Dwarven Blacksmith

I was lucky enough that a friend of mine with a 3D printer kindly produced the free sample from Loot Studios for me of a Dwarven Blacksmith. It comes in 32mm and 75mm scale and he generously printed both for me. I have finally got round to painting one of them. Printed on an Elegoo Mars msla printer it comes out as a nice sculpt. It printed out in four parts, base, body, one hand with hammer and finally anvil, sword and hand combined. Some of the detail is lost in the smaller print so I decided to paint the larger print.

I don't have much experience of 3D printing other than some scatter terrain crates I bought at a show a couple of years ago. Those had obvious layering in them from the print process (I suspect they were printed at a quickest rate possible) so as soon as I started drybrushing them the lines came out. I was therefore intrigued to see where printing has evolved to now. 

I must say I am very much impressed, the dwarf itself has no print lines. 

I initially finished painting the model with the sword being just plain metal, then realised that if he was working the metal it would be glowing hot. Luckily there is a wealth of videos on YouTube of people showing you how they paint glowy metal, so out came the paints again and I'm quite pleased with the result. 

Finally a bit of underlighting makes it look like the sword is the source of light and we get an awesome dramatic shot.

To think my first thought was I might paint it all grey as a statue and stick a bit of moss on it.

I think 3D printing is a really interesting new technology and has lots of great potential. I've yet to play with one myself but from what I understand it takes some work to get them to produce results. I think unless you get to the point where they are almost "plug and play" like a traditional paper printer they will never replace traditional techniques but nonetheless the technology is rapidly improving as we speak. I don't think we'll ever be buying a licence from GW to print out the latest 40k army in time for Christmas for the kids but I can see it becoming more popular.