Outpost 206

I purchased a Reaper Miniatures brand Learn to Paint: Core Skills kit from amazon back in May of this year and I consider it my first real foray into miniature painting. And when I say I knew next to nothing about painting miniatures prior to this kit, that's not an exaggeration. All I knew about painting came from scratchbuilding model space ships out of shampoo bottles and random pieces of plastic (which ultimately started me down the rabbit hole that led me to wanting to learn how to paint minis, though I’ll probably talk more about that in a later entry). What I thought I knew about model painting was that it involved spraying on a primer and/or base coat, slathering the model in a sludge wash made from black acrylic craft paint and water before wiping it down with a paper towel, and maybe dry brushing on some silver or metallic paints to make it look like paint was chipped off. Suffice to say, I was absolutely clueless and this kit really helped open my eyes and set me down th

As I alluded to in my Samurai Bead Bot post, I more or less built this second bead bot concurrently using bits of whatever was left over. Crappy image quality alert as these w ere also taken with my old camera phone sometime in April. It will become apparent later on that I decided to change up a few things (as well as add his hands and feet) but here’s the picture I took during the initial scratch build. As usual, super glue, baking soda, beads, and bits were the order of the day. And if you’re curious, that’s 1mm armature wire I’m using. At first I was a bit worried it would be too thin, but it’s actually perfect for miniature builds like these. After adding his hands, feet (the same apoxie sculpt copies of a Robotech figure’s feet that I used for the Samurai bead bot), and a bisected wooden bead for his head/face, I mounted him on an old GI Joe stand (I have quite a few of these) and blasted him with a coat of flat gray primer. And no, I don’t know why his crotch armor in thi

 Back in March, I came across an excellent youtube channel called Bill Making Stuff (another inspiration for this blog and a treasure trove of great crafting tips) and was so taken by his videos on making robot miniatures out of beads and bits of plastic that I decided to make some of my own. So I gathered up some beads (enough to make an entire army of bots) and some armature wire and I was ready to hit the ground running. The bead bot I really had my heart set on making was a samurai robot (once again, heavily inspired by the one Bill made ). Since I put this together sometime in April (it’s June 28 th as of this writing), I’m a bit hazy on exactly what bits of material I used. For the main structure, I used beads (duh), armature wire, bits of hookup wire, plasticard (for the sword and armor plates), and pieces of chopped-up hollow plastic q-tip shafts. For Samurai-bot’s wakidate (that’s the little crescent moon thing you sometimes see on samurai armor, fyi), I cut a pizza sa

 A couple of reasons, actually. I’ll try to break them down: I recently purchased a new phone with a vastly improved camera over the one that was in the previous phone that I’d been using since 2016 (if you must know, it was a Samsung Galaxy Amp-2 that I got “free” with my Cricket account).   I’ve been working on getting into the habit of writing every day (outside of my full-time job as a technical writer, that is) and I find that short-form, steam-of-consciousness posts give me the ki ck I need if I’m feeling burned out from work. I picked up a few fun new hobbies since the start of the pandemic. Namely, scratchbuilding/kitbashing and miniature painting. Obviously I'm not an expert on any of the above, having only just started doing scratchbuilding and model making last year and miniature painting only a month or two ago, but I figured a blog would be a fun way to document my progress (and my myriad mistakes) and gauge my improvement over time.   I also found myself wanting a s