The "Edgiest" Hero Ever

A very long time ago Marvel and DC collaborated on a series of comics called Amalgam; new characters were created by remixing those belonging to the two comic publishers. It was a rather novel idea back then, and the fact the the two long-standing rivals were actually working together to launch this new comic universe was quite exciting at the time. Now I'm not going to say that the resulting comics were good, but it was certainly interesting seeing the characters they chose to combine and the resulting designs. So I thought it was very cool when CGPyro started sculpting 3D models of the Amalgam characters; it was quite the nostalgia trip for me. I still wish he would keep making more.
I don't really print or paint statues for myself; for the time being at least I don't have a good place to store or display them, and perhaps more importantly I'm more focussed on painting my gaming miniatures. But I feel statues can make good gifts, so I made this one for a friend who does like to collect and display statues, and is a fan of Batman and Wolverine.
Assembly
I printed the model on my Longer Orange 4K Mono. I had to scale the model down to get it to fit; I found 48% was the maximum size I could print at - and even then the edges of the cape got clipped off and had to be fixed after printing. The real problem though was that this left some parts of the model very thin and delicate. It wasn't long before the forearm spikes started to snap off. So I had to print replacements. I could not use the original parts as I needed to redesign the spikes to envelope thin steel pins, else they would simply break off again. I designed them smooth then chipped away at them with a hobby knife after gluing in the pin, in order to imitate the ragged style of the originals. I drilled holes into the forearms and glued in the spikes, trying to position them as close to the original positions and angles as I could. I ground off the protruding tips of the pins with a rotary tool, trying to get a smooth seamless finish. After gluing the model together I needed to do some repair work, fixing misprints and gaps between the parts, cleaning up the remains of supports that I missed in my first pass, and blending the new spikes onto the forearms. Initially I did the repair work with greenstuff, but I found I needed to switch to the more sandable milliput for some parts, especially for smoothing over the seam between the two halves of the cape and fixing small divots left from removing the supports. When the forearm spikes started to break off, I worried about the claws. But after testing them, they seemed to be fairly tough, and they stood up to the rigours of the assembly and cleanup process just fine. Right until they didn't. So of course I had to design and print new claws that could be reinforced by pins. Since the claws were curved I needed to carefully bend the pins before inserting them. I was using 0.6mm pins, but unfortunately after preparing all six claws I found the pins weren't long enough; my original plan for drilling holes into the bases of the old claws and the knuckles of the hands didn't work, so I would need longer pins to be able to reach much further back, past the wrists. So I had to modify the design for larger 0.8mm pins, printing them all again. This left the walls extremely thin, making it harder to assemble the claws without breaking them. So I ended up leaving the supports attached until after the pins were glued in place. Once the pins were glued in the supports were removed, the tips of the pins were ground off with a rotary tool, and everything was sanded smooth... ish. Attaching the new claws to the hands was rather difficult; cutting away the remains of the old claws and drilling channels for the new ones was tricky due to the brittle resin and the shallow angle. After the new claws were glued in, I found they were not spaced and angled as well as I'd hoped. I tried to bend them slightly to get a consistent spacing and spread; the results weren't perfect but they're not too bad. Again I had to sculpt over the joint, and ended up needing milliput to get a smooth seamless result. But the actual point where the claws exited the back of the hand needed more work. I was not really happy with the details on the original statue, so I sculpted a more detailed joint based on my memories of the old comics and cartoons. The original model had a rather involved gargoyle base, inspired by the cover of the original comic. I personally didn't really like how it looked and felt that it was too much; the focus should be on the character, not the base. Plus I just couldn't be bothered to print, assemble, and paint that complex multi-part base. So instead I modified a model I found on Thingiverse called "Sculpted Ruin Piece" by TheBigTricky, making sure there would be good contact between the base and the model's feet. There were still some delicate parts, like the bat-wings on the cowl and boots, and the absolutely tiny fangs on the bottom of the cowl - I don't know what I would have done if they had broken! But luckily there were no more issues and the model could finally be primed and painted. I used a sandable light grey primer from either Tamiya or Mr. Hobby (I don't remember the exact type). This actually showed some more issues that required some more filling and sanding. The model has some sculpted detail for the yellow tiger-stripes on Dark Claw's costume; however, these were very shallow at the scale I printed at, and I was afraid they would be very hard to see when the black costume was being painted, so I took some photos here that would help me locate the stripes later.
Paint
The model was based on the cover of the original comic, and similarly my colourscheme was based on this reference image: Since the costume was black, I started with an airbrushed coat of Vallejo gloss black acrylic primer to serve as the black basecoat. This was a big mistake; the glossy finish made the gradients hard to paint, and also generally did not work as a very good undercoat as I often had issues with paint just not wanting to stick. At this point I think I'm done with glossy primers, except for specific uses (like airbrushing chromes or colourshifts). In theory I could have put down another coat of black or just matt varnish, but by the time I realised the extent of the issue I had already put a lot of work in.

I started by drybrushing the cape; I like to do large dryrbush areas first as it can easily spill over the surroundings. I did an initial drybrush with (pre-SFG) Privateer Press Formula P3 Exile Blue. I brightened some areas with another drybrush in a lighter blue; I don't remember for certain, but it was most likely The Army Painter Warpaints WP1113 Electric Blue. There's a chance it might have been mixed with a darker blue, I wasn't taking proper notes at this point.

