edition. They also started producing a range of white metal miniatures to match the art in the Monster manual, of which this is one — the Displacer Beast.

I don't know who the sculptor was, but it does a decent job of replicating the skinny, almost skeletal aspect of the MM artwork. It was a hell of a thing to assemble though.

 

It originally came with a plastic "slotta" base, but I've mounted it on a bit of steel I ground to shape, and added some groundwork with superglue and baking soda. It's supposed to be blue-black, though my one is more blue than black. never mind.

Bristol Beaufort (1/144)

 This is a 1/200 model by PlanePrinter (on Patreon), up-scaled to 1/144 scale and printed on my elderly Ender 3.

It's intended for my WWII Desert Air Force, to support my 15mm WWII Brits in North Africa and the Mediterranean. 

More Model Photography

 

Some time ago I made myself an MDF box to use as a portable photographic stage for shooting models. I painted the inside matte white, to keep as much light as possible bouncing around in there. Ever since, from time to time, I've been tinkering with various setups to get the best out of it, and in the end it seems that the simplest is best.

For light, I'm just using a single cheap equipoise lamp with a 14 watt cool-white LED bulb.

For camera/phone stabilisation,  I'm using an old tripod head screwed to some bits of plywood. A wheat-bag or something would also do the trick, though it would take more faffing about to set up, and to change if need be.

I have a bunch of quick-change mounts for the tripod head, so swapping between the camera mount and the phone holder is very quick and easy. Again, not essential, but it does make life easier. 

 These two were photographed with my iPhone 14, and the setup shown above. Apart from cropping them, and assembling in this attractive frame, I haven't edited the photos at all — no sharpening, no tonal correction.

The cyber-gorilla is a largish miniature, 60mm to the top of his mecha-fist, and photographed fairly well. The Roman centurion, a plastic Victrix (I think) 28mm figure, shows the limitations of the iPhone's digital zoom, and the detail is a bit indistinct. The tonal (dynamic) range is fairly compressed in both photos.

 

This photo of Vibius the Centurion was taken with a Canon EOS 50D, with a macro lens.

Again, no editing apart from cropping and resizing. 

The detail is a lot cleaner, and the tonal range is wider than the photo taken with the iPhone.

On the down-side, the camera is a lot bulkier and more trouble to use. 

On the plus side, the resulting images are much better. 

 

15mm Afrika Korps

 

I've had these Battlefront 15mm Afrika Korps sitting around, based, primed and waiting for paint, for years now. I don't know for sure exactly how many years.

I've finally pulled finger and got them sufficiently finished that I can use them in a game without being utterly ashamed.

For some reason, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly why, I just don't enjoy painting infantry. So they tend to get shoved to the back of the queue again and again.

Note: The idiots have assembled the tripod for their MG34 back to front. You just can't get good help any more. 

For reference, the paints I've used are as follows:

• Helmets and other metalwork, plus trousers — VMC Desert Yellow
• Jackets — VMC Green Brown
• Helmets, jackets and trousers all dry-brushed with VMC Iraqi Sand 
• Rifle stocks — VMC Flat Brown
• Gun barrels etc. — VMA Gunmetal 
• Boots, ammo pouches, water bottles — VMC Saddle Brown
• Faces and hands — VMC Flat Flesh 
• Bases — VMC Iraqi Sand 
• Overall wash — Citadel Seraphim Sepia 

 

The wash tends to pool on the top of the helmets, creating a blob of the darker colour.

Ideally, I should have just wicked it off with a brush while it was fresh and wet, but I often forget.

So instead I go back afterwards and paint a highlight in Iraqi Sand on top of the helmet, and at the same time I take the opportunity to crisp up the lines of the flared brim of the stahlhelm.

 

The Seraphim Sepia wash isn't usually my first choice — that would be Agrax Earthshade. However, in this case the Agrax would have darkened everything too much; the Sepia remains brighter.

 This is a 28mm model, a freebie from a Kickstarter, scaled down to 15mm to fit in with my BF metals.

For the most part, the scaling worked without issues, but the rifle definitely should be replaced with something a bit chunkier and sturdier — the barrel just printed, but the sling is nearly all gone. 

Also, I need a much better macro photography setup. This is taken with my iPhone, and none of my fancy-schmancy DSLRs would produce anything as sharp.

 2026-01-31

I've taken that Kickstarter STL and done some head-swapping, as well as giving it a beefed-up rifle that should print a lot better.

I haven't tried printing them yet, but since the original printed just fine I don't anticipate any major issues. 

DM Screen for AD&D2e

 

I've printed out and assembled my new DM's screen for AD&D2e.

Structurally, it's 2mm grey-board covered with some of my home-made book-cloth. I didn't have enough of a single pattern to do the whole lot, which is why it's in two different patterns.

The most useful in-game charts are on the two centre panels. The outer panels are less likely to be needed day-to-day, and I've added some hinged smaller pages (to the left) with other less important information. If I find there are other charts I feel the need for instant access to, I'll put other hinged panels on the right.

The main thing is to learn where everything is, so that I minimise searching time and garner a wholly undeserved reputation for omniscience.

The pages on the outside are more or less temporary; that's where I'll put any player info. In this case they deal with how I'm handling saving throws and critical hits / fumbles.

NOTE: I laminated the sheets before I glued them to the panels, and in hindsight I think that was a mistake. The glossy surface makes the content more difficult to read due to annoying reflections.

Strelets Streltsy

 

Strelets includes this little guy, or a mini like him, in all their soft plastic 1/72 figure sets, regardless of the actual subject matter of the set.

He's a member of the Streltsy, the Russian firearms troops from (I think) the 16th century up until the 18th (I think).

As you may have guessed, I don't actually know anything much about them, though I'm sure that Wikipedia could help, if I could be bothered to look.

He's been sitting on my painting desk for quite a few years, so I gave him a very quick speed-paint, just for the hell of it. 

Will I ever have a use for him? I kind of doubt it. 

Note: the paint-job looks kind of crappy in the main photo, but bear in mind that the figure is only about this size, as shown to the left. 

It's still kind of crappy, but not as crappy-looking.