Well it’s been a while since I have written a post here. I wanted to get a recording of the experiment that I am performing for a little mini painting contest by Vae Victis Miniatures – painting their signature Butt Fish. A contest I learned about with less than 3 weeks to get the model painted and submitted… and so of course the only reasonable path forward is to try something I’ve never really done… a resin pour!!!

I have never really attempted resin pours before. I have occasionally added a small puddle here or there on a base or piece of terrain but never a ‘real’ resin pour. So I did what every hobbyist does in this day and age and spent several hours watching random YouTube videos of decreasing relevance while procrastinating on the project.

Once I got past that – it was time to get started. I had a very clear image in my head of what I was looking to create. The competition is online meaning photos only. This is both a blessing and a curse in miniature painting. It means you can be a little more selective on where you focus your time and efforts (no need to paint the back of the piece). But it is also therefore a test of your photography skills and all that entails. It can also make certain styles more difficult to execute – and I think this piece definitely falls into that category. I am taking the focus of this contest – the ButtFish model and entirely submerging it in resin. This impacts how it will be lit and how it will show on camera a lot. At a minimum it’s going to distort the shape of the model as well as reduce the impact of lighting… a lot to overcome.

The first thing that I needed was to get the base done. The Resin will form a column on top of the base with the base acting as a riverbed. I used a slight variant of my standard simple basing (a mix of grit sizes with baking soda for the fine texture) by adding more organic matter in the form of coffee and mixed dried herbs to create a more diverse base texture. This is also what I use for woodland basing. In reality a lot of riverbeds can be quite dull to look at as decomposition occurs quickly and the water grinds everything up quite effectively, so taking a little artistic license here of maybe this being a more lazy river in a small wooded area. 

Conscious that I’m on a clock, I wasted no time in priming and painting the base up. Painting bases and organic terrain is one of my favourite things to do and I think I’ve become quite good at it over the years. I this instance, I airbrushed black, followed by a mid yellow brown from a couple of directions at different intensities – ensuring to keep areas of more shadow. Given the ‘depth’ of the resin pour, the reality is that this probably wouldn’t see much light but we’re taking some artistic license here in the name of visual interest. (I can also cheat the lighting a little bit in my final photography as needed!) When airbrushing colours onto textured bases I always put the airbrush at a very very low angle to help preserve the shadows. A ‘true’ zenithal will wipe out shadows on a flat base far too quickly, this helps give the same effect as a zenithal on a flatter surface. A few drybrushes and blending in some pigment powders, we get a visually interesting but simple base to work off of.

From here I next focused on ButtFish himself. 

I’m not going to go too deep into the paint job here. In a way, it’s not really as important… I mean it is for the competition but not so much for this blog. I painted a fish, well the front half of a fish, and human legs and rear end. I also painted fairly fast. It’s maybe a 3hr paint job… if that. I’d originally planned for a more creative fish body with striations along the body but… well everything started feeling so rushed I went with a more generic Tilapia kind of look. A little implied iridescence, but fairly simple. One interesting added complexity to the paint job was the feet… this model is sculpted to be stood up… well stood on it’s feet at any rate. The result is that the feet are flat on the underside, for the diorama I had. 

The solution was a little bit of sanding to round off the edges and to then ‘fake’ the shape of the foot through the painting…

With the figure itself painted, it was time to start the resin pour. As previously mentioned, I spent a lot of time watching YouTube videos as research for this. There is something particularly nerve wracking about having a miniature you have spent hours working on being subsumed by toxic goo that might forever ruin the entire piece.The next step is to prepare for the pour… The idea of this piece is to basically have the vignette as a single mini (so occupying the size of a single mini). To do this, I wanted the piece on a base. Most bases have a bezel making them quite challenging to work with for this. Fortunately however Conquest mini bases are flush sided meaning I could (hopefully) build up the column of ‘water’ from the base, even with the sides.

The first thing that I’d been really unclear on with pouring resin, is what you can use to create your mould that the resin won’t stick to once it’s cleared. It turns out pretty much any old thin styrene will work just fine, so that’s what I used. I had some perspex around instead and figured I’d just wing it with that.

Of course I was so absorbed in figuring out the resin pour that I had forgotten one key part of my little vignette… the foliage! I’d picked these up at Wine Country Model Expo and wanted to use then as some underwater growth to give the piece a little more dimension. Having already added a layer of UV resin, I figured the best thing to do would be to drill through the resin and glue in the ferns… so I did. Thank goodness I caught it before pouring the 2 part resins!

Well this has already gotten lengthier than I expected and I haven’t even gotten to the pour proper! Come back for the next post where I really dive into that side of things!

– Raggy, signing out