State of painting

So what's up, you say? Well I'll tell you!

The Malifaux project is churning along nicely and I now have three models painted from my crew of seven. More on that further down. In the hobby gear department I purchased a paint rack from the good polish people at HobbyZone. Great quality and construction, at a reasonable price. I could almost fit all my paints in it... so here is my current painting setup:

The big thing about this setup is that I can take it out, paint, and then stow the whole thing away. I am blessed with a very understanding and patient wife, but still, the place has to look nice.

Below is my Copycat Killer totem, a fun little fellow who is quite high up in my want-to-paint queue at the moment.

And next to him you can see another new purchase - grey primer in a bottle. This stuff can either be airbrushed on or painted on with a brush. I did the latter on the Copycat Killer, and I think the results are stunning. The paint goes in everywhere and does not leave any streaks that I could see. So if I'm just going to prime one little model, I will not waste spray can primer on it anymore. Love it!

The next pic is my current WIP gang, excluding the Copycat Killer. The Big Mek is also something I really look forward to painting, but I promised myself to finish the boyz before painting another ork unit. So he will have to wait. I took a break from the orks and now I am actually starting to feel quite inspired to paint them. That's a good thing!

Madame Sybelle was in the WIP shot above, but by the time I started writing text to these pictures I had actually finished her. So here is a group shot of the painted half of the Redchapel gang. I have stopped using spray varnish to protect minis since it usually leaves a nasty frosting. These are instead varnished with vallejo matte varnish on dropper bottle, a product I can't believe I could work without. It dries totally clear and matte, without disturbing the colours at all.

Building a portable gaming board, part 4

 This is part four, here is part three.

Prior to a small friendly tournament in the beginning of June, I finished my gaming board.
I applied a couple of layers of earth/mud brown color with a sponge and large flat brush (using dry brushing strokes, but with quite a lot of paint in the brush)

Tools!

Work in progress

After three layers of increasingly brighter brown

Table ready for tournament!

 I'm quite satisfied with the result, although some lessons were learnt:

• Don't glue the MDF boards and styrofoam together until you are finished with painting
• Work with the whole gaming board all the time, don't do one MDF board at a time, the texture on the three boards will turn out very differently if you do.
• Apply paint in random patterns/circles. Don't work from one edge to another (if you mix new paint at some point, you will have a noticeable change in color on the board)
• Don't use wet sand
• Don't mix glue and sand. Apply glue and then sand. 
• You might not want that last layer of highlight color all over the board... :)

Land speeder magnet extravaganza

First one done, now I know enough to post a tutorial based on the second one (without the rookie mistakes). This is just an overview of the loadouts. Details on clever spots to put magnets coming up later. All in all a fun but very challenging kit. Gunz blazin'! :)

Paint and Assembly Night

Spent yesterday evening with the Warhammer Geeks painting and assembling miniatures. I finished some terrain (WIP post here) and made nice progress on my first Howling Banshee.

Home made terrain

Howling Banshee (weapons not finished)

Terrain, Ruin WIP

Started to experiment with some terrain modelling.

Base is 4mm MDF, the walls are pieces from a plasterboard. Not sure the plaster will be durable enough, but it was really quick to build something useful.

Painted with cheap acrylic paints. Brown for the ground  (will add flock on the ground), and three layers of different shades of gray on the stone pieces. The two lighter grays were sort of "wet" dry brushed, turned out ok and it was really fast.

Wraithlord and War Walker WIP

Wraithlord and War Walker WIP, been experimenting with shadows, layering and highlights. 

War Walker wip

Started painting my war walker in Biel-tan craftworld colors. So far only undercoat and base coating with Orkhide Shade, plus som minor wash details on the engine parts. 

Dire Avengers

Experimenting with the Dire Avenger's blue armour. Pretty happy with the result. Did a mordian blue base coat, highlight with 50/50 ice blue and mordian blue, then a washed out ice blue highlight. Finished with asurmen blue wash over the whole armour to tone down the highlights. Plan to add a thin highlight with ice blue to make it pop, but I need steadier hands...

Biel-tan weapon platform

Paint job almost finished, some details left. Need to decide on basing for all units.

Biel-tan Guardian wip

White base coating, Asurmen Blue wash to define recesses. Needs white highlighting and green helmet + details.

Back out of chaos black

Fellow dads (and non-dads)!

