Painting 2021

Before the year ticks over, this is everything painted as I un-lapsed for a while. In reverse chronological order then, most recent first...

Taban Miniatures (limited edition) - an experiment with 'en grisaille', an approach learned from Marco Frissoni's channel that I like very much. Black prime, not zenithal but grey scale tones built up with brush then tinted with glazes. Continues the anti-colour trend started with the Chaos Warrior below. 

Gideon Lorr - already primed white, nuln wash. Then lots of fiddly fun making him look weathered. 

Grace is Gone - Brown Bunny Miniatures (limited ed.) - already primed white, then applied a nuln oil wash. I have never painted black skin before, so experimented with a pink base tone with choc brown/burnt sienna homemade contrast wash, which went a bit funny. Happy accident, it dried in a blotchy way that suits the post-apocalyptic vibe of a struggling post-human with no access to creature comforts.

Chaos Warrior - terrific old-school Jes Goodwin sculpt, had loads of fun doing this one. It was already primed white so first added a nuln wash and got going. I wanted something filmic from this, the antithesis of the day-glo colour most mini painting presents. The base requires some modification, since it is tonally indestinguishable from the figure, but then I wanted it standing in dark, chaos landscape. 

Caelia Dicqor from Rackham's plastic line before they went bust first time round. Nice character mini, if only the eyes weren't so HUGE. I painted this without much of a plan, white primer with a wash of nuln to edge the detail, then applied colour. I half like it. Like everything else in this post, left unvarnised so I can always make adjustments. 

Clawed Fiend - half painted when I last lapsed, forgot what colours I used and had to improvise when finishing off. Frustrated with the hair, but a fairly decent result in the end, adequate tabletop standard. 

Stormcast Sequitors - My impatience to use my only contrast paint at the time massively prejudiced the paint scheme from the get-go, but I'm moderately pleased with the outcome after such a long lapse. First time trying zenithal highlight over black primer. 

Other cr@p... Twilight Knight by Kingdom Death. This is the very first iteration of the character that was never released for sale and was bundled in with the first Gift of Death set (about 2010). I slapped on some colour years ago, and never felt any enthusiasm when I resumed because the sculpt is so inadequate. The sword was a banana when I first got it, replaced it with a metal spare from a Confrontation mini, but now replaced again with a spare from a plastic TK. 

I hope my followers and causal visitors enjoy this break from my temporarily dormant anti-plastic waste crusading. Next year there be will something very different from my long-gestating lockdown project.

~J~

Games Workshop & Plastic Waste, Part 5 - Not Only But Also

 A couple of nights ago I did some research to uncover other figure manufacturers making plastic kits.

This yielded: Mantic Games, Warlord Games, Wargames Foundry, Malifaux. And of course Kingdom Death, of which I own copious numbers of plastic figures.

It was interesting to see that Malifaux (aka Wyrd) have sprues exactly the same as KD. I also noticed some common features between GW and Mantic sprues. It seems that some parts of their plastic production is outsourced or shared, which could make initiating a  change in 'design culture' a little harder. 

An exceedingly useful mantra when trying to get a point across: show, don't tell...

Would have been nice to add a wood texture, but that is beyond my capacity to make. Rivets do nicely however. The plain sprue profile is an approximation from eyeballing and a millimeter ruler, good enough in the absence of having a micrometer to hand. The colour profiles are all derived from the basic GW footprint, and all of them lend themselves to scratch building structures that facilitate panels. 

~J~

Games Workshop and Plastic Waste, Part 4 - Hard Numbers

So this is now pretty much a crusade. Still shouting into the void, still the One-eyed Man in the Kingdom of the Blind.

Facts matter, and the facts I now have are quite depressing.

Being a scientific sort, I have kept my estimates of waste plastic conservative. "Up to 50%", I have written here or elsewhere. 

Then last Saturday I purchased the Adepta Sororitas Combat Patrol box from my local gaming shop, helpfully allowing me to bypass the 'sold out outline' denial at GW's online store. Useful set for my Sisters project, and saved fifteen quid. 

First thing I did after I opened the box, was to weigh the sprues. 

Canoness (small sprue)        complete - 8g;    empty - 5g;   remaining waste as percentage - 62% 
Sisters A (large)                      79g    46g            58%
Sisters B (medium)                39g    25g            64%
Rhino B (large)                       71g    32g            45%
Rhino T (large)                        81g    37g          45%
Rhino Extras (medium)           44g    24g           54%
ADDITIONS:
Aestred Thurga (smallish)      19g    12g        63%

(Percentiles have been rounded down)
(List will be updated as and when more kits are measured.)

Even from a small sample size, this is much worse than my conservative guesstimate, but I suspected it would be the case. Fair to say, that with the exception of larger model kits - the Knights, Daemons, etc - all kits have a waste footprint of well over 50%. Multiply that by MILLIONS of sprues sold every year, and the scale of waste is even more appalling. 

A REQUEST: to anyone who happens across this blog and is willing to help by providing some more data, please do what I did. Weigh sprues as new and when empty & post them in comments. Units are moot, as long as a percentage can be calculated. Thanks in advance.

~J~

Games Workshop and Plastic Waste, Part 3 - Solution+

Before going on, some backstory  Prior to my last post I sent a letter to Games Workshop (a speculative job application, actually, CV and all). In that letter I told them there are two principle solutions to plastic waste. Before, there had only been one - recycling, as everyone, except GW it seems, knows about. Last time I described the second. 

