The Wildhearts

Well, something like that. Ok… maybe just the lights bit.

But hang on – there’s more to this little project than just lights

(note the audio in the video isn’t brilliant for a number of reasons – firstly, it’s a lo-fi recording because there’s only so much space and data throughput you can achieve with a low-powered 8-bit microcontroller. But also, the song itself is recorded with heavy distortion on the vocals for the verses. And it’s being played through a tiny speaker, with no enclosure or bass-boosting properties. In real-life, even on this relatively low-fi playback device, it does actually sound much better!)

So wait – we’ve got lights. Of course we’ve got lights. It wouldn’t be a Blinky Production ™ without flashing lights.

But we’ve also go sound. Music even.

But look closer…..

Flashing lights synchronised with the music???

In real-time? On a crappy little 8-bit Arduino?

I know, right?

Now I just need to wait for the glue to dry on the “light rigging” and add the whole thing to the diorama…..

Of course it wouldn’t be a Blinky diorama if it didn’t flash/make a noise/move in some way. So I’ve still got some electronics to complete. But I think I’m done with the painting now.

I’m rather pleased with the way the diorama has turned out. I’m particularly impressed that I managed to get the arm tattoos and they don’t just look like bluey-green blobs and you can actually make out the (basic) shapes.

I’ve never been one for dioramas, preferring to paint gaming pieces for games I never seem to play. I think I might have found a new hobby within the hobby….

Most days I find social media hard work.

I love the internet. I love using the ‘net, I love online communities, forums, and this little niche where people paint tiny little plastic figurines and create tiny little works of art for no reason other than a shared love of nonsense.

But social media can be difficult.

For every picture of a dog balancing a cornish pasty on its nose, there are many more warning of impending doom/global conspiracy/political malfeasance. Sometimes I feel like doom-scrolling through my Facebook feed is a trial, rather like watching the news during a natural disaster, instead of an enjoyable way to catch up with my friends.

But sometimes – when something like this happens – social media can be as joyful and entertaining as it always promises it is.

I was rather pleased with how my tiny little rock band was turning out. But they just looked out of place on a bare shelf. If you’re going to re-create the noisiest b*stards in the country, they can’t just be standing around doing nothing – they need to be actually playing!

So I hit Thingiverse and found a miniature drum kit.

Like a lot of re-scaled miniatures, simply taking a larger model and scaling it down isn’t always 100% successful. But it works well enough to sell the idea…

Although this was little more than a “dry-fit” while painting the instruments and amps, this little vingette alone creates a lot of atmosphere!

Here’s Ritch Battersby at a pre-concert soundcheck, while Ginger has popped out to walk the dog, CJ’s gone for a sandwich and Danny’s round the back having a sneaky ciggie before the first rehearsal run-through.

I’m particularly pleased with the way the drumkit and the Marshall guitar stacks have come out. The cymbals retaining their circular ridges, even when scaled down so heavily, is a particularly nice detail.

I’m really looking forward to finishing painting this, so I can get on with the electronics.

Did I not say?

Of course, it’s going to be full of unnecessary electronics. Yes – of course – LEDs for stage lights. But wouldn’t it be great if the noisiest band in the UK actually…. well…. made some noise?

I was really enjoying taking on this project. I got to listen to a load of tracks I hadn’t heard since I was a much younger lad (The Wildhearts are regularly on my playlist but some of the early 4-track singles don’t appear in online streaming services, so often get skipped) and reminisced about how good a lot of the music in the 90s actually was.

I was also trying to embrace my “cartoon-y” style of painting.

It’s not a style I particularly wanted to develop, and I much prefer the more realistic look that other people acheive. But it’s almost like I can’t help the way the paint comes out of the brush. So I’ve stopped fighting it, and just accepted that a lot of my minis are going to look a bit “old school” cartoon-y.

Look, the long and short of it is… I forgot to take photos while painting.

I tried to treat the band as a “unit” of soldiers, and tried a sort of batch-painting approach. This meant slapping on contrast paint to block in the colours (this is my preferred method of painting now) then picking out the high points in a brighter colour.

A bit of black-lining where two simliar-looking colours meet and a bit of dry-brushing to pick out the tiny details like guitar strings.

To be honest, it felt a bit creepy and stalker-y trawling the internet looking for photos a bunch of gnarly-looking hairy blokes – and on more than one occasion, Mrs Blinky asked if maybe I was taking my love of the music that one particular band makes just a little too far?

She might have a point.

But at the same time, I can’t help but feel a little bit pleased with myself that the tiny 28mm dude on the tabletop has the same type of tatoos as the big 6ft reprobate it was based on. (I had to use a bit of artistic licence painting the tattoos a blue-green colour rather than black, which just looked too “stark” at 28mm scale.)

