Sneaky Alien Automaton

I am in love with handmade automata. I especially adore wooden ones, but unfortunately the product of my woodworking skills and attention span has been insufficient so far for me to make one. BUT... I have a much higher attention span for coding up 3D models and printing them. So that's what I did.

Spaceman with hiding alien automaton.

The inspiration for my model is this cute scene by Alan Westby: 

He has a lot of neat models, sadly his website seems to be down now. 

*cut for 20 minutes of increasingly incredulous internet searching*

You guys, Alan Westby teaches (taught?) at a charter school in my hometown. What a small world. And he was a director at the Fox Cities Children's Museum while I was a child there. Mind blown. Anyway, the upshot is he has a facebook page where he shares some of his other models.

Moving right along. I designed the base and mechanisms for my model from scratch in OpenSCAD, a programmatic 3D modelling package. The mountains were modeled after someone's open source code for making printable table top strategy game terrain but I made so many changes I don't think any of the original code remains. The other models I borrowed from thingiverse: 

• The spaceman is the Matter Hackers mascot Phil A Ment (a printer-testing model)
•  The alien is a model of the alien from Toy Story.
• There was a rocket behind the spaceman, this one but shortened, but the pin it was glued to broke off. 

And here is the final product:

It was really fun to design and print, but did take forever. Next time I dust off my printer I may do some wildly modified version of a marblevator like this one from Greg Zumwalt. There are a lot of cool marblevator designs around.

Finished Legion of Everblight Battlegroup

Nick finished painting his whole Legion of Everblight battlegroup for WarmaHordes. I didn't paint these little guys but I did offer significant moral support. And I took the pictures. So here they are on my blog looking all cool.

There's Lylyth:

Four shredders:
  

  

And a carnivean whose head and arms come off so it can become a scythean or ravagore. Through the magic of magnets! I hope you're keeping up with the vocab, there will be a quiz.

They look almost jolly after you've stared at them awhile.

Decade old Warhammer elves finished

I recently (re-)started painting miniatures after Tom introduced us to Warmachine/Hordes. Nick picked up the Legion of Everblight battlegroup and it all looked super fun, but I couldn't really justify buying a new set of minis to paint when I still have all my elves from high school. 

That's right, many moons ago Tiny Nell thought she would somehow acquire and paint an entire High Elf army for Warhammer. In the end, she assembled and partly painted about 20 minis before losing interest. We never played a single game. My little people languished in a box in the basement until I moved into a properly sized apartment and my mom evicted the last of my stuff. 

All my old paints were toast so anything requiring color matching had to be rebooted. I stripped all the half-painted heroes and chariots but decided to finish up the handful that had complete base coats. I read up on dry brushing and washes and used these fine little fellows to practice my technique.

 

Now, the problem with painting ancient little people who 1. you're never planning on sending into battle and 2. probably should have been stripped and repainted is: it's hard to know when you're done. Obviously, no one in their right mind would set up Brian's photolab to take shmancy images of unfinished, obsolete Warhammer figures. So... I guess that means they're complete. Yay!

The photo setup. Grass courtesy of Nick's Fibonnaci quilt extras, sky was another fabric scrap I had lying around. And here are my spearmen and archers all together, ready to rumble: