 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby-cheating video when today we're going to talk about removing details from miniatures. So this came about because of a question that happened in a recent hobby-cheating Q&A. Somebody asked me about removing the detail from things. I also saw recently that Richard Gray, who's working on like the ogroid mermidon, had removed some of the details from the shield, the sort of extra occult remontless on there so that he could do freehand on it. And I'll say this is one of my favorite things to do as well. Many years ago when I did a stormcast army, I had removed everything from their shields and sanded them down and such so I could put the freehand markings of the individual units on each one. So that was, this is my little wolf pack of hunters here. So the question is how do we get from this where we have all this sculpted detail to something where it's flat and even and we're able to paint over it or add our own touches to it. Well there's lots of different options we have here at our disposal and I'm going to kind of walk you through my process today. So depending on the nature of the raised stuff, depending on how big it is, you may be able to get some of it gone with just your clippers or your nippers right depending on the kind of tools you have. And some of this certainly you could try to take off with this although as you can see it's just not real effective right. It's even with the the tinier more precise ones. The reality is is that a lot of this stuff is just too thin too small too close to really peel it off like I can get some of these big pieces off and certainly your your clippers are always a good place to start if you can but some of this stuff just isn't going to come up with with these things. So good tool if you've got it. Option the second of course is something like our hobby knife right and this is probably where a lot of us go because certainly it's a lot easier we can we can scrape into them in there. We can just kind of come along and start pulling off the pieces. Now what I'll say about using something like this is one this is a great way to absolutely cut your thumb right open I've done it many times my thumbs are very scarred from it and two you have to be really really careful with this not just because you know please please please anytime you're wielding a knife be extremely careful but two you have to be careful with the mini as well because you need to be taking away tiny little pieces at a time this is pretty lengthy and involved and frankly if I had to just etch off with a knife every one of these I would probably lose my mind. So when the when neither of those work like a storm cast shield like we're making a little bit of progress there but it's taking too long it's time to bring in the big guns. So here we have a Dremel this is a 7700 you can order a similar thing offline it comes with multiple kinds of tips both sanding and polishing this is one of the sanding ones they're very coarse very high or very low grit count I should say that's it put it on high and then we go so what do we do here well we're going to take the shield and you want to make sure that you have a real good handle on this thing because when you start working with it it's going to want to jump and then we just slowly grind away the relevant elements and you can see how much quicker it comes off there now I'm going to go ahead and keep doing that basically what I'm doing is just slowly working up and down the thing I'm not going to show you all that on camera one because this thing is real loud and that can't be a pleasant sound to listen to and two because you don't really need to to watch me do it it's just literally doing what you just saw me do but slowly up and down the thing so I'll continue that for a moment and be right back all right so there you go all nice and removed you do want to be really careful with the Dremel because if the shield jumps out of your hand and you hit your own finger it's going to really hurt sometimes you'll get little plastic pieces because obviously you get some kind of hot which is another tip you want to be working it slowly and then removing it working it slowly and then removing it working it slowly and then removing it don't sit there and bury the tool into the thing don't sit there and take your Dremel and just be like and really like work it in you're just going to carve way too much it's going to you're going to melt the plastic because the heat of the friction and you'll get the tool sunk in there so nice little careful strokes then I take my Xactoblade and I just kind of give it a good scraping and what I'm doing here is just removing any big chunks oftentimes when you work with the Dremel it'll leave behind these little plastic I don't know roll up pieces I guess is what I would call it so that's just you scrape them off that's just the easiest way to go now we've got a smooth ish but rough surface so we don't want we don't want that to paint over that's not anywhere near where we want to be yet so now we're going to grab ourselves something like a sanding stick these come in lots of different versions you can also just use regular old sandpaper that you cut down a size whatever you like this is a course in a medium of course you can get sanding sticks and all sorts of different things but I'm going to start here with the course and just give it a nice little up and down this is nice because it's rounded and it meets right up into the sorry I'm probably shaking the camera there because my hands are resting on the table right up into the the roundness of the shield here we're just we start with the the lowest the most coarse grain of the sandpaper that way again we can just get rid of these nice big chunks just make some good progress and get it down there easy peasy already it's feeling a lot smoother right so now we go up to the medium grip and