Sorry for my lack of pen-and-camera wielding lately. I blame the flu actually, persistent headaches takes the fun and relaxation out of painting, but this is my first night without painkillers, so here is a mini update for your WIP pleasures. If by any chance my painting does not give you any pleasure at all, you may surf elsewhere. Try Hammerit.

My current batch on the painting station:

I try to keep at least one Ork in rotation since it pleases the missus... I have assured her that satisfying amounts of pink will be added at later stages. The captain has been on my todo list way too long now, but I wanted to wait until I had done a couple of models with good results. In my opinion, ones army leaders should be painted with twice the dedication of the grunts! I will leave the banner for last, since I haven't decided on the color scheme yet. The rest of the model is however basecoated now and is ready for washes.

The assault marine is on low prio, since I want to do the whole group at once.

Paint safely,
PD

Strokes and streaks

A couple of weeks ago I assembled my first vehicle, a Rhino. Yes I know - don't buy Rhinos, buy any other rhino based vehicle and get more options for your money. I learnt that the hard way, by feeling stupid when I realised the simple truth.

Now I have started painting it. I threw myself onto the task thinking I could just use the same methods I do when painting a regular ultramarine. However, it seems I might have been a bit hasty.

I'm not saying I need an airbrush, but oh god, I need an airbrush. My paintbrushes are too small and I don't have the patience to keep the paint as thin and paint as many layers as it would take to do the job properly with a paintbrush.

So my friends, what should I do? I can't motivate buying an airbrush right now. Plus it will take time to learn how to use it properly. Is the GW "Tank brush" any good? I would love to hear some top tips on vehicle painting.

xoxo,
Paintbrush Tweetwood

All your base are...

...not done yet. But that has a logical explanation (no, not laziness): I need to spray it with some purity seal matt varnish before gluing on the grassy patches. Other than that, I think I'm done. I could fiddle around a bit with the details and I can't say the lettering on the parchments are my finest work, but it's good enough™. And knowing when you are at good enough is a very important lesson to learn if a busy dad is ever going to get that army painted.

Finecasts are really fun to paint, but going back to regular resin models will be nice and easy. It will probably be a while until I do another finecast. That Librarian in terminator armor looks tempting though...

Next up: finishing my Rhino. Also, building some kind of lightbox for taking pictures of minis! A trip to IKEA is long overdue; baby stair protection gate thingy and better lighting for my hobby.

Cheers,

P Daddy

Painting together

Strangely christmas did not equal lots of free time for painting or playing 40k. But now things are starting to look better, and I invited two other friends who play for a spot of evening painting. Having the rival Tyranid and Eldar armies at the same table kind of spurs my competitive vein.

Some progress was made on the Chaplain, as seen below. I added some reds and washed the gold, metal and parchment areas. The face also got some more definition. I really hope the next step is edge highlights, but now I am starting to regret that I didn't just drybrush the black areas with some grey as a first step.

I also got a lot done on my first tactical squad. There is one more waiting in my case, just sprayed with Chaos Black, but I want to get this one done before starting on the other one. It is kind of a study on how fast I can manage to paint with quality. The squad still needs washing, highlighting and details noone will ever notice.

And no, basing is not a priority in my house. ;-)

Finecast finery

My very first finecast miniature is a Space Marine Chaplain, and I must say I am as impressed with the level of detail on these models as I am disappointed in the quality of the casting. It really looks stunning, but there are a LOT of casting artifacts and the bottom part was almost impossible to fit in the base. I emailed GW and they were very nice - apparently you can get a replacement by sending your bad miniature in to them.

After some serious scalpel action and superglue love I decided to keep it and start painting. The picture below shows my current progress. I use Chaos Black primer, and after that I basecoat with mixes of watered down foundation paints. Areas to be gold are basecoated with Graveyard Earth.



The next step is to add two coats of gold and then clean up the black areas to prepare for some grey edge highlighting. Then I will start layering the cloth/parchment stuff and purity seals. Fun stuff, but I really really need a working lamp and that Paint Station Plus I ordered to be able to work comfortably in the sofa next to the Mrs. Expect a review of that as well!

Basics

Basecoating a tactical squad and carving out terrain props from pink styrofoam. That poor squad looks so boring and flat right now, but soon some of them will stand out from the crowd.

Actually, sculpting terrain might just become something of a passion. I need to get some cheap black and white paint for that purpose though. Note to self: carving XPS styro eats carpet knife blades...