I then started blocking in the main highlights on the costume with Exile Blue. The was the part I was least sure about; some areas were easy enough, but there were some details that I just wasn't sure about; like the folds on the gloves and thigh muscles, especially on the leading left leg. After blocking the highlights in, I thinned down the Exile Blue with a lot of water and (pre-SFG) Privateer Press Formula P3 Mixing Medium to create a mixure that was very transparent but not too runny (P3 Mixing Medium is kinda thick, it helps prevent the mixure from flowing too much). I mixed up a decent quantity in a clean glass pot and used it to very very slowly build up gradients for the highlights with lots of glazes, covering smaller areas with more layers of the glaze.

I was still quite new to this and experimented a fair bit while painting this model; eventually I found that I got the best results by wicking most of the paint off the brush and applying coats that were so thin they basically just barely wet the surface. Pulling the brush towards the brightest parts of the highlight (where possible) also helped avoid accidental pooling where it would look bad. I had some issues with semi-dried paint getting picked up again if I over-worked an area or didn't wait for the glaze to dry enough. Overall it was a VERY slow process that was made harder by the difference in finish between the matte painted areas and the glossy unpainted areas, as it made trying to evaluate the existing gradient much harder. I do think that I improved a lot, and gained a lot of confidence, over the course of working on this model.

These highlights took so much work that I wanted to protect them with a matte varnish; this would make it much easier to fix any later mistakes and would also deal with the issue I was having with the glossy finish. I decided to finish all the basecoats first; I think I might have been afraid that the varnish would make some details slightler softer, so getting the initial basecoats first would be best for keeping the details looking sharp. I probably didn't need to worry about filling the details tbh, as I didnt really notice any loss of details after the varnish.

I picked out the yellow areas with Citadel Colour Base Averland Sunset. I had a very hard time keeping this neat; the recessed stripes were indeed very hard to see, and so shallow that they didn't really help much when it came to keeping the paint neat along the edges. In some areas the paint didn't want to go down smoothly because of the crappy gloss black primer, and some of the musculature that I was trying to paint across was quite pronounced, making it hard to put down smooth lines that looked good. It was also VERY hard to get my paintbrush in some places in a controlled way, at least with the tip angled the way I needed it to put down a neat controlled line, because of all the stuff in the way - mainly the arms and claws.

I basecoated all the metals with (pre-SFG) Privateer Press Formula P3 Boiler Black. The inside of the mouth was painted with (pre-SFG) Privateer Press Formula P3 Ryn Flesh mixed with a bit of Citadel Colour Base Mephiston Red. The teeth were done in Two Thin Coats 10036 Trooper White, and the face in Two Thin Coats 10026 Dwarven Skin. I went ahead and washed the entire face, including the mouth, with (older formula I think) Citadel Colour Shade Reikland Fleshshade. I did this before the varnish as I was afraid the varnish would fill the details a bit, which would make a shade less effective at settling in the recesses, plus if I had to try to fix any highlights later I would want the shade protected by the varnish. The model's base was painted with Green Stuff World 1832 Acrylic Color Redwood Brown.

I airbrushed a coat of Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX 113 UVCut Flat lacquer varnish through my Badger 250 syphon feed single action airbrush. I was afraid I might have overdone it and put down too much; the finish when dried almost seemed a bit too rough? But it really didn't seem to cause any problems once the final varnish was done so I guess it's fine.

I realised that I was going to need to paint more blue over the yellow areas, so I experimented with putting down a precise layer of liquid mask to protect the yellow, but that really didn't work so I gave up. I found a silicone sculpting tool worked really well for rubbing the liquid mask off without damaging the surround areas.

At this point I tried to paint the white eyes, but I found they were so sunken that I really couldn't get my brush in there without getting paint on the surrounding areas, so I quickly cleaned off the work so far with a bit of The Masters Brush Cleaner And Preserver. I have found that wetting a brush slightly, working up a bit of a lather in the brush cleaner and rubbing it on a painting mistake, then working over it with a brush of clean water (rinse and repeat as necessary, and wiping down with tissue or a cotton bud after) will clean up mistakes quite well - as long as it's done quickly. After a while the paint becomes more resistant, so generally a fresh mistake will come off with very little damage to the underlying paint, but a later mistake is much harder. And of course the fact that I was working over a lacquer varnish meant I had very little to worry about.

I thought that it might be easier to paint the eyes using a technical pen, so I tried it with a Rotring Isograph with Rotring Drawing Ink White (which I think is basically an acrylic paint), but it really didn't work as well as I had hoped. In the end I dug up a tiny old Winsor Newton Seriest 7 00 brush, which worked a little better because it had very short bristles (it might have been part of the Miniature range that has shorter bristles), painting the eyes with (pre-SFG) Privateer Press Formula P3 Morrow White, then cleaning it all up with Green Stuff World 1779 Acrylic Color Black Stallion.

I found it very difficult to decide on the highlight colour for the black. I was afraid of going too bright as, you know, it's supposed to be black, but I was seeing such a difference between how the model looked under my painting lights and how it looked under normal room lighting that I was afraid it would be dark and boring if I was too conservative. In the end I put together a mix of P3 Exile Blue and The Army Painter Warpaints WP1113 Electric Blue (I actually decided after the initial tests that it was a bit dark, and mixed in some Citadel Colour Blue Horror to brighten it a bit more, but I'm sure it would have looked the same with just more Electric Blue so I'm not counting the Blue Horror as part of the formula).

