Lifestyle and Emerging Technology In Plain English
I’m really happy when I can combine two of my hobbies. This time it’s Boardgaming and 3d Printing.
Often, many games have tokens or chits that are pooled for players to take at different times during play. Usually, these sit in piles around the main game area.
On Thingiverse, swholmstead shared this neat design — which I promptly downloaded and printed.
Super Effective! Keeping the game table neat and tidy.
Pretty cool what a little time, 3d Printing technology, some creative design work, and a spool of PLA will get you.
I’ve been testing various dungeon components to see how well they’ll work with our play style. And how good they’ll look once painted and finished.
The crates above have yet to be finished. Usually, I prime them with Flat Grey, then colour, lighten or darken as necessary. This example also uses short walls, allowing us to see the contents of the room from anywhere on the table.
If you’re interested, I’ve been keeping all the landscape and terrain designs I find on Thingiverse in this collection.
Standard Lunar Lander — because it’s Friday.
Wow, when you take photos of painted miniatures, the photos always catch all the rough paint-work and other issues, making the minis look like crap 😀
Ah well, since these Alien Frontiers field generators are meant to be played with and not put on a shelf and admired, I’m not too concerned.
One done, one in progress and one primed and ready to go.
The orange one’s interesting. I bought the Alien Frontiers Upgrade Pack. It included a lot of the new colony components, and these field generator components. It’s meant to upgrade the more generic ones from earlier Alien Frontiers generators.
So this one came without one of the generator arms attached. After filling out a form and uploading a photo of the flawed component, Game Salute, the distributor sent along a replacement (it’s the unpainted one in the background).
In the meantime, I’d decided to paint this one anyway, and am going to turn that gap where the arm mounts into a docking port. I think I’ll be adding yellow and black ‘alert’ lines around it. We’ll see how that goes.
Then, finally, I think I’ll likely give them a final spray of Testors Dulcoat, just to eliminate the shine. I like the way it helps bring out subtle detail and gives them a more ‘realistic’ look. Must be a personal taste thing developed back in the day when I painted plastic models.
Well, I finished painting the colony components. Looking at the photos, they kinda look messy. Note to self, don’t rush, even if you have 40 of the little buggers to paint.
Ah well, on the game board at normal viewing distances they look ok.
I didn’t want to paint the originals that came with the game so I had 3 options:
I went for the Upgrade pack, even though my first choice was the Factions Expansion. It looks like a neat addition to the game but it’s damn hard to find, either online or locally. Both the Factions Expansion and the Upgrade pack include the extra components to allow a five-player Alien Frontiers game, using the publisher’s expanded rules. So on to the painting.
Before I started painting, I looked at a lot of space colony images like these for inspiration.
Then I primed the components — 2 coats, first a dark to fill in the shadows, then a white, from above only, to provide highlights.
I wanted to test some colour schemes first, so I mocked them up using some image editing tools on the iPad. I took photos against a white background, converted the images to black and white, then kicked up the contrast.
Then just overpainted the image on the iPad until I found an appealing colour scheme.
I like this technique. It lets me work anywhere, gives reasonable results, and doesn’t cost me any paint to trial it.
Next up, the Field Generators. And I’ve got some ideas for the Rocket Ships too.
Recently I’ve become aware of a trend to paint the often garishly-coloured miniatures and game components you find in modern board games.
My first attempt was with Mice and Mystics, and now I’m working on Alien Frontiers.
This time, I decided to prototype my colour schemes digitally. To do this, photographed the components just after priming, so the base colour has been neutralized.
Then I processed the images, cropping them, making them black and white, and enhancing the contrast and brightness to bring out the detail.
And finally, I load them into Pixelmator on my iPad, and Experiment with layers.
Hopefully I can come up with something interesting 🙂
Oh, and one thing I just noticed while looking at other people’s designs, the above Field Generator is missing one of it’s towers. I just assumed that gap was a docking bay or port or something. I’ve contacted the game publisher about this to see about a replacement.
*** Update *** A replacement Field Generator is en-route. More to paint!
Well, I’ve finally finished them. I’ve learned a lot, and quite a bit has changed since I last painted minis (about 20 yrs).
I think they turned out fine, and I’m looking forward to my next set… not sure what that will be yet. Maybe something Star Wars.
Here’s a gallery of the finished Mice and Mystics set.