Hey folks,

Studs. They're an important part of quite a lot of PH conversions. And also can be a huge pain to make. That's enough of an introduction, I think. ;)

Well, not quite: There are numerous ways to deal with them. GSing, pin heads, drilling & inserting micro pieces of wire, resin transfers, and prefabricated railroad studs, which also require drilling. I want to be honest about this: As far as I can see, the last method brings the best results. So, why this tutorial?

For me, it's a question of availability (god, is that even a word?) and money. I don't want to buy new drill heads and large quantities of studs atm, when my usage of them will be limited (you know, I'm slow). Especially since I haven't seen them available anywhere in germany and would have to order it from the UK (time, extra costs, et cetera.) To be precise, I'm pretty much bankrupt at the moment, and dont want to buy anything at all. I want a honest-to-god homemade solution using the materials I have at home in large quantities anyway.

And I've found one for me. Here it is.
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Stamped Green Stuff Studs

Now, I've had my deal of experience with GS studs, and after two models, I stopped doing it that way. (Sample: here) It was a huge pain to roll balls of GS so small to the same size, and then, they wouldn't attach to the plastic, but rather to my fingers, so I had to glue them on hile the GS was still soft. (Pressing them to the surface made them big and flat, obviously.) Results were messy and time-consuming.

Now, I'm not sure if anyone posted something like this before (forum search and manual browsing didn't turn up anything of this kind), so sorry if I overlooked something, but as a matter of fact, I developed this myself for my own use. And I really wanted to once share a tutorial with this great and helpful community myself, so here it is. :)

Another advantege of this is that you can make custom forms other than plain round studs, too, with a little more work. More on that later.

- Step 1 -

First of all, you need to craft a stamp. This is as simple as it gets: Just take a piece of sprue and drill a hole. I used a GW drill, because it's the finest I have- finer drill bits might work as well, but I haven't tried it out. Smooth the corners of the drilled side with a file or sandpaper. Done.

Ith's Edit 1: Do not drill to deep. Ideally, the hole will just have the depth of the planned size of your studs. It is quite handy to have a small sausage of putty ready while drilling, and to try it out after each few turns of the drill.



Note that the drill bit size determines the size of the resulting studs.


- Step 2 -

Form a ball of GS, Miliput, whatever you prefer. I used Miliput standard (grey-yellow.). To demonstrate this technique, I applied the studs to another piece of sprue with a flat surface, but it works on any other surface with enough space to fit your stamp onto, which you can also cut and customize.

Then, form some small balls of your putty- they have to be larger then the final stud size. The huge advantage here is the fact that you don't need to be precise about their size, in contrast to finger-forming GS studs, and that they'll stick to the material, not your finger. It's clean, precise, and fast. Just one note: Use a sticky consistence of putty. It shouldn't have rested, yet.

Spread them out over the material in the positions where you want your studs.




- Step 3 -

Now you'll need some household oil. Don't try to fool me, you have some of that at home. ;) Sunflower oil, olive oil, whatever you like. I used olive oil, because I enjoy cooking italian.

Take a spare brush (I have one for this sole purpose) and just paint some oil on the stamp surface. Make sure that you oil the interior of the hole, too!

Ith's Edit 1: Water works as a lubricant, too- don't be spare with it, just dip the stamp into it and use it right away. Immediatly dry the result with the edge of a piece of toilet paper, or something, afterwards. In the meantime, I even prefer using water over oil, as it doesn't get messy if you screw something up.

And then, just press the surface of your custom stamp onto the GS balls. I tend to be quite careful here and re-apply oil on the stamp all 2-3 studs.

Ith's Edit 1: Do not stamp until the rim of your sprue piece reaches the plastic, as this mostly leads to cutting off your stud from its "base" of GS and sucking it into the hole. Ideally, you should do a test run of ~5-10 studs on a spare piece of sprue to get a feeling for it.




And that's about it. Here's our result:



(Note that there are only two studs left here- I decided to make this tut when I had a ball of spare miliput ready without an idea what to make of it. It already had rested around 45 minutes, so it wasn't sticky and soft enough anymore, so I screwed up the other two- no big deal, doesn't happen if you do it right.)

There are varoius ways to go on from here:

a ) Leave the excess, flat putty where it is to simulate a "welded" effect. (see above, works with small amounts only)

b ) Carefully remove the excess putty with an oiled or wet sculpting tool of any kind- I use a knife blade on this.

c ) It's basically a ), just with a twist: you can stamp the studs on an oiled, smooth surface. After letting the material rest, just pull them off, use the excess as a "base", and apply them where you need 'em. Ith's Edit 1: Concerning the oiled surface, of course you have to clean the base (rub it on sandpaper) once they're rested, so you can glue them on without the oil film making that difficult. Or you just stamp them on normal, smooth plastic surfaces and cut them off later.

In the meantime, I'm always stamping a row of studs whenever I have spare greenstuff or miliput left after sculpting something. This is a great side effect, as I -always- have some of that left, and this way, I can apply studs whenever I'm converting a new model and feel like it, without much effort.



d ) Different approach: model whole surfaces or strips of putty onto your models. Then, just stamp all over it. This works very fast, but you need a good eye for the distances in between. After that, you need to get rid of the other marks your stamp leaves, by evening the putty with a sculpting tool of your choice. Reference picture:



(I've added a picture of a studded GW shoulderpad for size referenze. The stud size is just okay for my taste, a bit larger, but you see that it works perfectly with the standard GW drill bits lots of people have at home.)


Example model:


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So, that's it. I've got little experience with this method yet, but I've done a whole shoulderpad in 3-4 minutes, and this is a very convincing result for me, being a guy with shaky hands, little patience, and mediocre to poor modeling experience.

Please note that you can also stamp other forms of small stuff with it you'll need in large quantities: Just take a cast of multilayer tank rivets, for example, use it as a stamp when the putty is fully rested, and apply them all over the model. I'll try that out soon on a scratchbuilt tank, and show the results.

In the meantime- tell me what you think about this.

Cheers,
Ithmari

Nice tutorial, very concise. This deserves a Sticky, in my opinion.

Aye, seconded.

Really nice tutorial Ithmaril, I think I'll have to give it a try :)

third for the sticky on this...

question: if using green stuff, would water work as a lubricant when stamping? i use water to keep green stuff malleable so would it work in this case?

if not water, then what bout vaseline?

top notch tut!

Thanks for the backup, people. I'm glad you find it useful.

Inquisitor Malaclypse: Incidentally, I've been testing water for this method just yesterday to see if that works too, and found out that it leads to even more stable results. So, I've edited this into the tutorial, along with two other bits of info that occured to me after working with this method some more. :)

I hope that mods don't mind that I used color to mark my edits.

I've finally added a finished example model towards the tutorial's end. I also noticed that the text would require some more cleanup now, as I've gotten mor experience with the technique under my belt, so there will be another update soon.