I used this mix to block in the second highlights on the black costume, trying to focus on higher and more upwards-facing areas, but leaving out some areas of the lower legs (especially those towards the back where the cape would block light). I then took some of the mix and, as before, thinned it with water and P3 mixing medium in a clean glass pot, going back and forth until I had the flow properties and coverage that felt right. I used this thinned mix to glaze in gradients for the second highlights.

I worked from the inside out, starting with the face and chest, then the legs and finally the arms, as I tried to leave the areas that got touched the most until the last. In between the inner areas (face and chest) and the outer areas (legs and arms, that I often rubbed slightly with my gloved hand while trying to get the brush to the inner areas) I actually went back to the face. I touched up the tips of the teeth with pure Trooper White again, but I didn't feel the inside of the mouth needed any more work. I did paint over most of the face with pure Dwarven Skin again, then I cleaned up and reinforced the shading with Reikland Fleshshade carefully and precisely applied to the edges and recesses. I blocked in some very light highlights with Two Thin Coats 10027 Elven Skin, then thinned it with P3 Mixing Medium and water to blend the highlights in.

Once all the highlights for the black were done, I went back and re-established the yellow stripes with Averland Sunset. I then shaded all the yellow areas with Citadel Colour Shade Seraphim Sepia mixed with Vallejo 73.596 Glaze Medium (mixed at around a 1:1 ratio) as I wanted more of a glaze than a wash. With the yellow darkened, I picked out highlights with Averland Sunset again, once again blocking in first then smoothing the transitions with glazes of Averland Sunset thinned with P3 Mixing Medium and water. I didn' want the yellow to be too bright as it was already very bright compared to most of the rest of the model, but I did end up adding a second highlight with Vallejo 72.006 Game Color Sun Yellow mixed with a little P3 Morrow White. This time I only added water when thinning the mix for glazing over the transitions, as the Sun Yellow already has a consistency very close to the P3 Mixing Medium, so water alone was enough to get the flow properties that I wanted.

Despite my efforts the yellow stripes were still a little messy, but as I hoped giving the stripes an outline of Black Stallion fixed that while also just making everything look neater and sharper.

I highlighted all the metal areas with Vallejo 72.054 Game Color Gunmetal, aiming to cover about half of every surface with the initial blocks of colour. Once again I blocked in highlights then smoothed the transitions with glazes. I repeated this process a second time with Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver, this time aiming to cover about a quarter of every surface with the initial blocks of colour. I had a hard time with this paint, I didn't feel like the coverage was great, and ultimately when I tried to glaze over the transitions I ended up thinning the paint far less that I had the previous colours.

As his claws are adamantium I wanted to go even brighter. I edge-highlighted the claws with the silver, then built up a third highlight with Scale75 SC-66 Scalecolor Metal N' Alchemy Speed Metal, which is very bright but has really bad coverage and is really hard to get a solid colour without basically globbing it on. It took a long time to get the highlights looking good - I barely had to thin the paint at all to use it as a glaze - and I ended up covering and brightening far more of the claws than I had originally intended, but overall I do like how it brightens and adds more contrast to the claws, making them more eye-catching. I used it to brighten the ends of the claws and the edge-highlights across the sharp edges (leaving silver edge highlights along the backs of the claws).

Finally I blacklined all the metal bits with thinned Black Stallion.

As I prepared to move on the base, I noticed something: there was a line across his back foot. Upon further inspecting I realised it was snapped cleanly in two, about halfway between the toes and the heel.

I think it was when I was highlighting the yellow stripes that I was bit careless and the model was knocked over. I had it blue-tacked to an old deoderant bottle to serve as a painting handle (at 11cm tall and with a wide flat top it was a good size for a handle). The model didn't really fall, it essentially just go knocked over. I was afraid it had hit the claws against the table or something, but luckily only the front of the base had actually contacted the table, leaving a very small blemish that wasn't an issue. But I guess this must have been when the foot broke, because I don't know when else it could have happened.

I was frustrated and angry, but luckily the break seemed to be absolutely clean, without any missing chips or anything. So I tried to fill the break with thin superglue, but I think my superglue had thickened up or something because it didn't flow into the break smoothly and I basically had to flood it, then it didn't wick up cleanly when I tried to clean it up with tissues. Fortunately the foot did glue into place properly, but there was a lot of hardened glue leftover around the cut. Plus the surrounding area had a lot of that hazy white residue that you get around superglue. It took me quite a lot of work to clean up all the leftover glue and get a smooth finish again using a hobby knife and fine sanding paper, then of course I had to repaint most of the foot. It was pretty much perfect when done, but it was quite a bit of extra work and makes me worry about the statue's longevity; this damned 3D printed resin, I guess I need to buy the really expensive, really tough stuff in the future. If I can even get it.

I cleaned up the Redwood Brown on the base, then washed the entire base with The Army Painter WP1136 Quickshade Washes Dark Tone mixed with few drops of the Vallejo Glaze Medium. I've been having a bit of an issue with old washes drying and having bits in them, so I filtered the shade with an airbrush paint filter (I should have done this for the face as well, as the shade left a couple of dark spots that I think were caused by dried bits of pigment). I hoped the glaze medium would help the shade spread more evenly across the base to darken the whole thing, but also I find it extends the drying time a lot, which in this case was important since the base was quite large and a longer drying time would help me get a smooth(ish) even coat. The result wasn't perfect, but good enough; once I drybrushed Redwood Brown over the base again it looked pretty good, with any flaws in the wash basically creating shading and subtle detail without looking too rough.