I tend to just use whatever resin is to hand when I’m 3d printing. It just so happened that I had some AnyCubic Eco peach-y coloured resin in the vat, and needed to top it up. I had some white resin to hand, so slopped it in.

The result? Meet The PinkHearts…..

This was my first attempt at recreating actual real people in miniature. I’d made a street-scene for my cyberpunk Titan Forge competition a few months back (https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1497669/) and quite enjoyed using reference photos to make a slightly-more-realistic looking diorama so set about looking up footage of The Wildhearts playing live.

Both CJ and Ginger play sticker-splattered Gibson “Lucille” ES335 guitars live. Ginger ofter changes his guitars around (pictured here, the f-hole version of his guitar) and has even been known to play a Flying-V.

But it’s almost impossible to find a photo of CJ playing live with the Wildhearts playing anything other than a Gibson ES335. It was time to put my Blender skills to the test…

In all honesty, I spent far too long on this modification as I would have liked. The first Gibson guitar model I found on Thingiverse and hacked into my .stl didn’t really work. I spent hours removing the Stratocaster from the original model (using multiple boolean operations to remove it piece-by-piece) then boolean merged the Gibson guitar in place.

But when I put the modified .stil into the slicer, the guitar model was hollow and only a couple of pixels wide even at the thickest part!

So I downloaded a different guitar model and used that instead. The same thing happened.

I kept making minor changes to the original .stl and merging in the replacement guitar, exporting as .stl and running it through my Chitubox slicer to see that the model was consistently solid.

This took aaaagges. But, eventually, I had a 3d-printable .stl of a bald-headed guy appearing to play a Gibson ES335 in place of the Stratocaster he originally held.

All that remained was to find a “pork pie hat” on Thingiverse, rescale it and plop it on his head. I added a simple cylinder shape between to the two not only to fill any gaps, but also to represent a headband/headscarf.

Having spent far too long on this one particular character, I figured “screw it, Ginger can just play a Flying-V in this vignette”.

I grabbed a couple of models of the classic 12×4 Marshall cabinet and guitar amplifier “head” and threw each model into Prusa slicer to add supports ready for printing….

The HeroForge website (http://www.heroforge.com) is beautifully simple and really intuitive to use. What surprised me was the sheer range of choices for miniatures.

It didn’t take me long to filter out all the medieval animal-hide clothing and focus in on just the “modern” apparel – which, although limited, provided enough range and choice for four basically scruffy-looking herberts.

Now, personally, I’d have liked to be able to scale the instruments (a bass guitar should be noticeably larger than a “regular” six-string guitar) but it’s a minor detail I can forgo for now.

I can’t really criticise HeroForge for having a limited selection of guitars to choose from either – an acoustic and a couple of electric guitars is about it. But, then again, it’s really more a website for building fantasy adventurers, isn’t it? So we’ll let them have that one too.

I’d have liked a couple more choices of hairstyles (dreadlocks and punky spiked rather than just a mohecan for example) but I managed to get them “close enough”.

After an hour or so of messing about on the HeroForge website, and about $28 later, I had four .stl files ready for printing.

A few weekends ago, the Beastie Boys introduced us to the HeroForge 2.0 website (https://www.beastsofwar.com/featured/win-your-hero-forge-2-0-miniature-design-mantic-goblins-their-best-range-yet-weekender/).

I’d tried the website a couple of times in its earlier incarnations and wasn’t particularly impressed. But the sheer range and quality of minis that people were creating piqued my interest again. I had an idea for a diorama, but getting custom minis commissioned would make it unviable.  Armed with a new-found knowledge of (very basic) Blender hacking skills, I figured if HeroForge could get me “close enough” I could have a go at tweaking and personalising the minis from their website.

“Make your own heroes” bellowed @lloyd.

So I did.

This bunch of ugly buggers are the Wildhearts.

I first came across them as a teen, finishing my sixth-form A-levels while living in a friend’s shed (I left home at sixteen and was something of a gobshite). I’d saved up enough spare change from my meagre Income Support to pay for me and a few friends to get into the Tivoli nightclub to see this raucous new band (using a combination of a housing benefit “wheeze” and doing a bit of cash-in-hand work at weekends, I’d often “spread my good luck” with fellow school-friends and pay for us to stay out ’til silly-o-clock, even on a school night!)

A loud, messy, troubled band playing a mix of “melodic punk” – they quickly become “my band” and my heroes.

I recently saw the band when they played at the Concorde 2 in Brighton and they are every bit as good, loud, angry and awesome as I remembered from that day in 1993 when I first saw them live.

So when the OnTableTop crew invited us to make our own heroes, I knew exactly what I was going to make – not a lizard-headed necromancer or a bare-chested barbarian…. I was going to make my heroes in miniature.