guess what we repeat this process again sometimes you got to work with this stuff for a little while just to make sure you really get all of it off you want it nice and even so we just sit there and we make sure we get these nice short repeated strokes of it there and now I mean you'll be able to feel by the touch of your hand if it's getting smoother right so now we're really getting somewhere great awesome next up we can go to something like this so automotive stores sell really really high grit sandpaper 400 800 1200 so here I'm going to take a nice little chunk of my 400 out curl it up on my fingertip and just really work that in there over and over again so this is the kind of thing I use to sand stuff down when I want it to be really really smooth because this is a very very high grit sandpaper and it will do a nice job of making a real smooth surface so now we're feeling nice and buttery smooth but we don't have to stop there we can finish it out let's grab some of our 800 which is really high again same thing we'll grab a little corner here you can see how even the dust gets kind of removed at that point because we're getting so so high with the grit okay there's what we took off it the next thing I do is I grab a little touch of water and I just run it over there because sometimes the dust will get down in the cracks and stuff and obscure your vision so there's just a good way to test and see how you actually look so pretty smooth not too shabby we have these cuts up here that happened you know probably from either how we had to angle the the dremel or whatever like that so what what do you do when you're when you're in a situation like that how do you handle these last little pieces up here well there's a couple different options so one thing you can do is you can go ahead and prime the thing and then sand it back down again that's certainly a possibility the other option is you can take something like this so this is our this is plastic putty you can also use perfect putty is another one there's there's lots of them out there doesn't really matter any brand will do so we're going to take just a little a little bit of that we'll use an extra war cry card that I have enough sitting around here take a little bit of that and then what we're going to do is we're going to get a nice wet brush okay go ahead and mix that putty with a lot of water just kind of water it down so we get that kind of goopy mix okay something like that we don't want any of that those chunks anymore then we're going to take our little goopy mix and we're basically just going to paint over the shield kind of in everywhere I want to be make sure it doesn't flow down in any cracks or anything like that where it's just going to sit there now the key is then we just let that dry so this only takes a few minutes to dry so I'm going to let it dry and we'll come back and I'll show you how we finish it off easy peasy all right so everything's dry you can see how because it was thin it settled into those recesses now we just go back to some of our 800 grit or whatever the high grit you're using is and we just give it a nice light sand in any kind of areas where it built up high it'll be scraped off and you'll basically even it all out now we've got a nice even shield and you can see like where it pulled off there that's okay because it that's where it's that's where it wasn't depressed and it was a nice high flat part sunk into all the rest of those and we're good to go you can repeat this by the way multiple times if it's still not good and after you prime it you can just grab your good old friend gloss varnish or something like that you prime it if you still see a small area that's not quite flat after you prime you just give it a nice little solid coat of gloss varnish done and dust it again it'll sink into there and once again you can go and sand it it really just depends on like how perfect you're trying to get it because the reality is is that you know if it was an army I would and it was just like one of 30 40 50 80 guys with shields I'd probably call this a day and feel pretty good about it if it was you know some competition piece where I needed it to be perfect um sure I would sit there and work a lot harder on it so you know you kind of set your own desire of where you want to stop but there you go that's uh that's how you get rid of detail uh so just a recoup a recover real whatever just to go over it again real fast to summarize that's what I'm looking for if you can start with your clippers or your nippers to remove the bulk pieces uh if you've got other small areas of course you can always grab the hobby knife and use that but your good old friend mr. Dremel is going to be your best bet if you've got a big piece you need to get rid of just again remember you want to be very careful with it uh you don't want to chew deeply into it so you need to still move very slowly over the top once that's down get yourself a couple different versions of sanding sticks or sandpaper or something like that start from your courses and then go up slowly uh into uh higher and higher grit until you get to something nice and smooth when you're then trying to repair any damage at the end something like your plastic putty or your perfect putty uh watered down is then your next bet to finish it off one final sand and boom you're done job's a good so there you go that shield's now ready to be attached to uh a storm cast so he can be painted we can give him his own sort of moniker of whatever you know whichever of the uh the chambers are most appropriate for him so there you go uh if you liked that give it a like uh subscribe for additional hobby cheating we have new videos here every saturday if you've got questions drop those below as well as any suggestions for future videos always appreciate that uh but as always i thank you very much for watching this one uh and we'll see you next time