Monthly Archives: November 2010

Skaven Minis

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Man, that sucks.  They finally do a Games Day mini I can dang about… just in time to move the damn thing out of Baltimore and to Chicago.  What the hell?  Not fair!

Looks like I need to make an arrangement to have someone who will be there to pick one up for me.

In the interest of making this post a bit more than a quick gripe: has anyone else see Mantic’s limited edition Dwarf Engineer w/ Drill?

It’s a shame this thing’s 1) limited and 2) only comes with their £150.00 Grafe’s Iron Legion bundle… ’cause that thing would be the perfect base for a Doom Flayer conversion.  Amirite?

Painting Progress – 20101120

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Past week or so, I’ve been jammed up, waiting on hobby time to make itself available and for some bits to show in the mail.
The bits finally showed up, so I made sure some hobby time presented itself.
First on the list was Skulltaker’s Chariot; I’d been waiting on some wheels to complete the chariot and the juggernaut to pull it.  All of that came together splendidly, until I realized I’d forgotten to order a base for the whole thing.  D’oh!  That should hopefully show up next week.
Tonight, while waiting on some code to checked in so I could compile it, I got the ball rolling on the rest of the Daemonettes.  (I think I’m going to call them “Bloodbrides” or something goofy.)
Speaking of Slaanesh: I’ve started on my first non-Khornate unit for my Daemons.  (The Daemonettes don’t count: they’re for the tournament only.)  I hadn’t set out to shift to an ecumenical list, but a deal turned up where I could buy two Varghulf for $10 each.  Ended up grabbing some other kits from the guy, one of which I was immediately able to turn around and trade for a third Varghulf.  One of those Varghulf turned out to have a fairly miscast arm, which meant a call into GW for a replacement.  
So, with a good amount of greenstuff work, I’ll be fielding four slightly converted Varghulf as Fiends of Khorne.
Not much going on here.  Because they’re so mono-posed, I wanted to do something to make them each a little more unique… and more Khornate.  I’m not entirely satisfied that I’ve made them sufficiently less mono-posed, but I think it’s probably the best I’m going to be able to manage.
Basically, I just stuck some Bestigor horns on their heads.  Lots of greenstuff work, though.  Tons of gap-filling, too.

Painting Progress – 20101108

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Did a lot of random work over the weekend, mostly due to being stuck at my desk while remodeling trucked along.

For starters, I assembled SKULLTAKER and the chassis of his SKULLTAKER CHARIOT.

I need an auction to come through for some bitz before I can go much farther than this, so we’ll have to see how long that ends up taking.  Might be a bit before I finish him.  The chariot’s got something of a wider profile than the pair I built last month: the spikes are the wider, larger sort, and they’re angled out instead of parallel.  Skulltaker’s not a little dude and steps needed to be taken to fit him into his ride.

Briefly considered having the Mouth of the Abyss pull the chariot… but even though its about the same size as the Juggernauts it just looks so smaller, so that’s not going to fly.

Also, got some good deals on some stuff.  I’ll post about most of it as it comes together, but I did snap up a box of Daemonettes to paint up for the Battle for the Cure next year.  Part of the appearance scoring calls for a squad painted pink: after some thought about painted up an octet of pink Bloodletters, I decided it’d be better to just run a squad of pink Daemonettes.

So, I played around with some approaches.  Found one I liked.

In some ways, it’s not perfect.  Red on pink?  Ick.  It was key to me that they tie in with the rest of my Daemons; this is pretty much a one-off unit.

Anyway, as a result, most of the colors are done the same way as with my Bloodletters, etc.  I’m extremely happy with the pink flesh.  Probably more appropriate for Pink Horrors, but whatever.

Pink Flesh
– 3:1 Baby Pink (Apple Barrel) : Dheneb Stone basecoat.
– Ogryn Flesh wash
– 3:1 Baby Pink : Dheneb Stone heavy drybrush
– 3:2:2:1 Water : Baal Red : Matte Medium : Leviathan Purple wash
– Dheneb Stone extreme highlight

The Baby Pink / Dheneb Stone mix isn’t exact.  Each time, it started out with a 2:1 mix that I added more pink to until it looked right.  I ended up keeping some of the dried, unused paint to help get the ratio about right down the line.

The wash is spectacular.  Man, I’ve really started to love putting matte medium into washes that I’m watering down.  It works miracles to keep things from splotching up.

Also, for the heck of it, I put a little pink ribbon on it.  It was an easy little pain in the ass to do.

It’s checkbook receipt onion paper sliced extremely thin.  Brushed with superglue and then wrestled into shape.  That part was the hardest: such a small thing to do.  Then hit with some Tentacle Pink, highlighted with Baby Pink and washed the pink wash above.

I’m very happy with how they came out.  I’ll have to paint up another seven at some point: I won’t need them until March, but it’d be nice do knock them out while I can remember how I did the first one. :)

Finally, I did a good bit of work on three more Bloodletters.  I need a non-Icon-bearing Bloodletter for two of the squads and an Icon-bearer for the third.  Hopefully, I’ll wrap them up pretty quickly: I think I’m a little bored with painting them.

Verdigris – Honored Imperium

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I’m working from home this week while we have some remodeling done, so it wasn’t hard for me to rotate my chair 90° and fiddle with what I touched on Monday night while waiting on an e-mail.  I’d say this thing easily took less than an hour (spread across a workday, but ready in time for the game store tonight).

