NICE!!!

aww... no lead, but all the best minis give you lead poisoning >3

I COULD cast them in lead. It's not like I don't have several dozen pounds of it lying around. I even found one alloy that was tin, lead, antimony and cadmium if you want a really toxic one.

could always just use lead based paints >3

If you want a good poisoning use cadmium yellow/red anything with cadmium in it.

didnt know there were paints with cadmium in them

Those look fantastic, especially for the scale. I've been getting into molding/casting very recently, too - though latex/epoxy resin/silicone/urethane rubber, haven't experimented with metal yet.

What did you sculpt these in?

I mostly use greenstuff, but also procreate and apoxie sculpt for the originals. I tried doing things with resin and came to the conclusion of 'fuck resin.' This stuff's cast in a vulcanized rubber mold in a spin casting machine. Let me know if you wanna do any metal casting, I can definitely do contract casting pretty soon if it's something small enough. Hit me up on PM or something if you need more details.

Did I mention I hate resin?

Yeah sure! I actually should have a couple monster heads in resin by this evening but they're pretty large - I may have to do something specifically for this, but I'll hit you up at some point for specifics since I'm not sure what limitations there are with moldmaking for that.

Greenstuff is great. I have been wanting to try Apoxie Sculpt but haven't yet - I actually just got a big tub of Smooth-On's Free Form Air but haven't tried it just yet, but I think it's pretty similar. I was going to use it for teeth for masks since it's supposed to be pretty lightweight and sandable and such.

Resin can be a bitch. What troubles are you having with it, bubbles and such? Are you using a 1:1 resin-to-catalyst type? I think I read you were using Smooth-On's which I think is a 1:1. A friend was explaining those are more prone to bubbles because the need to stir in that much catalyst works a lot of air into it. I can imagine bubbles of any sort would be pretty devastating on this scale.

yeah I was using smooth cast 300 for the resin, because it's what came with the stuff I got. Turns out you really need a pressure setup to do resin at this scale, yeah. It's a mess and pretty much every five miscasts I would get one good one. The problem with resin is I can't just re melt the miscasts.

The apoxie is pretty cool, it's nothing like the other epoxy putties I've used. It's actually kind of greasy and not sticky and it smells like really old corn chips that have gone bad. It dries hard and brittle, but if you mix in a little greenstuff it gets a lot stronger but keeps the hardness. After working with it for a while I actually like how sticky greenstuff is so I mostly use apoxie for bulking out stuff before doing the details. It ran through the vulcanizing process just fine, too.

Nice.

From the level of detail, I'm guessing the master is a mid to late 80's Ral Partha?

It's my original sculpt, lol. Did they even have sergals back then?

Sergals were first drawn in 2004 so no :V

They had so many weird monsters, it's hard to keep track.

An original sculpt? Very good indeed, if I mistook it for a professional casting.

Well it was made on professional casting equipment, at least. I keep meaning to get good pictures of the originals to post

Casting is casting, I'm guessing a typical 'spin mold' machine, traditional for small-scale casting, such as metal minis.

I was talking about the sculpting quality, you're up to 80's Ral Partha skill level, beats any sculpting I do out of the water.

With a little more practice, you might be able to get up to late 90's/early 00's Citadel Miniatures, but then you'd be pushing the limits on the detail you can get from the rubber molds and would need to move to more sophisticated equipment.

(I don't even count modern Citadel Minis as 'sculpting,' the minis are 'sculpted' with 3D software and automatically converted by computer into the multi-part mold designs, then the molds are milled out by CNC machines based on the computer design. The minis are beautiful and wonderfully detailed, but it's not fair to compare it to traditional sculpting.)

You'd be surprised, a good sculpt will reproduce faithfully in metal. I've seen some that you could see the extremely fine striations from the 3d print in the finished metal mini. Technically that is a fuck up and the person doing the casting should have sanded and cleaned up the print, but you can get extremely fine detail with vulcanized molds and metal. There's a reason most minis are still done in metal.

I tried to do the 3d thing, but I've only ever modeled for stuff like games, so I tend to make everything really low poly and can't get away from that.

With the right equipment, you can get a faithful reproduction, but most 'spin casting' done in the mid-late 80's was on older equipment, and the rubber molds were used for about 200-300% of its 'service life,' and all the good copies at the start were almost impossible to find.

Too damned sweet.

I've tried my hand on minisculpting before and it's awfully time consuming. Glad you made a really good mold though! What do you ultimately plan on doing with them?

I plan on selling them if somebody wants one, really they're just for practice at the moment. I've got another project I'm working on that will need me to make spincasting molds and I figured this would be a good thing to try it with.

That's cool. I hope it works out well :0

Very nice. I wouldn't mind painting one of those :)

Thin your paints