I highlighted the base with a drybrush of Reaper 09225 Master Series Paint Redstone Highlight. This was a lighter drybrush, using more downwards brushstrokes to focus on catching the edges and brightening the upwards-facing surfaces. I had planned to leave it at that, but under room lighting the base looked quite flat, so I decided to brighten it up a bit more. In the original artwork the rooftops he's standing on brighten towards yellow, so I decided to try to do the same by mixing the Redstone Highlight with Citadel Foundation Iyanden Darksun, again drybrushing with a focus on catching edges and brightening upwards-facing surfaces. I wasn't completely happy with the result (I feel there's a lot of bricks in the body of the base that hadn't caught much shading or highlighting), but it was pretty good and I didn't want to mess with it any more than that. I did spot an area under the toes of the left foot where where wash had apparently not shaded the bricks properly, but only after taking photos (so you can see it in the photos if you look for it); I painted a touch of Stallion Black over this after taking photos.

I wrote the date under the base with a technical pen and white technical ink, and airbrushed the statue with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX 112 UVCut Gloss. Since I had put down more than I intended when I used the Badger 250 last time, I switched to my (knockoff) Badger 350 (which directs the flow better) and reduced the pressure on my compressor, but this time I felt as if I spent ages spraying the model yet barely any varnish seemed to have been applied. I don't know if the pressure was too low, if I didn't thin the varnish enough, or if it's the airbrush itself, but when the gloss varnish had dried the statue was not glossy. So when I followed up with the matte coat (Mr. Hobby GX 113 Flat again), I switched back to the Badger 250 and bumped up the air pressure again, and this time it put down a lot of varnish again. I tried not to overdo it and I think it looked good when it dried.


The Box
Just painting the statue wasn't the end of the story however; I needed to be able to transport it. So, as I did for Savage Dragon, I used the original digital model to create templates, which I printed and used to cut foam sheets, which I glued together to make a liner for a carrying box - which I 3D printed this time. The Dark Claw statue had a lot more three-dimension-ality than the Savage Dragon, and the resulting foam was not as form-fitting, but there wasn't much else I could do. Unfortunately something went wrong somewhere, and the two sides just didn't close properly over the statue. I don't know why, in theory everything should have been sized quite well. I fit the two foam blocks to the box halves. Unfortunately, even without the statue the foam blocks turned out to be a touch too deep and the two halves of the box wouldn't stay completely closed. Of course this only got worse once the statue was involved. I couldn't trim the foam down because it was already quite thin in some areas; I really shouldn't have cut it so tight. Oh well, he shouldn't really be spending that much time in the box after all.

While he's not perfect, and I'm not sold on how I highlighted some areas like the thighs, overall I think he looks really good and I'm a little bit proud of him. He was a LOT of work; glazing the highlights was such a time-consuming job that halfway through the first batch I kinda gave up and put the statue away for a VERY long time; the glazing had come to feel like such a huge job that it was ages before I could bring myself to start again. But eventually I feel I got the hang of it and managed to stick with it until it was done.

For context, I started glazing the highlights on this guy before I painted my Butcher4, and I think I had a much easier time with the Butcher just from the practice I got on the first half of the first hightlights on Dark Claw. Actually, while I'm on the subject, the technique that I used to create my glowing energy blade was something I came up with after having to figure out how to fix this statue's broken claws.

Having a good quantity of the blue glazes in a sealed pot was extremely useful; even when trying to focus on the painting it took several days to highlight some colours, being able to just open a pot and get to work with a mix that I was used to, rather than trying to get a mix with the right coverage and flow properties every time, was huge. Especially for the Exile Blue/Electric Blue mix; trying to match the same colour every time I started again or needed to fix something would have been hell.

It also didn't help that he was large and awkward to hold. Painting smaller, lighter models just feels easier and more relaxed. Although at this point my eyesight is pretty bad, so the details on 35mm models are really feeling too small to see well or paint precisely, even with a magnifier (hell, I needed a magnifier when painting some details on this massive statue!). I'm thinking of focusing on Monsterpocalypse monsters for a while, they are big enough to see easily (well, relatively easily; most details can be painted with simple reading glasses), but not so big that they are hard to hold or transport. Plus Monsterpocalypse is having a kind of a resurgence, so now's a good time to give it some attention.

Quick Card Printing Tool

I've been thinking about writing a very simple card printing tool for some time, mainly to make it easier to print Monsterpocalypse cards (since the updated cards were shared as individual images). Well, I finally sat down and did it: https://soulsamurai.blogspot.com/p/card-printer-v1.html. I tried to make it easy to use, but there's probably a lot of room for improvement. Well, it's a start.

Miniature Computer Console With Real Screen: Worth It?

5th edition Black Reach marines on 25mm bases for scale.
A while back I came across a Kickstarter project for something called the "Pocuter One": it was a tiny little electronic device, small enough to fit in a (rather bulky) wristwatch, but fairly fully-featured, with a colour screen, SD card slot, wifi, battery-charging capability, and some buttons and sensors and other things. It promised to be able to do things like playing videos etc. Of course my initial reaction was to think about how I could use it for miniatures. My first idea was to create a computer console, probably as an objective, that played real video on its screen. After a LOT of time and effort, I finally came up with this little thing: Pretty cool, but getting here was a colossal pain that I'm not convinced was worth it. First of all, when the Pocuter arrived it didn't have any video playing software - despite the Kickstarter page clearly showing it playing video and advertising it as one of its features. When I asked about that, what I was told essentially boiled down to "you can write a program yourself, or wait and maybe someone will write a program that you can use". Well, I was very busy and not prepared to dive into Arduino programming. So I waited. For a very long time. I was around a year before I decided to revisit this, and when I started asking around again I was finally told that there was the source code for the demo video player program seen on the kickstarter page was available. Boy, that sure would have been nice to know before! Part of this was on me for not exploring the docs and examples thoroughly enough, but I was out of my depth and didn't know where to start.