I set things up by getting the statue ready.  Here’s what it looked like before:

This came together very easily.  Spent a little more effort on it than I normally do: Tin Bitz base followed by a heavy Brazen Brass drybrush, a less emphatic Shining Gold drybrush and a fairly light Burnished Gold drybrush.

I mixed up pretty much the same color I tried out last night.  (Apologies for the crappy focus.)

Roughly equal amounts of Goblin Green and Ice Blue (with a bit more blue than green) and a tiny dab of white (Morrow White; I love the P3 whites).  After mixing this, I immediately decided to add more blue.  In hindsight, I think even more blue would have been the way to go. I’m thinking that maybe 2:1 Ice Blue : Goblin Green might be the better way to go.

Then, a fairly light drybrush of this pretty much everywhere.  That gets me:

Finally, I based it the same way I’ve painted all of my 40K terrain: Ceramcoat Charcoal base, a heavy, heavy Ceramcoat Hippo Grey drybrush and a light Rain Grey drybrush.  This combo looks fantastic.  Really.

The end result is something I’m happy with.  It looks like old brass.  Not super old, not super weathered, but definitely old.  It’s clear there’s room for improvement: more blue, more streaking and some pooling, but I’m happy with it.

Thoughts?

Adventures into Verdigris

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I picked up an Honored Imperium back when it came out.  Very early on, I decided I wanted to paint it up as brass/bronze and weather it up with verdigris.

Mind you, I don’t weather my minis.  When done well, weathering looks amazing, but more often it ends up looking, in my opinion, pretty terrible.  Really, really terrible.

So, expectations for myself are pretty high… but this is a pretty safe place to try it out on.  It’s a piece of scenery that I can strip back down without too much trouble, not a freaking army.

I’ve played around with a couple of approaches.  Unfortunately, I’ve stripped and repainted over some of them before I realize I’ve done it and forgotten to take pictures.

A Gentleman’s Verdigris

Probably the best (and only) great verdigris tutorials come from b. smoove.  He’s got two, in fact: his Chaos Marines and a darker, greener approach for Ogres.

I haven’t quite followed his walkthroughs to the letter (I was working on it and got test models mixed up and switched halfway through: d’oh!).  Here are some results from, following some of his steps.

This is from going much heavier on Burnished Gold (as opposed to the Shining Gold I usually use), with a wash of Scaly Green, Goblin Green and Hawk Turquoise and then an attempt at AGO’s metallic wash (1:1:2 Thraka Green : Leviathan Purple : Water) thinly applied.  It’s lacking a final drybrush of Burnished Gold, though.

Look at the backpack here.  This is kind of a halfway: my usual brass (Shining Gold -> Burnished Gold -> Devlan Mud) and then wrapping up the AGO Ogre way: a wash of Dark Angels Green and Scaly Green followed by a Burnished Gold drybrush.

These look ancient and evil.  Really nasty.  It’s really a great freaking effect.

I like this look… but not for the statue and not for generic patina.

Secret Powders

Also, after an extended e-mail exchange by the unbelievably helpful Mister Justin asking for his advice on how one would go about using weathering powders to get verdigris, I went ahead and ordered his Oxide Weathering Pigments.  (It’s interesting: there are a ton of videos bouncing around the internet on how to use pigments for rust and, the best of my knowledge, no videos about how to use pigments for verdigris.)  

Here are some examples of unskilled efforts to use the oxide powders:

This Tin Bitz with a heavy, heavy Brazen Brass drybrush followed by some stippling of the various powders.
The same stippling of powders, but this time over my usual Brass recipe (Shining Gold -> Burnished Gold -> Devlan Mud).
Even though I’m basically at monkey+football stage with this I think it convincingly ages the mini.  It looks like the real stuff.
And yet I’m not entirely happy with it.  It looks like real patina except, in doing so, it kills the illusion of scale. I mean, basically, the reason we paint these little dudes is to make them look like they’re not a couple of inches tall… and this patina makes them look like extremely little aged statues, not aged statues at a different scale.

Where I Think I’m Going

I think these two approaches aren’t working for me because patina works a little differently.  b.smoove’s approach (and every other approach I’ve seen on the internet) is based on getting the green/turquoise in the deep spots, via a wash.  But, Googling around shows that, really, that verdigris is really on the high spots, not the low spots.

I think that’s part of where the powders are failing me, too: rust collects in the crevasses, unlike patina.  brushing and wiping this stuff on the smooth spots is a lot harder than the details, you know?
So, I think I’m leaning more towards a dry-brushed verdigris approach.  Color-wise, I’m going something more like the Oxides: lighter blue-green.  
Here’s a half-baked attempt at what I’m thinking.  (Look to the head, flamer and pauldrons.)
I think I’d have to go a bit (but not a ton) heavier.
What’s interesting is that the right leg (the one I haven’t really drawn attention to) is almost perfect in the way it covers the area (if not the color): but I can’t remember how I did it!  I’m pretty sure it was one of the b.smoove washes (cut with some forgotten combination of Future, water, matte varnish and rubbing alcohol) followed by an, “Oh crap!  I didn’t mean to wash that!”
Anyway, this is what I’m working with at the moment.  I’ll continue to share my progress.  We’ll see what I end up with.  
Thoughts?  Comments?