Stackers: The Next Generation

Shortly after I decided to revisit the traditional BMC stackers by creating some corner pieces to supplement them, a new crafting channel appeared on YouTube that took the original concept and made it significantly more adaptable and configurable. It’s introduced on the video below, and subsequent entries on the channel cover creating the basic building blocks and a number of add-ons, as well as techniques for painting the pieces.

So far I’ve built the basic blocks, some battlement pieces and corners and tiles to go with them, doors, and a bunch of arrow slits. I’m not going to go into too much detail on my build since the videos already cover it pretty well; instead, I’ll share some notes on my experience along the way and a couple of things I did differently.

Firstly, I’m jealous of the video’s creator because the foam he has access to seems to be nicer than the greenish stuff I get locally. It looks like it cuts cleaner, takes texture better, and might even be stronger. I tried making the arrow slits out of the local XPS. This process involves super-gluing sticks at an angle to the backs of thin sheets of foam… which seemed to work out in the video in spite of the tendency of that glue to dissolve foam. However, my experience was that the resulting units were too weak to survive the gentle paint-brushing of the mod-podge process – over half of the ones I’d made had the shafts snap off simply from trying to paint them.

Rather than continuing to attempt to glue those little sticks back on to already-weakened foam or try to do some sort of multi-layered cardboard assemblies and adhere the sticks to those, I instead tried out my fledgling TinkerCad skills and created a 3 printable arrow slit!

I also had some models of single-sided dungeon doors I downloaded a while ago from Thingiverse or one of the Patreons I’ve participated in over the past year – can’t remember which. But I decided that while I had the printer fired up anyway, I’d make a few of those instead of the hand-made doors (because I’ve done variations of those already, here and here).

The wooden parts of the doors as printed didn’t have any texture of their own on the individual slats, so I used an X-acto knife to gouge some lines into them. I initially shrunk the doors down a little from their default size before printing because they looked a little big next to a “mini sizer” ruler object I use to measure things in the Chitubox software I use to prepare files for print. But after looking at the results after my first print of doors and arrow slits, I decided they were a little on the small side next to actual minis, so for the next print I scaled them back up.

For what it’s worth (and for my own records, because I’ll inevitable lose or throw away the scrap of paper I wrote my notes on), I followed the painting guidelines on the channel using the following color combinations:

• For the base color and the final drybrush, I used FolkArt “Linen”
• The first highlight color was a 50/50 mix of Apple Barrel “Pewter Grey” and DecoArt “Snow (Titanium) White”
• Second Highlight was Pewter Grey again, mixed with an equal amount of Apple Barrel “Lite Mocha”
• The third (and more sparingly-used) highlight was 3 parts Lite Mocha to one part DecoArt “Raw Sienna”.
• Everything was finished off with the ubiquitous BMC-style black terrain wash.

Since my 3d modeling skills don’t come close to enabling me to create textures, my arrow slit pieces were pretty smooth. Likewise the stone areas of my printed doors, I thought, needed a little roughness to their surfaces. So after spraying all the pieces with a black primer, I mixed some baking soda into some of the Linen color to get it to the point where I had something thick enough to carry a texture but still spreadable with a paint brush. The rocky parts of my 3d prints were coated with that, with the black coat being left exposed in the center of the arrow slits.

I used some craft metallics on the portcullises and the metal parts of the doors, and a medium brown with a tan dry-brush on the wood sections, and gave everything a black wash.

After sufficient drying time, I had a big pile like this:

… which, with a few minutes’ assembly, became (as an example) this wall:

I still haven’t made a large front gate piece for it, but will probably start on that in the next few days. I’ll probably do some corner pieces like I made for the old-style stackers. With all those new wall-type segments, that means I’ll probably be making more battlements and tiles as well.

I also haven’t done the plug-in pieces for torches, banners, cages, etc. – and I’m considering trying to do them also as 3d print pieces – in part for the practice at using the modeling software – or “mixed media” with both printed and hand-crafted elements.