Actually getting the video player to run on the Pocuter was not so simple however. The Pocuter just didn't behave the way I was used to as I had never worked with this kind of hardware before so I didn't realise some of what was happening behind the scenes and a lot of stuff just kept going wrong. I had to compile the video player demo for the Pocuter, but even faithfully following the docs I was unable to get it to compile. And then the documentation was taken down, so that was nice. Eventually they it was replaced by updated but less complete documentation; coupled with some help on the discord (where it often took weeks to get a response) I was finally able to compile the video playing demo and run it through the menu.

The problem now was actually getting the video player to run on startup as I would not be able to scroll through the menu and select it when the Pocuter was embedded in a terrain element. This required flashing it to the Pocuter, replacing the menu program, which proved to be very difficult; the Arduino IDE didn't want to flash the Pocuter, and the little communication I was able to achieve through the discord was basically "we don't know, we only used the old version of the Arduino IDE, give us some time to figure it out" followed by nothing. Eventually I was able to figure out how to use the menu program to overwrite itself with the video player; a little hacky but it seemed to work... mostly, I'll come back to that later.

Next up was figuring out how to actually convert video for the video player. Luckily I was given the answer on Discord (ffmpeg -i inputvideo.mp4 -vf "fps=24,scale=96:64,transpose=1" -c:v rawvideo -pix_fmt rgb565be outputvideo.rgb). Of course I needed an actual video that would look good; I eventually settled on the idea of using the classic Matrix scrolling text as it was easy to find so I wouldn't need to do any work, it's bright and has a good amount of movement to show off the screen, and it would not look out of place on just about any computer monitor (I figured it would give the impression that the computer had been hacked), plus it would be recognizeable even on such a tiny screen. I found a decent looping video on Youtube, and it seemed to work well enough. Plus I can always change it in the future.

But of course that wasn't the end of the story; I still needed to model and print a housing for the Pocuter that would look good as an objective. I wanted to squeeze it onto as small a base as possible, and after trying several different ideas I found it could just about fit on a 30mm base, though the screen would need to oriented vertically. So I designed a console to look sorta-kinda-computer-y, then spent AGES tweaking it to perfectly hold the Pocuter. Even though there was already a housing available for 3D printing (Pocuter One Case by LordFisch) that I initially tried to use as a starting point, I really did need to spend a lot of time remodelling the whole thing to work for what I wanted. Getting everything to actually fit together and look good required constant printing, tweaking positions and sizes, printing again, etc.

Partway through this process, the battery that shipped with the Pocuter ballooned out; rather than buy a replacement I decided to use a 10180 battery instead. This is a tiny little 3.7V lithium-ion rechargeable battery that I already had from a tiny pocket flashlight. Switching to the 10180 had several advantages: it actually made it easier to fit the Pocuter on the 30mm base efficiently, I could much more easily make the battery removeable for charging rather than needing to remove the whole Pocuter or have to work around keeping the USB port accessible for charging, and having a removeable battery meant I no longer needed a power switch (which was proving to be a much bigger problem than I had expected) as I could just insert or remove the battery to turn it on or off - not perfect but it really did make things so much easier.

Of course that meant redesigning the housing to be thinner but have room for the battery and the battery terminals. So began another long, slow series of tweaking the size and shape of the housing. But at long last, years after I initially ordered the Pocuter, it was finally done.

Computer Console:
I just went for a simple scheme with limited colours but hopefully enough contrast to create visual interest. I primed with Green Stuff World 1740 Matt Surface Primer Black, followed by a basecoat of Vallejo 70.869 Basalt Grey. The metal areas were basecoated in Formula P3 PIP93172 Boiler Black. The buttons on the front were painted Vallejo 71.132 Model Air Aged White, Vallejo 72.106 Game Color Scarlett Blood, Vallejo 72.026 Game Color Jade Green, and Vallejo 72.021 Game Color Magic Blue.

I then applied The Army Painter WP1136 Quickshade Washes Dark Tone directly into the recesses, and also completely covered the buttons and metal details with it. I edge-highlighted the grey with Vallejo 70.990 Model Color Light Grey, and the metal areas with Vallejo 70.053 Game Color Chainmail Silver.

I basecoated the base with Green Stuff World 1832 Redwood Brown, then layered it with a mix of Citadel Colour Tin Bitz and Boiler Black; initially I tried just Tin Bitz but the bronze colour was too saturated, I wanted something more neutral (while still standing out from the completely neutral greys and steels of the model). I shaded the recesses of the base with the Quickshade Washes Dark Tone, then I edge-highlighted using the original Tin Bitz/Boiler Black mix with the addition of some Chainmail Silver.

The base rim was painted with Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black, then the model was airbrushed with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX112 UVCut Gloss, then Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX113 UVCut Flat.


