Easy crystals

DaN

New member
Is this worth doing a quick article on y\'all reckon...?

EASY-CRYSTALS

Do you ever just throw away your old sprues...?

if so; SHAME ON YOU!


Sprue can be a very handy in making all sorts of bits and pieces.

The majority of mine is chopped into thousands of small pieces to use as rubble in scenery, but if you find an interesting shape, or, an interesting colour, then keep it!

In this tutorial I will be dealing with the transparent green sprue included with GW Necrons.

I decided to try using some of the sprue to create some simple crystal shapes, which could be ANYTHING in Sci-fi (Kryptonite etc) or perhaps Warp stone in fantasy.

I First snipped off a few lengths at random, giving me three short pieces.

I angled the snips so that the bases of the \"cystals\" would glue to their base at that angle although you could have them standing vertically if you wanted. (I also filed the areas where I can cut them flat)
I then got a sharp knife with a and angled each of the lengths downwards, and gradually shaved off slivers at different angles to produce a point.

Once all three crystals had been shaved in this manner I gave them each a quick file and then simply glued them to a base.

My example is shown below, although with enough sprues you could create an entire crystalline field of \"Difficult terrain\" or something!

And, of course, although the necron sprues are transparent, not all crystals are, so you could also use normal opaque sprue and paint it however you wanted.

NecronCrystals4.jpg

NecronCrystals3.jpg

NecronCrystals2.jpg

NecronCrystals1.jpg
 

Undave

Flockwit
Originally posted by QuietiManes
Yeah, nice idea. Goes good with that article on terragenesis about making leafy plants out of bits of sprues.

How about a link for the lazy?
 

Shawn R. L.

New member
WOW!! Those look GREAT. For other colors, tooth brush handles would work well. Most of them have pretty good color saturation.

A little LED would make these FANTASTIC.
 

DaN

New member
Cheers Shawn :p
I have some tiny LEDs after seeing one of JameSessions threads about Surface mounted LEDs - the only problem is they use a weird voltage and I\'m crap at electronics :( :p lol

I was hoping I\'d be able to just get some batteries and a small switch and solder it all, but it looks like I\'d need a resistor or whatever!
 

Shawn R. L.

New member
Originally posted by DaN
Cheers Shawn :p
I have some tiny LEDs after seeing one of JameSessions threads about Surface mounted LEDs - the only problem is they use a weird voltage and I\'m crap at electronics :( :p lol

I was hoping I\'d be able to just get some batteries and a small switch and solder it all, but it looks like I\'d need a resistor or whatever!

A lot of them run on those tiny \'button\' batteries. They\'re probably thin enough to simply mount under the base and you might be able to make a simple pressure switch so that when the mini is standing upright the light goes on.

Some of those button batteries will run a fairly good size LED for 2 weeks STRAIGHT.
 

Shawn R. L.

New member
Another way you can do crystals is to carve them out of clear acrylic and get some of the \'stained glass\' paint at a hobby store. I\'ve used some for another project and the color is very saturated.
 

No Such Agency

New member
Those tiny, tiny LED buttons from the dollar store might be useful to light up a base somehow. You know, the cheesy ones with [your country\'s flag] or Santa Claus and flashy LED patterns embedded in it?

EDIT: Like this:

blinkers.gif
 
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