March Welcome - Poll Challenge Vote - Announcement of Live Video Stream

Dear Patrons, Thank you for your support, we are glad and honored having so many cool people as a part of our Patreon community. It is all much appreciated.

Updates, Let's hope that later this month we will be able to share one of the secret projects, only thing we can say so far, it is sci fi oriented and we are excited sharing work but also tutorials for it, it will be something different from previous ones. Let's hope dates of reveal will not be changed again. It is not only cool project we can't wait sharing both reveal wise and tutorials wise. But all of those have to wait.

Meanwhile, there are many cool ideas cooking behind the scene,

First, we have one cool surprise. And that is this new giant model from Artisan Guild that we printed as our first 3d print. We had three tries and printed him in parts so we managed to push in few more models on the plate. And since we have this printing fever at the moment, probably we will print much more, soon. :D

Since this giant looks perfect for making tutorials we decided to start painting him right away, together with you guys during live videos, hope you are excited.

FIRST LIVE VIDEO ON PAINTING THIS GIANT WILL TAKE PLACE ON Tuesday, 2nd March at 8PM CET.  If you can't join at this hour, and would like to ask us some of painting question (leave your question in comment section bellow) after live is over video will be available on a Patreon for later watch.  

POLL NEWS*  We are ready to make new challenge for you guys, and that is bringing a poll into this post. We have decided on cool reward of your endeavor's, and the challenge will be related to one of the Patreon tutorials, but to make it more cool for all of you we would like to know what you would prefer to paint for a painting challenge? This is not a painting competition. Idea is to bring you all closer to how our feedback looks and to have fun while learning from lessons and learning something more from results.  :)

The idea is to speak a story trough your painting. That will be one of the upcoming tutorials, depending on a topic of your choice we will speak a story trough our artwork and challenge you guys to make your stories trough your mini painting based on the same topic. So vote for the topic you would like the best!?

Well, before we give you more info on this, we hope you guys like the idea, and vote to help us decide how to proceed with this one.

Bellow you will read more about our first 3d Print experience, but we will also share more insights when we really really dive into these new adventures.

Before that, let us give you our compliments to all your works that we saw trough Discord, & Social medias. It is amazing following your updates, progress and shares. We appreciate all the mentions, it means a lot.

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Everyone has a different story, experience, problems and solving methods when it comes to miniature printing, but it is all part of learning.

First of all we would like to give our thanks to our friends that gave us great advice and shared with us their experience. It was very helpful.

)So Thank you very much: Maria ZN , @Francesca Musumeci, Greg Kourakos , István Bertyák and of course @Andrea Tarabella (Artisan Guild Miniatures

Sonic Mini 4k we spent good time reading and learning how to prepare models and settings for the printing. As well as - how and where to add different kinds of supports, what to be careful of, what to pay attention to...etc..Before we actually plugged in ourPhrozen 3D Printer

For all of these info Greg have a awesome video explanations on his YT channel: 3DPrintingPro

Very unexpected (since our schedule was too busy, and we were too careful to actually dive in this new hobby) , some deadlines on our schedule changed right in a time when our friends from Artisan Guild prepared stl of this big "miniature" Hulgfnir Frost Jotun Champion. So naturally, this was destined to be our first mini to print, 3d printing "rite of passage".

Now, with all reading, video watching and so on, we haven't actually had that feeling like we are ready to do this. Because, when you read: Be very careful, resin is very dangerous, there are a lot of mistakes you can make when you print your miniatures, it will be hard for your first try, you will surely encounter a lot of troubles...etc... you can't really get that nice hobby time picture in head, right!?

When we actually got to printing, we forgot some small but essential advices that we watched on the videos, and after experiencing printing and watching videos again it all made more sense and stuck with us better.

Good thing for us was that we knew we had contact with people who already had printing experience. So if anything gives us troubles or goes wrong, we would have help.

We all learn from mistakes, as it is the best experience you can possibly get. Mistake or success, it is about doing it - experiencing.

1. For our first print, we prepared our files for printing in Chitubox, knowing that the time of print would be the same - depending on the height of the prints - not regarding the quantity of files - we fill up the printing plate. Made fist setups and prepared printer for first time printing. We made sure that the table with the printer is in good angle, we have prepared all the things around it, checked the screen, calibrated the plate. And started our first print. Good advice that we got was to check out print progress in every hour or so. Therefore we were able to intercept the problem in a time to stop the printing. Issue number one was that our calibration wasn't perfect. One corner of a plate wasn't leaning to the screen enough causing print failure. This was easily repaired by making those calibrations again and paying attention to all angles of the plate. Some of the parts of the print looked nice, so we thought this would all go well only if we had this calibration's good.

2. Second print started well and all looked fine, we were very happy. But, since this is a bigger model, supports of the head /that we were printing together with a few more things/ were not strong enough to hold the head on the plate. Head fell off and caused troubles with printing. Again, luckily, we saw it on time to stop the printing and avoid more troubles.

3. Okay, third time it's a charm. We are ready. We decided to hollow the heavy parts and to add extra supports. Checked calibrations just in case once more and got ready for our successful printing. And guess what, it was successful actually. We were so happy and since this experience we are drawn to print more minis. But, there was one more trouble on the way. While washing the mini in hot water, we let some part sit in a hot water a bit longer, which lead to having a thin wall of resin cracked. Good thing is that it was easily repaired with putty. And we learned that the hollowed mini should have inside supports (as we found one piece of failed layer that luckily didn't ruin our print as it was on the top/bottom part), it is good making holes for inside resin washing and drying. And of course making a thicker resin wall.

We glued all parts together, our cats approved of it all during the priming. And our dog wasn't amused. So the next stage is painting. And we will be painting this cool "mini" on our next Patreon Live Session.

We are very impressed how this Mini 4K printer managed to print some of the very big parts of this giant. This mini height is around 19cm.

We were using the Aqua-Gray 4K Resin and Phrozen curing lamp, which made experience much easier for a first try.

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Yours,

Aleksandra & Marko,
Mrs. & Mr. Craftworld