Obviously it's not perfect. Despite my efforts the print came out a tiny bit wonky in places. I had to leave a slot open at the top to help me push the Pocuter out of the housing with a rod when needed. The screen cutouts looked good when I was testing them, but it was awkward to supply power to the Pocuter when it was in the housing (until the end when I had everything set up to hold the battery), so I didn't quite manage to get the slots lined up with the actual viewing area of the screen, and I didn't realise there was enough room for light from an LED to show through from the bottom. Also I was too lazy to properly edge-highlight the vents so I kinda roughly brushed the highlight colour on, almost like a drybrush; the results were quite messy but I don't care, it gives it a bit of a weathered look I guess.

But the worst part is that for some reason the Pocuter screen goes black after a couple of minutes of playing video, as if some sort of power-saving setting had been enabled. This wasn't happening before, but started to happen in the menu application just before I flashed the Pocuter with the video player. So right now it's good enough for taking a few photos, but not actually practical for using in an actual game. Plus I don't know how long the battery will actually last playing video (and there's no way for me to figure it out right now). I might mess around some more in the future to try to figure out how to stop it from going black, but I won't be able to get any more support from the Discord since the company seems to have gone out of business, so for right now I am DONE with this nonsense.

Also I don't know what game to actually use this for anyway. Warcaster objectives are 20mm, it doesn't fit the Warmachine aesthetic, and I dunno about 40K but I think it uses 6" objectives. Not that it matters since I don't play anything these days. So whatever I guess.


Recently, long after I took the plunge with the Pocuter, I've become a little more familiar with this kind of miniature electronic device. I'm still a complete noob, but at least I have a slightly better idea of what's out there and what you can do with this sort of stuff, and I've found other options that can achieve similar results to what I did - some of which seem to be much better established with much better support. So I do want to do more projects with actual screens and video, and other things with electronics too, but I won't be using the Pocuter next time - especially since the company has basically disappeared (leaving some angry customers behind).


My thanks to Hannibal and Dërp on the Pocuter Discord, without whom I would not have been able to get this stupid thing working at all.

2025 End Of Year Report

This was another strange year. I was basically taking the year off, my focus was mainly on finishing old projects and learning new skills. It feels like I got very little done, but some of the things that I did achieve I'm quite proud of. Still, time really did fly.

My vision has been deteriorating even further. Spending tons of time staring at my phone hasn't helped, and I've been too busy and too broke to get my eyes looked at again or to get a proper pair of glasses. At this point I need reading glasses AND magnifiers when painting fine details - sometimes even details that aren't all that fine. It kinda depends though; sometimes my eyes feel worse than others.

I've been extremely busy with cats this year. That's not exactly new, but it might even be worse than last year, and not having a salary made the financial side sting more. Perhaps this is a good thing though, a learning experience. Perhaps.


Old Resolutions
I didn't fully stick to the calender thing, but I used it a bit, so it was a start I suppose.

I can't say that I took much better care of my health; I was too busy taking care of a whole gaggle of cats with lots of health problems of their own. But I think I'm eating a bit healthier than I was in the past, and there were period at least - especially towards the end of the year - where I was able to stick to a routine that included exercising (although it never lasted all that long before something got in the way, but still I feel like I'm slowly getting better at sticking to it).

I guess I didn't have too many issues facing obstacles where I would need to remember to break them down; still, overall I think I did a better job of throwing myself into things, starting small if needed, and not wasting too much time procrastinating. So that's kinda nice.

I haven't gotten many of my old hobby projects done, which sucks, but I did complete some projects that I feel rather proud of, so that's something.

I did get better at some of the things I've been trying to learn. I made some progress with Blender, I designed and 3D-printed some useful stuff, I feel like I understand microcontrollers and single-board computers just a little better than I did before, to the point that I feel like I can actually do things with them now - when I can find the time.

Unfortunately the idea of supporting myself doing things that I love feels farther away than ever; I've gotten better at things, but they've taken so long that it feels even more unrealistic than before to imagine trying to make them profitable.


New Resolutions
I've really found that sleeping late has a very negative effect. A big part of why I sleep late is that, after each hectic day is finally done and I can settle down in my room with the door closed and all the possible distractions gone, I feel the need for a "hit"; I watch videos or read webcomics or things, waiting for the elusive feeling of "that was good, I'm satisfied now" to magically materialise and somehow release me from... whatever it is that won't let me put my head down and stop feeling like I'm in a race. Dopamine addiction or something, I REALLY need to get past the feeling that if I'm not doing something else I need to pick up my phone and check social media or chase some sort of distraction like Youtube.

I'm addicted is what I'm saying, and I need to break my dependence. But especially, or at least initially, at night when I should be sleeping. If I can sleep early, that will help a lot with my days. So yeah, let's go with "I need to put my phone away and be in bed before midnight". Well, that's not exactly the perfect routine, but it would be a start.

I also want to start reading actual books again. I used to consume books like food, but I haven't read a physical book in ages. There's reasons for that, but the biggest one is probably that smartphone-fueled dopamine addiction. So instead of picking up my phone, I want to pick up a book. I need to keep one next to my bed so I can grab it when I'm on a break. Maybe I need a chair to sit and read instead of just flopping on my bed? I'll having to figure something out I guess.


What a lot of this comes down to, is I want a healthier daily routine. Wake up earlier, check the calender, write my daily to-do lists, do some regular exercise, avoid spending ages on my phone, read actual books, sleep early. It shouldn't be so hard, but somehow it is. I seem to be bad at multi-tasking; I need goals, but can only focus on a few at a time, when there's too many I let things slip, and I always have too many that I keep cycling between. I keep getting distracted by random life stuff and it feels like I lose my progress each time and have to start again. I guess I need to prioritise the routine over the projects, and not allow things to slip even though there's "more important" things to take care of.

