A Question About Sculpting Armour and Shields

[MyGeekyPersona]

Hi All,

I find that I'm buying a lot of shields and shoulder pads from bits retailers, so I'm going to have a go at making my own.

I have 2 questions for everyone;

1) Has anyone tried using brown stuff? Is it better than green stuff for armour? I've read that it drys harder and can be sanded to a sharp edge, but I have no actual experience using it myself.

2) has anyone tried using other materials for armour, shields etc.? I've got some plastic tubes and hollow cones that I'm going to try to use for shoulder pads and shields, but I was wondering what else I could try? Brass sheet maybe?

Any suggestions, or ideas welcome. Better still any wip photos!

MGP

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[cb_rex]

I've not tried Brownstuff but you can do a lot with Greenstuff and using small pieces of plasticard and spure and building up the shapes you want to create allowing it to cure between stages.

Shields are an ideal shape to press mold, once you have made one shield as long as it's fairly flat you can make several copies fairly easily but it is quite a time consuming process.  You'll need some magic plastic/instamold or Fimo oven bake polymer clay and petroleum jelly to make the mold.  I use a 50:50 mix of greenstuff and standard Milliput to make the duplicates, it sets harder then greenstuff alone and Milliput is much cheaper, aftermixing give it about 30minutes to cure before you press it in to reduce it's stickyness and after that it's just practice.  I use a warm lamp to speed up the cure and them pop them out while they're still fairly flexible and then spend a bit of time carving them before they're fully hard to improve the detail.

I reproduced these last year for a regiment of Orc Spear Boyz:

The one on the bottom right was the first one I made for a champion I put the most work into, (I still haven't finished painting all the checkers on them).  None of them are as crisp as the Finecast original but it works well for crude Orcy looking shields. 

I would however say that if you can buy multiples of the bit you want it's not worth the time and effort making your own, also if you need a 100's of them in your own design then don't press mold then, find a company to cast them in metal for you.