A New Way Of Modelling Energy Blades?

I'm not saying this has never been done before, but personally I don't recall ever seeing energy blades on a miniature done this way, so it's new to me at least. And I'll confess to being somewhat proud of coming up with it by myself, even if it turns out I'm not the first person to pull it off.

The Sword:
A while back I was working on a 3D printed statue (which I'll finish someday...), and ran into an issue where several small curved blades were too delicate and snapped off. I eventually figured out a way to internally support a blade with a steel pin. And then one day I had an idea: what if I did the same thing, but with clear resin, and painted the internal pin white?

I started by modelling a simple curved blade, with a channel inside that followed the curvature. It was surprisingly difficult to actually print this out; for some reason the channel would often only go halfway up the blade, or even less. The files looked fine, but I would get inconsistent results even from a single print batch. Initially I had the channel go to the tip of the blade then stop, but in the end I had to make it go the entire way through the blade and out the tip. Eventually I was able to get a few successful prints (out of a lot of failures). I took an 0.6mm steel tailor pin and carefully bent it to match the curvature of the channel, grinding down the tip to be fairly round instead of pointed. I primed the pin and then painted it white.

I then carefully glued it in place at the right depth using superglue - a process that failed at least once, as you have to work fast to get it in place before the superglue sets. I did this before the "final curing" of the printed blade so that it would be soft enough to deform over the pin, making it easy to slide the pin into place. After the pin was glued in place, I finished curing the blade with a UV lamp. I then used UV resin to fill the leftover recess in the tip, then carefully sanded it to shape. I also sanded the rest of the blade smooth, which I figured would also add some tooth to the surface to help with the painting.

I then brushed on a VERY thin coat of Formula P3 Blue Ink mixed about 1:1 with Vallejo 73.596 Glaze Medium; I had to be careful to get a light even coat, brushing the glaze on then basically brushing most of it back off. I then airbrushed the blade with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX 112 UVCut Gloss to smooth it out and protect the clear resin from UV to try to reduce the yellowing that happens over time in clear resins.

Coupled with the OSL the results are pretty good, with a bright core and a darker, more saturated "aura", much like the classic rendering of a lightsaber.

Kara Mint:
The model is Kara Mint by HardWitch-Games, I modified the 32mm pre-supported model by removing the blade and leaving a hole in the hilt for a pin, printed it at 105% scale (which is just what felt like it fit next to my Marcher World models) using Phrozen ABS-like matte grey resin on my Longer Orange 4K. The base was made from GSW Brown Stuff using Shiboicarus' Space Station Roller A, printed at 69% in order to fit in with my existing GSW texture rollers.

After priming with Mr. Hobby Surfacer, I basecoated the model with Vallejo 71.073 Model Air Metallic Black, thinned with Vallejo 71.261 Airbrush Thinner. I first ran this through a GSW airbrush paint filter cup to try to avoid the blockage issues I was having previously. This was using my new Harder Steinbeck Ultra 2024 airbrush, which so far has indeed been far superior to the cheap double-action airbrushes I've been using so far. Nevertheless I made sure to brush the metallic black into all the recesses with a long-bristled brush; I'm starting to feel that 3D printed models have a tendency to have more hard-to-reach areas that traditional cast models, probably due to the different restrictions imposed by the production method (and also perhaps due to the differing experience of the creators).

I then sprayed the model with Vallejo 71.072 Model Air Metallic Gunmetal from about 45 degrees. This came out brighter than I had expected; even though I shook up the dropper bottle a fair bit, I wonder if the paint had separated from the pigment? Maybe not. I did follow this with a spray of Vallejo 72.053 Game Color Chainmail Silver from almost directly above, but I'm not convinced this actually did much as I wasn't sure I could actually see any real difference.

I initially basecoated the cloth in Citadel Foundation Mechrite Red and the "underclothes" in Vallejo 70.862 Model Color Black Grey. After cleaning up the basecoats I washed the steel and black cloth in Citadel Shade Nuln Oil. I tried to shade the red cloth with The Army Painter WP1138 Quickshade Washes Red Tone mixed (1:1-ish) with Vallejo 73.596 Glaze Medium. This didn't really seem to do much, so I went back with a couple of washes of straight Red Tone, which of course tended towards the recesses as it was designed to do, rather than shading all over. This didn't darken it much overall, but did pool into a few spots and darken a lot there, which I didn't like.

