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Behind the Scenes #42
🕑 Added 2019-07-25 16:45:04 +0000 UTCWhat up, mini family?!
I think I missed last week's post. It was pretty uneventful. Because I was a full 2 weeks ahead of my public release schedule, I spent the entire week assembling and converting a Knight Titan for a commission I have going on right now. Here are some of the more notable conversions:
I may need to remove the dude on the shoulder pad so that I can put the heraldry on it and then add him later. That was an oversight on my part. I quoted the guy who's commissioning me 70hrs of work to finish this, and it took me 40hrs to do the conversion and assembly...so...I'm a little behind, haha. Good lesson learned here: Always quote more hours on something you've never done before.
Recently, a KS that's going on right now by Tuoi Toys reached out to me to do a dedicated video painting one of their figures. They're gigantic primarchs, essentially. They want the video done ASAP because their campaign is going on right now so I'll need to finish it up for this next week, August 2nd. This is becoming a bit of a recurring theme with Kick Starters: they come to me after publishing their campaign and want stuff done immediately; life would be a lot easier if they reached out ahead of time. Also, surprise surprise, it's a 75mm model. Yikes!
To get a video out to you guys for early release this week, I started to work on another basing video similar to the one I did recently with a little twist. I wanted to do 4 different levels of winter bases going from easiest -> hardest. The biggest feedback I got on the last video was that "sure, this is easy for you Scott, but not for me" which is totally fair. The problem is, however, when I started working on the bases I thought to myself "I have no idea how to make good snow bases" so this spawned off a myriad of tests to figure out what products are the best.
Here's a handful of my initial tests. At the time of writing this article, I'm at 43 tests and I probably won't do more than that. So, I'll probably make a video called "Making the best snow bases" which is more about the research and development process for finding what works best. So far I've tested Baking Soda, Microballoons, Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow, Liquitex Natural Sand, Golden Light Molding Paste, Golden Modeling Paste, and Golden Heavy Gel Matte. I've also tried different ways of adhering them to the base with PVA glue, Medium CA, and Thin CA. Right now I'm messing around with adding pearlescent paint and powders and there's more to go! I'm hoping in the future to make my "4 Different Levels of Snow Bases" videos with the information I learned here, but probably not right away because that would be too much snow.
Besides the hobby and various videos I'm working on, I did some accounting on Tuesday. My books are all balanced with my statements for my various business related bank accounts. It's pretty boring, but it feels good to have that done. Now, I just need to keep up with it. I'm also preparing to run payroll for the first time, because "Miniac LLC" is officially an S-Corp! This will allow me to get more tax breaks at the expense of complicating my tax procedure and basically requiring a CPA to do it for me.
That's all for now. PAINT MORE MINIS!!
Comments
Joseph E.
I'm excited about a potential R&D episode! I appreciate all the testers in the crafting hobbies (meeting people who developed some now-standard LARP weapon techniques was wild) and I'm interesting in seeing what you tried
I'm just about to start reading a book on PnLs and shit. I feel like I'm 90% the way there already, but some of the product related accounting stuff gets wacky
Get to it!!
God, I needed this. I haven't painted or done anything in like 2 weeks. Time to clean up the nerd bunker and get to work! Keep up the good works, Scott!
