Making Maskwitches: Making Lightstands

This article was original posted in February 2024. We’re in the process of moving the Making Maskwitches blog here to our own site, and thought it would be fun to revisit them in the order they were made, a year ago in 2024. You can browse all the entries as they appear with this tag:

Making Maskwitches

Making Lightstands

Let’s talk about some practical behind the scenes stuff. I have some more to say about the philosophy and meaning of the Maskwitches project, but today has been a building day.

I finally caved and invested some money in some proper photography lights this week. I’ve now got a couple of LED panels. Not the most expensive, but also not the cheapest. I spent a couple of hundred pounds. The array of choice is wild – you can easily spend thousands on lights.

Prior to this arrival, I’ve been using four Ikea anglepoise lamps with some strong LED bulbs in them, with some traditional lighting gels.

Because I make and sell backdrop books for miniature photography all of this is a clear worthwhile investment with multiple uses at Handiwork Games. But gosh I agonise before I spend anything! You just don’t want to get it wrong and waste opportunities.

Once my fancy new panels arrived, I realised I’d managed to buy two solo lights, rather than the set that comes with stands. But! It was less loot to buy just the two lights, and the stands won’t really fit in my photography area. They have wide tripod legs, and there’s no room for that.

So I figured why not make something? The panels come with the necessary “universal” fixings, so provided I can make something with a solid piece of metal tube or bar that can marry with the clamps on the lights? Great! I can actually make it to my own specifications.

I raided the off-cuts pile, and trawled through my various boxes of fixings, and found enough bits to make four stands. Two tall ones (slightly different heights, which makes sense to me) and two small ones, which will hold the lights as close to the table as possible. The nice flat bases will mean I can build sets on top of them as I need to.

I’m very pleased with the results. And literally just ninety-seven hours of woodwork, £14,000 of tools, and three minor injuries has saved me twenty pounds on some light stands.

I’m joking. Making things is cool. And the things might work better for being made by you, for you!

Having messed about with these new panels I’m going to have to concentrate on refining my technique – the colour is so strong in comparison to my old gels!

Stone Man

This is Stone Man. I built him today from individual pieces of slate, that really did not want to stay together. But I got there in the end, after several glue fails and complete collapses.

I think the colour in this shot is a little too much, even after some work in Photoshop. As mentioned above this, is going to take some experimentation, since my camera is reading the light might more strongly than my eyes are.

Stone Man is taking quite a different form to the other spirits which I’ve made so far, but that’s all for the good. I want them to be extremely varied and individual.

Naming of Spirits

Speaking of spirits – last week we released a reduxed version of The Naming of Spirits – a free pdf preview of one of the tools you’ll find in the new edition of Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland.

You can grab it for free here:

Get it here

Please be aware that it’s flagged as adult content because it contains some scary stuff, and the names of body parts you might not want in a gaming product for young folk. That means you’ll need an account at DrivethruRPG to get it.