If you do any kind of terrain building, for tabletop gaming, model trains, diorama-making, or scale modeling, you’re likely familiar with pigment powers. These are colored, powdered chalks that are sold by major hobby supply companies to be used in weathering terrain and models. They’re great, but also expensive at as much as $10/ounce.
But you don’t have to spend that at all. Using a mortar and pestle (or a hobby knife), you can grind up a set of cheap art chalks. They work exactly as well as the commercial chalks and you have a much wider range of colors available.
In this Black Magic Craft video, Jeremy shows just how easy this is.
The same is true for weathering pencils that are new to the market ($8 for 5 pencils). For a few more bucks, you can get an art pencil set and use them in the same way. Here’s a Frostgrave miniature that I did weathering and edge-highlighting on using cheap art pencils.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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