To the Victor!
Planning
I looked through the packet I was sent by TMP, and tried to figure out what miniature I would start with. It had been a while since I had a larger miniature to work on, so I wanted to start with the one that would give me the easiest reintroduction to the techniques used in painting this scale.
In the end, I made a gut-level decision as to which to begin with. When I was stationed in Korea, my son (who was 8 at the time) sent me a video of a movie he had taped for me. It was labeled Conan the Barbarian - so I decided to start with Fred the Barbarian!
Preparation
The first thing you have to do when starting work on a miniature is to thoroughly clean it to get all of the detritus and oils off of it. This is, of course, the first step I skipped! Generally, I have only had problems with miniatures that are made from resin, due to the mold release used in the casting process. The metal ones look fine to me, and so I leapt in with both feet!
Basing
I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary for the setting. I took out a piece of paper and started doodling.
The first idea I came up with was the one I stuck with in the end. I felt the barbarian should be placed into a setting that allowed him to be the centerpiece. Since it looks almost like a command figure, he would fit in giving commands or looking like he was in charge. I had been playing around with a couple of the Hirst Arts molds using a two-part resin, and so decided to see if I could arrange a setting from that.
I settled on the Cobblestone and Roman Temple molds, as they looked like they would fit together nicely. Since I had some spare castings lying around, I fiddled with them to see what I could come up that might match my sketch. The initial layout is shown below. This looked fairly balanced, and placed the miniature in a central position.
The pieces from the Hirst Arts molds are made from a two-part resin from SmoothOn called SmoothCast 300. It's a two-part match-by-volume resin that is pretty easy to work with, and they do offer samples on their website.
I am using a filler from Reynolds Advanced Materials that is made from glass microspheres. This requires me to use a filtering mask, as getting glass particles in your lungs is probably not covered by many insurance companies. The texture of the filler is a lot like flour. You can generally mix one part filler or less to one part of the resin, to give it a different texture and make the resin go farther. This is a good technique, as the resin is about $70 USD a gallon and the filler is $30 USD for 5 gallons!
The building steps I used were some that I had made from Excalibur, a tough, dense dental plaster. Since I did not see the diorama being moved around much, I felt like the plaster was acceptable for use. Understand, though, that the dental plaster is a much better material than regular Plaster of Paris. This material can handle a lot of handling from greasy gamer fingers.
Since the figure would have to be pinned, I cut off the base and filed it down.
Next, I used a pin vice, and drilled two holes into the feet so I could put some wires in.
(After doing all of this, I decided that I was going to change the layout and put the figure on the steps of the diorama, giving it an even more important position in the layout. Sorry, I don't know the proper terms to use here... The focus would now be on the miniature, and so it would be more prominent when it was not fighting with the background clutter.)