At this point I changed my mind about the red, and decided to go with a magenta instead. But my only magenta paint was Formula P3 Murderous Magenta, so I needed to start with something darker. I went over the red with a couple of layers of Redwood Brown, but that still didn't feel dark enough so I glazed it with a roughly 1:1 mix of Citadel Shade Agrax Earthshade and Vallejo 73.596 Glaze Medium - however this didn't seem to darken it as much as I expected, except where it pooled in the recesses. I figured it would have to do and moved on to the highlighting.

I edge-highlighted the grey cloth with Vallejo 70.869 Model Color Basalt Grey as I wanted it to stay fairly dark. The steel was edge-highlighted with Vallejo 72.052 Game Color Silver. With this done I glazed the areas I wanted to be brass/gold with Formula P3 Blazing Ink thinned with the glaze medium.

I had just watched a fantastic video from Ninjon, and was eager to try a (highly simplified) version of the cloth texture painting technique he used. I blocked out the basic highlight areas of the magenta cloth with the P3 Murderous Magenta, then I thinned it down and feathered it on over the block-highlights and the surroundings, extending the highlights but also creating gradient and texture using multiple passes. I then mixed Murderous Magenta with Citadel Edge Fulgrim Pink and blocked out some smaller highlights, then thinned the mix with water and P3 Mixing Medium and feathered it on in the same way. I had originally planned to apply a magenta ink glaze to tie the colours together a bit more, but I decided it was fine like this.

Finally I could move on to the base. I was having a hard time deciding on a colour, so I asked for advice from a couple of painting discords. The most popular suggestion was turquise (followed by green), which I liked more the more I thought about it. So I put down a solid coat of Formula P3 Boiler Black, then edge-highlighted it with Green Stuff World 1876 Metallic Paint Aqua Turquise. I drubrushed over it with the same colour to soften the edge highlights somewhat, then washed the base with (old) Nuln Oil. This left it looking very desaturated, with very little colour visible; there was barely any difference from the steel on the model. So I glazed it with a roughly 1:1 mix of the Vallejo glaze medium and Formula P3 Turquise Ink.

I wanted to try airbrushing a glow to accentuate the energy sword, but was feeling nervous as I had never done it before. I went looking for youtube videos on airbrushing OSL, but most of the ones I found actually did this first then painted the rest of the model after, and of course it was too late for that. However I did finally stumble onto a useful video from Paint by Az, and another from Slayer Miniatures, that cleared things up in my head and - along with some encouragement on Discord - gave me the courage to give it a shot.

So I started by airbrushing a tiny bit of Daler-Rowney 011 FW Acrylic Ink White onto the model, and followed it with a rough spray of Formula P3 Blue Ink. And I stopped there because it already looked overwhelming. I was struggling to control the flow here; my compressor doesn't have a good regulator so I've been finding it really hard to put down light controlled sprays, I ended up putting down far more paint than I had intended and I'm probably lucky it wasn't even heavier than that.

Finally I painted the base rim with Vallejo 70.950 Model Color Black, attached the sword, and varnished the model with Mr. Hobby Mr. Color GX 112 UVCut Gloss followed by 113 UVCut Flat once the gloss coat was dry. I marked the bottom of the base with Dr. Ph. Martin's Pen-White using an Isomars 0.4mm technical pen (which somehow seems to have rusting issues; I'm thinking of replacing it with a Rotring or Koh-I-Noor).


I think she looks pretty good despite what's actually a fairly simple paint job. I enjoyed trying some new techniques, and the actual painting didn't even take all that long (in actual man-hours), once I had figured out the sword at least.

I think I can get better results for the glowing blade by using tinted casting resin, that I cast directly onto the painted pin. It might be tricky, but if it works it could potentially look better (I imagine it will give a brighter core while having a strong "aura" colour), and should avoid the need to use UV resin to fill a hole. In the future I want to try to build an actual glowing lightsaber using LEDs in the hilt; I don't know if I can get it to fit in the hands of a 35mm human figure, but I intend to try. Eventually.