Brilliant! Pt1

Every so often a project idea shoves itself into my brain and refuses to leave until I work on it. It consumes my life, where every waking moment is spent obsessing over each detail.

The ideas generally never pan out and after a week or two testing different theories out, the drive eventually goes away.

My current project was the idea of using LED lights in mini's. Since my current game is Malifaux, that meant using a crew where glowing from the inside was going to be natural. Thank God the Dark Debts boxset was made in plastic

A whole crew that revolved around spreading Brilliance, a corrupt light that the Hungering Darkness could feed off of, was the perfect crew to play around with.

Unfortunately I don't know anything about LED's or how to wire them. After several days reading various tutorials and learning about using resistors to keep the lights from burning out, etc etc...

I found this site. Not only are the lights pre-soldered for me, but they even come with the correct resistors to prevent burnout! It's even cheaper to buy 10 or more! SOLD!

They sell several different sizes, the smallest being the Nano-chip LED. The light is as small as the eye on Washington's face on a quarter. Despite the size, the lights are incredibly bright. Do not stare at them too long, otherwise you'll be seeing glowy afterimages for an hour.

I don't have any Work In Progress pictures as they seem to have vanished, but the general idea for me was very careful drilling using a hand powered drill through the feet and neck area, eventually meeting in the middle. I have a pretty good sense of location, because I generally don't miss connecting the two tunnels.

The wires on the lights are small enough that even using the smallest drill bit I had, I could string in 2-3 lights with little trouble. Of course that only really came up with some of my bigger models.

Once I had the tunnel for the wire drilled out, I carved a little groove to fit the Nano-chip LED inside, generally the chest area and spun out some cheap Fiber Optics cable to continue the journey up to the eyes.

I use the fiber optics cable for the eyes instead of trying to fit two lights inside the heads of my models. Some of them, especially the Beckoner's had incredibly tiny skulls. With the cables sticking out (like slug eyes), I could paint the whole model without worrying about covering up the eyes, and then trim the cables down to normal size.
If you look closely, you can see everyone look like humanoid slugs. :)