Castle Ravenloft spiders – Miniature Painting

Painted model spider with blue accents.

Normally you add details as one of the last steps when painting a model. For this spider from the Castle Ravenloft board game, I used Cerulean Blue (hue) acrylic ink from Liquitex to line most of the depressions on the back and the gaps between each leg segment right after the black automotive spray primer. Yes, it took a bit of time to pick out each segment and the depressions on the back, but I knew it would be worth it as soon as I saw the result. The high flow of the ink (vs standard acrylic paint) was key in filling the depressions without making the brush work too difficult.

Cerulean Blue lining on spider

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Sabertooth Tiger – 3D printing & Painting

I printed this sabertooth tiger model from Thingiverse # 3931638 and painted it with acrylic paints.

Although not perfect for FDM printing, the 3D print wasn’t too bad, and looked relatively sharp after priming.

I painted on a base coat of dark yellow to brown colors, decided it was too dark, so lightened it up with a few areas of brighter yellow.

Then I dry brushed more brown and orange over the model, painted the rock on the base gray, and added some white details (claws, teeth, inside ears and above eyes) plus some black (for the eyes and above the ears).

You can compare this to my reference photo (which has a lot more orange on it…) to see how well I did.

Stump Spider tabletop miniature — 3D printing & Painting

I was cleaning out my car and found a small toy plastic spider.   I suddenly realized that if I were to hit it with a heat-gun, I could bend the legs into any pose I wanted.   So I printed out a tree stump from Thingiverse # 3033820 scaled appropriately to be a stand, and bent the spider legs so that it would stand on the stump.   After that, I just had to paint it….
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Cobra tabletop miniatures: 3 color schemes — 3D printing & Painting

Black, Yellow and Brown cobra mini-figures

I’ve been very happy with this 28mm Cobra model from Thingiverse. Even printed on my low end FDM printer it retains enough texture so that dry brushing works well to accent the scales.   I used a heat gun to rotate the left model’s head 90 degrees in relation to it’s body, and the center model’s tail into a loop so that the three figures look slightly different, but mostly the color choices are the defining differences.

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It’s December 2021, how is Orange County Florida doing with Covid-19?

The number of detected COVID-19 cases has been flat or going up for the last five weeks. The latest week had a 50% increase (from 1002 cases to 1503 cases), up from a low of 673 cases in the second week of November.
Orange County FL’s new case positivity rate is 4.5% (below the Florida State average of 5.4% in the same time period), but is almost certainly going to go above 5% next week.     This increase can be attributed partially to the new Omicron variant, and partially to the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

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VECYS IC1209 Countertop Ice Maker Review

I tested the VECYS IC1209 countertop ice maker.

It takes 1h 20min to make a pound of ice, and draws 100 watts per hour average (max draw is close to 250 watts when heating the evaporators to drop the ice, and may surge to 350-800 watts for a second when the compressor kicks on).

I was surprised to find that my fridge/freezer door mounted ice maker only made 0.19 pounds of ice in the same time, justifying having a separate appliance if you need to make a lot of ice in a quick amount of time. [You will have to add more water and remove the ice every 1-2 hours, so it’s not for completely unattended operation…]

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