Tuesday 1 May 2018

Objective Markers: Glass fuses

Taking a small break from big terrain and red marines to do some objective markers... These are blatantly knocked off from one of Wyloch's crafting vids, but with a few tweaks on size and colour...


I found some really cheap glass fuses on eBay (something like $3 for 100x...) - the standard size is 30mm long, however I opted for 20mm ones since they are a better fit for 32mm GW bases. Seemed like overkill to go get 40mm bases just for objectives when I keep accruing spares in 32mm :-) That also helps me keep them small enough to fit on some of the walkways/ruins where 40mm bases don't fit. 



A set of 6 'numbered' markers is 21 fuses - a set of these were coloured with blue and a set with green. 


The blue & green should give a good bit of contrast with my red marines (as well as my generally grey game boards); plus have done some airbrush blue & green on devastator marine weapons before. 



The airbrush blue seemed to come out ok - could maybe have done it a bit heavier, although that should help imply that it's coming out of the glass portion. Macragge blue with ice blue over the top. 



Went a little brighter with the green - partly as I was planning to stack these more randomly, and partly as green seems to work better as a sickly glow than sharp. 

I think the trick with these is to spray only facing surfaces - eg, rocks on the edges should be sprayed from the direction of the middle of the base, rather than from the top down. Basically imagining that the direction of glow is adding the paint. 


Gel superglue rather than regular superglue gives a better grip on the metal ends of the fuses - and done... set of blue objective markers numbered 1-6 by fuse number. 



The green ones were intentionally more 'spilled' - overlapping or mis-stacked... in hindsight they probably end up looking a bit too posed. Turns out they are actually quite hard to photograph without getting some flare - the silver ends pick up light from anything... 



So... tips if I was doing them again... maybe add a little bit more rubble to the bases for variety; probably try spraying with matt varnish to take a bit of the shine off the metal and glass surfaces. Would also maybe add a couple of bits of wire/accessory to the fuses to look part of machinery - although that could complicate painting & gluing. 

I think you could go quite funky with a purple or red (very chaos style) but lighter colours like the blue/green (or yellow) are all vibrant if wanting to put some clear spots of colour on the table. 

Anyway - fairly happy with the result and these were pretty quick to do. Probably half hour on adding sand/rubble to bases, 15 min to colour the fuses themselves and an hour to airbrush the 12 bases (including a few colour changes).

Total cost excluding spare 32mm bases and sand is maybe about ~$1.30 worth of fuses and 2 colour sharpies out of a set of 8 (total pack was about $9 so couple of bucks for the ones I used). So probably about half a single plastic space marine for 2 sets of markers :-)

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