About BlacksmithSONG

# About BlacksmithSONG

There are two of us. We're married, we've been running this shop for about two years,
and between us we do all of it — choosing what to stock, building the sets, shooting
the photos and the video, answering your emails, and taping the boxes shut.

Here's the part most shops leave out, so we'll put it first: **we don't cast the
weapons.** We're not a foundry. We source the die-cast pieces, and then we do
everything that happens after that. Which turns out to be most of the work.

## Why we started building sets

Our early photos looked like everyone else's. Clean cloth, a couple of books to prop
the blade at an angle, decent light, done.

Then those photos started turning up on other people's listings.

You can't really stop that. What you can do is make something that doesn't transfer.
So we started building a world for each piece — a specific place it might have been
left, put together by hand, shot once, ours. It's also why there's a small
BlacksmithSONG plate somewhere in every scene. Not a watermark stamped on afterward.
An actual object we set down in the shot.

## What happens to a piece before you see it

1. **It arrives and we open it.** Anything with real damage doesn't go any further.
2. **We weigh it and measure it.** Every gram and every centimetre on this site came
   off our own scale and our own ruler, not a spec sheet. If a listing says 137g, we
   weighed it.
3. **We decide where it belongs** — a shrine, a ruin, a snowfield, the corner of a
   forge that went cold a long time ago.
4. **We build that place.** Model the terrain, print it, prime it, paint it, wash the
   recesses, drybrush the edges, seal it flat. Over a thousand hours of print time so
   far, and the shelf of towers and broken arches keeps getting longer.
5. **We shoot it** — the full photo set, plus four videos: the build, the unboxing,
   a short cut and a long one.
6. **It goes into a foam-lined box**, and she tapes it shut and ships it.

## The prop library

The most-used thing on our shelves isn't a prop. It's used coffee grounds. Dried out,
they make better dirt than anything we could buy — right colour, right grain, and
free. Second place goes to moss. Everything else we printed and painted here: gothic
ruins, a crystal tower, staircases, arches, a lot of rubble.

## Where we are now

283 pieces on the site, and the number keeps going up. **About a hundred of them have
a full build** — a set made from scratch for that one weapon. The rest were shot the
old way, and we're working back through them at roughly two a week.

The first set we ever built was for the Dark Moon Greatsword. Calling it a set is
generous. We didn't own a printer yet, so it was a few bought pieces at mismatched
scales stacked up behind the blade and lit hopefully. We're rebuilding that one now,
properly this time — and the sword itself has grown from 22cm to 30cm along the way.
Two years of practice sits between those two versions.

## What these are, and what they aren't

Everything here is unofficial fan art. We aren't licensed by anyone, we don't
reproduce official logos or artwork, and we'd rather say that plainly than let anyone
assume otherwise. The full version is on our [fan art policy](/pages/fan-art-policy)
page.

Every photograph on this site is ours, of the actual item we ship. No CGI, no renders,
no supplier images.

## Say hello

Emails come to the two of us, not to a queue. If something turns up wrong, tell us —
that's what the 30-day guarantee is for, and we'd genuinely rather hear about it than
not.

**support@blacksmithsong.com**