2mm Strength & Honour

Still waiting for Royal Mail to deliver my interchangeable label making kit so con’t do the basing yet.  In the meantime this is how I paint Auxiliary infantry.  I decided on an 8 cohort layout:

Then the main colour.  This is the brightest blue I’ve got.  As before, slop it on and cover everything.

Flesh drybrush with a narrower brush to target legs on all sides, faces across the top and arms on the right side of each block.

Armour.  Heavy drybrush mostly focusing on the top.

Shields – a thick line across the front and dabs along the left hand side.

Finally the raw umber wash to shade and help combine the look.

Now that we’re up and running with the prints I’m following Project Wargaming’s 2mm Painting Guide.  He was painting Persians but the basic instructions will do for Romans.  The steps are:

Mount a legion’s worth of prints on a card.  Here we have one double sized cohort for Cohort 1.  9 regular cohorts and one tiny legate and officers.

Get a big soft brush and slop on red speedpaint all over.

Let it dry.  Then focusing on the left had side and lower legs, dry brush on a bit of flesh.  I also brush at random some small patches across the heads but I’m not sure this is visible on the final models.

Next we’ve got armour. Most visible on helmets and shoulders so a dry brush across the tops is sufficient.

Now a relatively good narrow brush and a straight line of solid red across the front of each block covering all of the shields.  A few quick dabs onto shields on the right hand edge too.

Finally cover the whole block in a fairly heavy coat of brown ink with the biggest flat brush I’ve got.  I used Liquitex Raw Umber but any ink or wash will do.  Ensure you cover all four sides as well.  Instant shading.

Tap the card firmly on the desk to work the was right down between the figures and into the supports.

It will be dry in a day or so.  Next to basing.

I got a Voxelab Proxima 6.0 for my birthday in January from my brother-in-law (Thanks Nick 🙂 ).  It has sat unboxed until a couple of weeks ago when we decided to try to get it up and running.

After cleaning and checking the components and very straightforward assembly we were ready to go.  I was given Voxelab basic grey resin to start.  Knowing I wanted to print some 2mm miniatures for this game I purchased a set of Roman Legion stls from Project Wargaming. $4 for the files to print an entire Roman Legion – great value.

After a bit of experimentation and some failed prints this is the setup:

1 – Voxelab resin printer.  The observant will notice it has a Creality screen showing.  More on that later…

2 – Paper products.  A half sheet of A4 for leveling and a roll of paper towel for cleaning and mop up.

3 – Alcohol.  The takeaway tub is the claening bath, half full of isopropyl alcohol (99%) the parts are prised off the print bed and dropped straight in.  A minute or two soaking and gentle swirl and they come out clean.  Behind is the half litre bottle I use for pouring over the print block to clean it and the big bottle is one of the five that Amazon supplied.

4 – My work area.  An old metal tray from a GW paining station is used as the surface that the prints are removed and cleaned on.  A metal spatula is essential to get the prints off the bed.  Latex gloves also essential and not in the photo is my breathing mask – the fumes are unpleasant and dangerous.

5 – UV light curing box.  Part of my birthday present was this box.  Came flat packed but simple assembly.  It has a simple turntable and UV LED light array inside with a timer switch on the power lead.  These are small prints so 75 seconds in here seems to be enough to cure them.

5 – Resin.  This is a basic grey.  The collapsible funnel is to assist with decanting resin back from the printer bath back into the bottle.  I use paper filters specifically designed for resin (available on Amazon).  You can use domestic coffee filters but they get clogged easily apparently.

Issues before it worked:

1st, 2nd and 3rd failed prints – print bed not level or far enough down – not enough bed adhesion so prints ended up stuck to the FEP film on the bottom of the bath.  Also spilt about a third of a bottle of resin when the funnel collapsed because it was too full.  Learned to hold it and pour SLOWLY!

4th failed print – printer stopped accepting the Chitubox slicer files.  I was using the Voxelabs standard firmware and Chitubox 9.0+ isn’t compatible apparently with this older style printer.  The fix was on Reddit.  This printer has a Creality motherboard and is therefore effectively a Creality LD-002H.  Ran the firmware upgrade supplied on Reddit and hey-presto I’ve now got a Creality printer 🙂  The print is now sticking to the print bed as I’m using platforms and upped the base layers to 8 from 6 and the exposure time to 50 seconds.  Still some missing sections – print bed too crowded.  Deleted about a third of the intended prints, you can’t totally fill the bed as I had and must leave a gap between each model and offset them on either side of the bed.  Just over half of the bed surface covered is about right.

5th failed print – poor fine detail.  upped the exposure time to 4.2 seconds for all layers and upped from light to medium supports which were already set to 74% density following guidance from the designer.

6th print – fine.  Very minor detail missing but good enough for me.