I have to avoid getting into a funk state where I just sit around feeling depressed and killing time, especially late at night when it ruins my next day. I don't know how to avoid it, all I can think of to do is to try to keep reminding myself, to try to clear my head and "reset". Maybe I need to do some meditiation or something. That sounds good, maybe I can make it a nightly thing? I don't have to figure out the specifics right now, I just have to have a goal of having a healthy routine.

So yeah, I guess that's the goal this year. Find and stick to a healthy routine; the rest are just steps, sub-goals. Of course "quitting a social media addiction" is a hell of a sub-goal...

Repurposed Pen Box

I was making a box to store some lighting-related stuff. The idea was to cut foam inlays for the box to hold the bits. I was actually working on this box concurrently with my recent gaming accessory box, and so it was part of the same batch of experiments (such as using the same batch of resin for the inlay). However I somehow made a mistake when programming the G-code and only made it 3cm deep instead of the intended 5cm deep, and I didn't even realise it until I was cutting the foam. So I decided to use it to store some of my nicer pens that don't have their own proper box instead.

From left: Noodler's Konrad Dixie No. 10 Methuselah, FPR Himalaya green ebonite, FPR Himalaya amethyst purple acrylic, Parker 51, Omas 361, Pilot Elite, Lamy Scribble, Aurora 98 Archivi Storici, Rotring Esprit retractable graphite, Pilot Decimo dark grey.

I was using the leftover 20mm foam from when I made a foam insert for a statue. I thought it would be cool to have a protective piece of foam actually attached to the lid rather than have one sit on top of the contents, so I inlet a large pocket inside the lid. Unfortunately the plywood I was using was just over 5mm thick, and with the resin inlay on the outside I was afraid to cut out too much incase the lid became too flimsy, so I only cut the pocket for the foam to a little under 3mm deep. Which is quite thin, but still probably enough foam to protect the contents?

I glued in a sheet of foam, and then trimmed it flush on my hot wire cutter.

Since the box interior was 30mm deep and I was using 20mm thick foam, I had to actually slice one piece in half, down to around 10mm thick, to make up the 30mm thickness. This would be the bottom piece. I did this by sandwitching it between two pieces of wood, marking the line I wanted to cut, standing the wood-foam-wood sandwitch on it's side, and carefully running it along the fence on the hot wire table while trying to keep it upright so the wire would cut a consistent thickness.

I found that the foam insert in the lid actually catches slightly on the foam inside the box, creating resistance to closing. In fact the lid tends to "bounce back" after closing, leaving it open by a few mm. It can be rather hard to get it to fully close. Initially this was MUCH worse; it was hard to close at all and impossible to get it to stay completely closed. But I cut the inner piece of foam a bit lower and now it's much better, but still annoying. I'm not sure what the best solution is, perhaps I can find a way to cut the lid insert to be slightly thinner than the recess, or I just need to cut the body inserts to a bit lower.

I printed a template for the cutouts for the main piece of foam. I cut the inner pieces out of the template, then pinned the template to the foam with tailor pins.

I then cut out the pieces of foam on my wire cutter. This was a little fiddly as I had left very little material for the walls, so the whole block lost it's structural strength very quickly, making it harder to manouver across the wire cutting table.

I probably got too greedy and tried to fit in too many pens. The wood is also probably too thin, and annoyingly the lid is slightly bowed out - I really want to use solid, stabilized wood in the future, but that's a lot of work and I'm not really set up to process wood properly. Well, overall this box came out OK and it's nice to have a better storage solution for some of my pens.

Improved Game Accessory Box

My last attempt at a gaming accessory box for Warmachine worked fine for the cards, but it was very inconvenient when it came to the gaming tokens - at least in the amount that I carry around for Warmachine. After checking my carrier box I decided I had room to make a larger version that could organize everything better. I couldn't increase the height if I wanted it to fit in my case, but I could increase the width and depth. So I designed a new double-sided box; this would allow me to store cards on one side yet still have a large, shallow area for storing and organizing tokens on the other.

On one side I have enough room to store 3" cloud templates (up to five of the acrylic ones I'm using; I don't think WMH uses the larger 4" and 5" templates anymore) and still have several compartments left over in my 3D-printed divider for dice, tokens, pens, etc. I think I could even fit a small measuring tape in the middle, if I could find a good one. The other side has four compartments, each large enough for around fifty game cards in Dragonshield sleeves. Of course they can also be used for more tokens if needed.

This box took me longer to make than I had hoped. Double-sided boxes are something I've been having trouble getting dialed in, likewise partitions have been proving tricky. My first attempt actually didn't quite go together right, and the box glued up wonky. So I went back and modified my code, double-checking pretty much every aspect of the sizing and tolerances. I also changed my workflow to focus on accuracy (at the cost of a great deal of speed; this box took many hours to mill).

Previously I've been using a 3mm compression bit, and cutting through the entire stock in one pass. This is very fast, but I was getting some deflection. So this time I tried a 1.5mm bit (single-flute upcut as that's what I had) and used multiple very shallow passes; this gave me much better dimensional accuracy (and also meant I could use dogbones without them being nearly as noticeable), but took much, much longer. I also broke the 1.5mm bit, but that turned out to be because a connector for my spindle power cable was crap; it's only a few years old but the plastic had become brittle and the retaining tabs had snapped off. I noticed this and taped the connector ends together, but the tape apparently decided it couldn't be bothered to do its job and just kind peeled off partway through a cut, allowing the cable connector parts to separate and leaving the machine trying to drag a non-spinning bit through the plywood.

