Learning to Sculpt - the Tomb Guard project
For a while I’ve been wanting to learn how to sculpt miniatures from scratch, based on armatures I make myself. I consider this a very useful skill to have in the hobby as it opens up endless new possibilities for custom characters, conversions and army projects. My theory is that if I can sculpt a whole mini, I can certainly convert or sculpt parts on a mini in the future. I was recommended Greenstuff and Milliput, which are products I’ve familiarised myself with in smaller detail sculpting on previous projects. By now I have a good grip on their working time, consistency, and pliability, so I think it’s time to tackle a full sculpt. After watching a few tutorials by Tom Mason, particularly the one about making armatures, I felt ready.
My expectations are low, as I know this is hard, and requires endless hours of practice. But if I can manage something that looks good enough to make me want to paint and play with it, I’m happy.
This was a project for the summer, and a goal I set myself for August. Since I was planning to travel during this period, I made myself a travel kit with “all” the necessary equipment.
The kit contains Milliput, Greenstuff, Green Putty (a filler), superglue, hobby-knife, steel wire, pliers to cut the steel wire, a piece of cork to insert the steel wire into while working on the model, two silicone sculpting tools, two metallic sculpting tools and an old brush (to apply the green putty).
After making the armature, and getting the pose I wanted (this is a difficult, but obviously very important step), I started by covering the whole body in a thin layer of greenstuff. I also sculpted chest muscles, although this was only for practice, as I knew I would cover all of this later with clothing/armour.
Working on this project, I mostly sat outside on the ground, by a table, or wherever I found a good spot when I had a little downtime. With me I always had a cup of water, some Nivea hand cream and my little kit. Since sculpting is a slow process, requiring patience and at least a few hours of curing time in between each session, I found this to be a great activity in combination with a slow summer holiday - something to do in between the daily activities.
I actually had no plan where I was going with this, or what kind of miniature I wanted to end up with. I’m not sure how smart this is, and wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but for me, being my first try and all, it worked. I started from the inside, building out, and with each session, adding another layer of clothes or skin. The cape I just tried out since I happened to have an extra thin sheet of greenstuff after finishing a session, and I kept it as I like to paint capes. It’s perhaps more realistic than most miniature capes, but lacks the clear folds of a GW mini for example, and will therefore be harder to paint. But I don’t worry about that now. Painting is not a part of my sculpting concerns.
I eventually decided on armour for my mini, instead of clothes or muscles. Mostly because it seemed the easiest of the three. Armour is harder, stiffer, and less organic than clothes, and doesn’t require any advanced anatomical knowledge like muscles and skin. To make it simple, I made a thin sheet of Greenstuff and rolled my hobby knife handle over it—both to make it as thin as possible, and to imprint the pattern of my hobby knife onto the Greenstuff. Then I used that same knife to cut out small triangles from the thin sheet, which I glued to different parts of the armour. Different sizes of triangles were used depending on where they went on the body—big ones for the chest pieces, smaller ones for the shins.
When I came back from my vacation, I went through my little box of bits, and found a few I liked that fit the style of what I had sculpted. This was basically for the parts of the mini that I didn’t have the skill or time to sculpt. As I had been told that hands and faces were the hardest, I delayed sculpting these until the end. But I never got around to it, and would probably have ended up ruining what was turning out to be a body I was quite happy with. So after finding hands and a face that fitted, I glued them on, covered some gaps with more greenstuff and had this:
I was happy at this point, but felt it could still be improved. I removed a few details from his head piece that I felt overcomplicated it, and glued these same parts to his chest instead, covering up some details there I had sculpted that I wasn’t quite happy with. I also added a handle to the lantern in his hand and a skeleton head as his belt buckle. Then I sanded a few details to smooth them out, and finally covered most of it (except the armour with the pattern I had made using my hobby knife handle) in green putty, to cover up any unevenness, gaps or other flaws in the sculpting.
After a zenithal prime, I had my first sculpted mini. Not perfect by any means. The lantern arm looks broken, the posing of the legs is stiff, and required me to make a strange base for it to look more natural, and in the end, I didn’t sculpt the entire mini. Also the scale is off (this mistake can be traced all the way back to the armature), so it doesn’t really fit in with other 28 or 35mm models. However, as a Tomb Guard (the lore became apparent during the later stages of sculpting), he can basically be any size - a large, living statue, guarding some kind of valuable tomb in D&D or other narrative game. Now I’ll also have more confidence going forward with other projects that require small amounts of sculpting or conversion. So all in all a worthwhile project.
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Science behind Acrylic Paints
- Binders (eng. resin) – form a film – in our case probably pure acrylates, I suspect they are styrene acrylates.
- Fillers – in addition to adding volume to the paint, they also affect the viscosity, coverage and appearance of the dry film
- Pigments – the main division is into organic pigments and inorganic pigments. Inorganic ones are more covering but have less vivid shades, while organic ones are often quite poorly covering (yellow for example) but their shades are vivid and bright
Additives:
- Anti-foam
- Rheological modifiers – affect the behavior of wet paint on the substrate (e.g. spillage) and the behavior of the paint when a force is applied to it (brush, roller, spray, airbrush). Rheological modifiers also include thickeners that affect the viscosity of the paint.