I also want to say something about why I am keep mentioning Games Workshop in particular. Simple. They are pretty much a ubiquitous presence across the UK - a bit like Costa - whether it's their own stores or official independent stockists - and that makes them by far the biggest player in the hobby sector. And the biggest source of hobby plastic waste. 

OK. Now the Bonus Solution: re-design the cross-sectional profile of the sprue frame network. That's it. For the designers and engineers at GW, this will not be hard to do, but the outcomes can be far-reaching and will provide ideal complement to surface textures. 

Now a diagram, or rather my original sketches from a project book, since a picture tells a thousand words...

Lines of paired rivets would be really useful for scratch building industrial stuff, but they would be better combined with a thinner cross section - the current trapezoid is a bit chunky. A profile something like a 'T', or an 'L-bow' (like at the top the image), would be a lot handier for scratch building. Obviously,  every design profile has to accommodate release from the mold. I could go on but this is quite sufficient for today. Part 4 will round up, with some additional material.

To the management at Games Workshop, the guys whose main goal is to drive profit, it seems almost certain that their psychology is aligned with 'Time is Money'. In other words, if there is any extra time involved in producing something, it will result in a loss of money. 

How much profit would be lost if it took an extra, say, 20 minutes, to go once around a mold drilling little divots that will translate into rivets?  (Spoiler - none whatsoever)

Now, production pipelines are complicated for a large operation. GW is obviously large. But lets do a thought experiment about what would happen for a limited run product if it takes longer to mill the injection molds. 

After the designs are finished and signed off, the molds are milled, everything else is prepped for printing. With my suggested modifications in mind, lets say it takes an extra hour to mill an A5 sized sprue. Lots of sprues in an Indomitus box, big ones A4 sized, and I forget how many were in it. Lets say 6 x A4, so 12 x A5. And what does the extra time come to? 12 hours. Half a-fucking-day. Where, exactly, will the 'Time is Money' tenet manifest from that extra time? 

There is quite literally NO EXCUSE for not implementing waste reducing adaptations - nay, INNOVATIONS! - into mold making. 

~Jay

P.S. Seriously, I will be posting painting content soon. 

Games Workshop and Plastic Waste, Part 2 - Solutions

 *[Miniature painting content will resume soon]*

The tabletop wargaming hobby has a problem, an elephant in the metaphorical room. 

That elephant is the unspoken, unacknowledged problem of plastic waste by the biggest name in the wargaming hobby - Games Workshop. To be sure, this is a problem that every other plastic kit manufacturer is guilty of, and my solution below is just as applicable to them. I don't know where GW sits in the scheme of things w.r.t. other kit makers, but they may well be near the top by quantity of output. Lego have addressed their long legacy of pumping out millions of kilos of unrecyclable plastic, and now use non-fossil sources for their bricks. Everyone else needs to catch up, ethically speaking.

Empty sprues are synonymous with single use plastic. Have been so from the very beginning. No thought given to making it do more once its usefulness is over. Now, the resourceful model maker CAN do stuff with them, but most hobbyists don't. So, what to do. The talk on the internet is always about recycling, but the infrastructure in the UK is woeful, and sorry tales emerge periodically about UK waste being shipped overseas. UK business has a history of shirking responsibility for sorting out its own mess and unintended consequences. 

There are two solutions the likes of GW can implement to prevent waste. The first, as already stated, is recycling. But left to generic, local authority waste management, sprues are as likely to end up in landfill, or incinerated, than get properly recycled. Recycling will work, if, and probably only if, proper incentives and channels exist to get empty sprues back to Nottingham. OK for the UK, not an option for the the rest of the world. I don't hold any hope for really worthwhile incentives, but a lot of people will do it just the same, because they care.

As for the second, I'll illustrate by recounting my story. Really looking at a sprue was what gave me the inspiration, mixed with some older observations of Kingdom Death plastic kits. 

First, look at a GW sprue, if you have one around. It would help if all the kit parts are already snipped off, then you can focus on what's left. So what is left? Glib answer: a piece of plastic with no useful features (except to the rare few who extract some measure of use from offcuts). But keep looking... notice it yet? 

There in the corner - a string of numbers. So what? 

Now we get to a 'hang on a minute...' thing.

The 'so what' is a solution that pertains to plastic waste as far as Games Workshop is concerned (other companies as well in relevant form). 

Why can't those numbers be in a fancier type face? Ornate. Gothic. Or elegant. So it follows - why can't MORE numbers, or text, or strings of both, cover the ENTIRE sprue?

My point is: if a manufacturer can etch a serial number onto the blank part of a sprue, why can't it also etch other detail on the remainder of a sprue? Why not have rows of rivets, a simple wood texture, names, phrases, icons? It doesn't have to be overelaborate - imagine something like an embossing effect, which can, hypothetically, be done with a single pass at the mold milling stage. 

And there you have it. A solution to plastic waste in the Warhammer hobby is to have sprues that hobbyists can kitbash for decorative bits and pieces. Can't use it? Give it to someone who will. Trade them. Congratulations, you've made sprues that are REALLY USEFUL to the end user.

With further adaptations, this can go much further still, but I'll relate those another day.   

Recycling is an awkward business. We don't have a proper circular economy, that in hindsight should have been implemented decades ago. Companies make stuff, ship it out, and that's that. It doesn't help that we are collectively lazy, deciding that it's too much effort and too expensive to recycle plastics properly. Send it abroad and make it Someone Elsa's Problem.

The only obstacle to innovation is Games Workshop, and their willingness to do something about an environmental problem in which they are culpable partners with other plastic manufacturers.

~Jay