Speaking of plywood, I'm not too happy with the quality of what I'm using right now. Lots of voids in the middle, and it all splinters very easily, the box finish getting damaged during assembly and sanding (in a way that feels like it shouldn't be happening). This was especially true of the box lid "runners", the tongues and grooves that hold the box lids in place. So to try to reinforce them, I added varnish first, before sanding to fit. I actually tried to apply the varnish and then put them in a vacuum pot to draw the varnish deeper into the wood, but I don't think that really did anything. Regardless, I think the varnish helped to reduce the damage to the tongues and grooves when making the second box.

I wasn't too happy with some of my other materials either. My old wood glue had turned weird and yellow, so I threw it out and bought some new wood glue from the local hardware store, but this stuff... feels different. It's labelled HP Gold Synthetic Resin Adhesive, and it doesn't feel like the PVA wood glues I'm used to; it doesn't spread very well for example, and I feel like it might be setting more quickly. It worked, but the difficulty I was having spreading it might have been compounding the issues I've been having with box glue-up.

You see, applying glue to the correct places on all the sides and partitions was taking so long that the glue would start to harden before I was done, and pieces would end up setting slightly out of place. So for my second attempt at this box I tried applying glue to just two pieces at a time, then quickly assembling the box parts and applying pressure so that the two pieces would set in the correct positions. Once they were set I would take everything apart, apply glue to two more pieces, and repeat the process. This again took a long time, but I feel it worked better. I do need a better clamping solution though; my clamps are too big, elastic bands actually work better than clamps for smaller boxes but the ones I have are too small for this box.

I did think the resin inlays worked much better this time than in my last attempts. I started by applying a very generous coating of Coprabel's Easy Color wood stain varnish in Palissander 506 into the inlay to seal the wood. It's the varnish I used for the finish on my previous game box; I hoped the very dark colour would create a sort of blackline around the actual resin. After giving this a day to set, I applied a clear varnish (National Protective Coatings synthetic varnish clear) to the entire top of the lid. This was to avoid the issue I had with the previous box, where sanding the resin inlay flat created a coloured dust that settled into the wood top and refused to come out, leaving it looking slightly pink. I also wanted to wet-sand the resin as I've found it to be MUCH nicer than dry sanding (at least for resin), and hoped the varnish would protect the wood from the water.

When all the varnish was dry I applied the resin. I used gold Art Nation mica powder in ResinVentures Art Resin. The Art Resin has proven to be very vulnerable to yellowing, but I didn't feel that mattered in this case, and the mica powder worked much better than my previous attempts at using dyes or GSW metal powders. Being able to use a vacuum chamber (a relatively recent aquisition) to reduce the amount of bubbles in the resin also helped. Of course I passed a heat gun over the surface to pop the rest of the bubbles too; I think the heat gun moving the resin around also helped create a more organic looking pattern.

After giving the resin three days to fully set, I tried sanding the inlay using wet/dry sandpaper in a 3D-printed sanding block. While most of the clear varnish actually got sanded off the wood, and a fair bit of water soaking into the unvarnished wood on the other side, overall it still mostly worked out OK; I didn't notice any real warping of the wood or discolouration from the resin dust. The dark outline came out very nicely too, I'm quite happy with that. I did a quick polishing pass with a Dremel tool and Dremel polishing kit/compound. This did deepen the gold colour a bit and give it a bit more shine, but the wet sanding had already given the resin quite a nice smooth surface so the polishing wasn't too important in this case (I think I used a rather finer grit of sandpaper than I needed to for the initial sanding). Besides, there was still another varnish layer that was going to go over the resin, so the polish was too early (I didn't end up polishing again as it didn't seem to do enough to be worth it to me - especially when the rest of the box ended up looking a little bit rough anyway).

With the box assembled I started the final sanding (dry) to smooth everything out. Once this was done I coated the outside of the box with the clear varnish (applied by brush) and left it for a couple of days. This varnish was not very even; some areas felt very smooth, while others had a rough wooden feel. They actually felt rougher than they had after sanding, as if the varnish had lifted the wood fibres. So I applied another coat, then after giving that a couple of days to dry gave the whole box a very wet sanding. This evened out the surface a bit and actually gave it back a bit of the textured wooden feel, which I was happy about. However in some areas, where I felt the need to sand a bit more heavily as there were some thicker spots of varnish on the surface, I ran into some issues where the varnish didn't sand very well; it almost seemed to gloop up like an almost-dry PVA glue. Perhaps the water, and heat from the friction of sanding, was affecting it?

There were also some spots where the varnish didn't soak into the wood properly, perhaps because of my clumsy use of the wood glue earlier. These spots show up as pale spots and look pretty bad. Overall the final finish is not great, I actually think my previous box came out looking and feeling a bit better. The stained Coprabel varnish was much more expensive than the clear National "synthetic" varnish, so material quality might be a factor. I also dry-sanded that one much more heavily compared to the light wet-sanding I gave this box (to try to get rid of the excessive staining), creating an aged look and a more natural raw wood feel than the varnished look and feel of the new box.

Oh well, maybe the next one will be better. I want to try working with solid wood rather than plywood; I'm also hoping to eventually try using stabilized wood, which should be stronger and not require varnish. Fingers crossed.