- Dispersants – envelop pigment and filler particles and prevent their agglomeration during standing. Good dispersion of pigment and filler affects the coverage and uniform appearance of the dry film. There are a bunch more but I won't go into too much detail
- Solvent – in this case water.
Contrast paints and speed paints – high pigment content, but not so much that it causes high coverage. They are formulated to spread, not to stay where you put them. The result of spreading is that the paint collects in the recesses, where a thicker film of paint remains than on the protruding parts of the miniature. Where the film of paint is thicker (the recesses), the shade of the contrast paint is more pronounced, unlike on the protruding parts where the film is thinner, which is why the shade is then influenced by the color of the substrate.
Composition:
- Binders
- Pigments
- Additives – all listed above + surfactants that reduce the surface tension of the wet paint film, which is why it flows
- solvent
- I would say they do not contain fillers, or contain very, very little of them
Washes – similar in formulation and behavior to contrast agents, only they have a much lower proportion of pigments, certainly no fillers, a higher proportion of surfactants, lower viscosity, and probably less binders.
If we want to greatly dilute acrylic paint or contrast, it is better to use a product intended for this purpose from the manufacturer of that paint rather than water, because it contains all the necessary amount of binders and additives for that paint to retain its properties.
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U ovom članku, naša Dunja nam otkriva znanost iza akrilnih boja.
Akrilne boje – visoki udio pigmenta i dobra pokrivnost. Ako su dobro formulirane ostaju tamo gdje ih naneseš, ne ostavljaju „brush marks“ i suše se dovoljno sporo da stigneš napravit što želiš na minijaturi a opet dovoljno brzo.
Sastav:
- Veziva (eng. resin) – formiraju film – u našem slučaju vjerojatno čisti akrilati, sumnjam da su stiren akrilati.
- Punila – osim što dodaju volumen boji utječu i na viskoznost, pokrivnost i izgled suhog filma
- Pigmenti – glavna podjela je na organske pigmente i anorganske pigmente. Anorganski su više pokrivni ali manje živih nijansi, dok su organski često dosta loše pokrivni (žuti npr) ali zato su im nijanse žive i jarke
Aditivi:
- Protiv pjene
- Reološki modifikatori – utječu na ponašanje mokre boje na podlozi (npr razlijevanje) i na ponašanje boje dok na nju djeluje sila (kist, valjak, sprej, airbrush). Pod reološke modifikatore spadaju i ugušćivači koji utječu na viskozitet boje.
- Dispergatori – obavijaju čestice pigmenata i punila i sprječavaju aglomeraciju istih stajanjem. Dobra dispergiranost pigmenta i punila utječe na pokrivnost i ujednačen izgled suhog filma.
- Ima ih još hrpa ali neću toliko u detalje
- Otapalo – u ovom slučaju voda.
Kontrastice i speed paints – visoki udio pigmenta, ali ne toliki da uzrokuje visoku pokrivnost. Formulirane su da se razlijevaju, a ne da ostaju tamo gdje ih staviš. Posljedica razlijevanja je skupljanje boje u udubine gdje onda ostane deblji film boje nego na isturenim dijelovima minijature. Tamo gdje je film boje deblji (udubine) nijansa kontrastice izraženija, za razliku od isturenih dijelova na kojima je film tanji zbog čega na nijansu onda utječe boja podloge.
Sastav:
- Veziva
- Pigmenti
- Aditivi – svi nabrojani gore +
- surfakanti koji smanjuju površinsku napetost mokrog filma boje zbog čega i dolazi do razlijevanja
- otapalo
- rekla bih da ne sadrže punila, ili ih sadrže vrlo vrlo malo
Washevi – po principu formuliranja i ponašanju slični kontrasticama, samo imaju puno manji udio pigmenata, sigurno ne sadrže punila, veći udio surfakanata, manji viskozitet i vjerojatno manje veziva.
Ako želimo jako razrijediti akrilnu boju ili kontrasticu bolje je koristiti za to predviđen proizvod od proizvođača te boje nego vodu, jer sadrži svu potrebnu količinu veziva i aditiva kako bi ta boja zadržala svoja svojstva.
" ["created"]=> string(19) "2025-11-20 13:03:37" ["modified"]=> string(19) "2025-11-20 13:03:37" } ["Member"]=> array(10) { ["id"]=> string(2) "64" ["group_id"]=> string(1) "1" ["first_name"]=> string(9) "Krunoslav" ["last_name"]=> string(8) "Belinić" ["first_name_mask"]=> string(9) "krunoslav" ["last_name_mask"]=> string(7) "belinic" ["username"]=> string(5) "Kruno" ["password"]=> string(40) "eb3fda45fbec0258e90d809803b10491c548b22f" ["born"]=> string(19) "2015-01-18 09:19:00" ["created"]=> string(19) "2015-01-18 09:20:39" } } Krunoslav Belinić, 20th November 2025 - We attended: ModelMania 2025 Marko Paunović, 5th November 2025
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