Matakishi's Tea House

Can any one recommended a good "printer" or are they all about the same??,the card/paper links have me really excited about building something a spaceship/dungeon something along those lines??.

Any help would be much appreciated,i can spend about a £100 on one,

Thanks tony:)

Any of the well known makes will be fine. The key things you must check is if the printer can take card and what weight, and whether it is a photo printer or a general one.

Now I know some people who swear by using photo printers and matt photo paper, but this is much more costly than ordinary card or paper. The results can be magnificent, especially if the original images are photo quality.  For the sort of figures that Gwindel and One Monk produce though, an ordinary printer and card is more than sufficient.

I use a good, i.e. not budget, paper or card. I set the printer driver on the PC to a decent grade - so check it is not on 'draft' or anything like that.  You'll use more ink but you do get a better result.

Another thing. If you are making figures they need to stand up.  If you print off and assemble the figures using their integral paper bases you end up with the same storage problems as for metal or plastic figures.  One way around this is to print and make them flat and then use pre-made plastic stands, which you can get cheaply from:

http://www.plasticsforgames.co.uk/en/en_prod_cardstands.asp

You can then store all your figures flat and only erect the ones you need.

Yet another thing. Unless you have the money to buy a robocutter, you are going to be cutting out all these figures and floorplans by hand.  This means you'll need a cutting mat (one of those blue or green squares you see in hobby & craft shops). You can't cut out on hardboard or anything similar, because they get very quickly scored and your cuts will get diverted by the scores beneath.

A good 12" steel rule and a sharp scalpel-style knife are the other key tools. I recommend cutting as close as you dare with scissors first and tidying up with the scalpel.  This is because paper and card wear scalpel/craft  blades at a horrendous rate.

One Monk and Gwindel make their figures with thick black borders. This is so you can fold and glue the two sides together knowing that it will mostly match and where it doesn't the black border will hide any shifting of the central image.  I tend to trim the border a bit once I have the figure assembled. One Monk has tutorials on his website which cover this better than I can.

For buildings, vehicles and floorplans I print in paper and glue them onto mounting board.  This is the card used by picture framers. It is stiff, dense, cuts very well leaving a sharp consistent edge. and is resistant to warping.  You can also often pick up big bags of offcuts from framing shops for a few pounds.

I hope that this helps.

Craig.

Thank you for all the help Craig,brilliant stuff i will be studying everything you said in the post.I think paper and card will be the way to go if prices go up any more!!.

Cheers tony:)

Be warned you will get 'scissor-finger', calluses where your fingers meet the scissor holding thingies

Ha ha ha ha.."scissor-finger" i already have "scapel hand" and suffer from "glued fingered" and "part of figure sticking to fingers" plus the famous "paint on trousers"

ha ha ha ha....

How we suffer for our art ha ha ha....tony:)

And then there's modeller's knee.

This is where you repeatedly slam your knees together in a futile attempt to catch that tiny plastic part you just dropped.