By Craig, on May 23rd, 2013 Randomly I’m working on my photography setup for the finale posts. I learned a lot from the Adepticon photography class and want to put it to good use.
Unfortunately, things seem to be getting in my way. I get a gradient blue background printed, but it isn’t big enough so I have to get another printing done the next day. My lights aren’t bright enough. I find new lights around the house, but one of them doesn’t work in my lamp. Go buy some more.
And then, the final straw for this attempt…
Melty! My old lights were CFLs, but I wanted bright, so I bought some 100W incandescent. This is what happens when heat meets crappy plastic. And woooah did it stink. So now I’m thinking I need to pick up another desk lamp…or two (the three I have already are either broken, or are hard light bulbs to find).
By Craig, on May 21st, 2013 I evened out that stark highlight I had in the mid-section. Watered some codex grey and fixed that up. Patience, and solid brushwork were needed – you have to push the pigment where you want it to be while it floats in the water.
Lamenters Yellow continues to be a great colour for me. I put it over the red to make an orangey-fiery thing. Some of the scales (left of the first photo) they are really dark and not fiery at all. Added some watered Mephiston, some watered Ushapti Bone, more Lamenters, and lastly really watered down some chaos black and painted that in between the scales. That’ll give them more “pop”! 
I think the moment I started to feel better about the model was after I painted the bone. I had started to do the glazing thing again, and it wasn’t working and was creating another horrible patchy mess when I decided to screw it. Layered highlighting had gotten me this far in life, and I wasn’t going to put it down yet. Moments after I started, I felt some of the tension leave my shoulders. When I was done, the model had the sort of characteristic brightness that I like in my models. It was that simple – a few simple spot colours cleaned up and instantly it looked much better.
A bit of work here and there on the ropes, some more cleaning up and that’s where I got to tonight.
Only two more things need doing here — the metal bits, and for me to accept that it’s a good paint job. I could feel something resembling obsessive perfectionism sneaking in today while I worked the skin back and forth trying to reduce the chalkiness. Perfect is the enemy of done, and of good enough.
After that, I glue this sucker to his base. Pretty excited about that!
By Craig, on May 20th, 2013 This one is actual glazing. The light is Fortress Grey, the dark is Codex Grey mixed with P3 Umbral Umber and some Chaos Black. (All mixed with the matte medium and lots of water). The Umbral brings some warmer (“red”) tones in certain places while the rest of the skin is very cool (“blue”), which gives some tonal variation in the skin.
 After the fiasco the other day, I found some foam and blue-tac and now I don’t handle my model anymore. 
I don’t like the belly section on this side. It’s too stark, but every time I try to fix it I end up to stark in the other direction. I think I need to take a mid-tone and even out the muscle shading a bit.
But you can see that the horrible chaos of the last post has been fixed. There is still some mottling in places, but this is good since it’s a dinosaur skin. Painting on the layers of light and dark has given a certain amount of order to the chaos, so it no longer looks like the dogs breakfast.
The other thing I’m trying, is a bit of OSL, (Mr. Wappel) which is why there is some orange and yellow on the underside of the model. Can’t say I’m succeeding, but it should be good enough when I’m done.
That’s the biggest part of the model done, and because it’s a simple model there is really only 4 more colours to paint – gold, the scales, the ropes and the bone. I think I’m going to try to finish this part this weekend and glue it to the base so I can stop calling it my Stealth Suit Stegadon…
By Craig, on May 19th, 2013 A couple changes to my process tonight.
 Like most hobby desks, mine is in serious need of cleaning. I’ve only ever used a wet palette at painting classes. It seemed like something people did when they were taking a class. The other day I was in Michaels and picked up some parchment paper (baking section) and made it happen.You need:
- A plastic lid, or styrofoam plate.
- A piece of paper towel and get it moist (but not soaked).
- Parchment paper and place it on top of the moist towel.
I’ve had that dark grey, and the lighter grey next to it, wet all night long. I’ve been painting for 2 hours, judging by the episode of Chumphammer I’m listening to. The big bonus of this is that I can go back and forth with my colours. If the dark got too dark, do a layer of the light, and vice versa. And this is how you do glazing! I’ve been doing it with a dry palette for a few years, and mixing new paints/water when I needed them, but this…this is way better. Highly recommended.
The other new thing on my desk is a dedicated clean water bottle. For years I’ve been using water out of my cleaning pot to water down my paints. The other day, I noticed that my grey was red. >.< You’d think I would notice that sooner (there’s a good story from my GW days, working with Owen, here), but my eyes have a very hard time discerning the difference between similar shades. (And don’t even get me started on navy blue/purple). Clean water bottle, also a total win.
I like having a back-log of posts lined up, and I don’t want to post spam, so we’ll get into the actual end result of the glazing…tomorrow.
By Craig, on May 18th, 2013 Glaze is in quotes because this isn’t glazing…well, maybe it is, but it’s not what people usually mean when they say glaze. I’m feeling like this is really part of the base coat of the model. I’ve painted some bright colours on, and now I’m darkening them a bit.
I took 1:1 Chaos Black and Matte Medium, added a boat-load of water, and wazzed that all over the entire damn model.
 Still watching (listening to…) The Voice. Doesn’t make for good painting, even if it’s an easy job. It actually looks much much worse than the photo makes it seem. The paint has dried in a patchy, horrible way. If you click on the photo and open a bigger version, you can see what I mean on the back leg.
There are a few spots where, while I was painting after working out last time, the paint isn’t adhering to the model. Oils from your fingers slide onto the model, and because our paint is acrylic/water based, it does what oil and water do and doesn’t stick. One spot was so bad I asked my club mates for advice and it was recommended that I sand it down. I did and that fixed the problem, but there’s a few more smaller ones to fix.
Right now, I’m a few posts behind. This is good because I can say that despite how embarrassed I am to post a photo of this model, it’s turning out ok tonight (which will be posted…in the near future. )
By Craig, on May 14th, 2013 I’ve finished the base coat for my stegadon. This was a simple matter of repeating the same process as I did for the grey, but for some other colours – blood red, ushapti bone, snakebite leather and dwarf bronze.
At this stage of the process, I start to think that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just taken a $70-80 model (I don’t recall) and coated it in a ridiculous colour which is completely different from how I’ve worked for the last 10 years. That other process started with black and worked up. This process starts with white, puts a bright base on, then washes down and then builds up again on the raised areas.
If I keep this up, you’ll see this whole thing, and cringe with me as I do it. My next post in particular is going to be super embarrassing.
By Craig, on May 14th, 2013 This is really stupid. I had about 10 skinks, 3 temple guard and a cold one rider not make it back successfully from Adepticon. Spent the night pinning things.
I have couple GW drills, and I bought a pack of really small bits from Central Hobbies. For whatever reason, I use the insides of computer network wire for pinning. I guess I just had a lot of it around when I learned how to pin, and it’s reasonably strong and thinner than paper clip. Call me weird… but if you do, tell me what you use to pin with!
One nice thing – after the repair, I puttied some more bandages on the 2 already built temple guard I bought at Adepticon. I need 4 more for my OFCC list (and 24 is just a good number in general for temple guard) so this is the start of that.
After all of this, I’ve got some painting to do. Probably take the Scorched Brown for the weapons and some Codex Grey for the models and get rid of any unpainted breakage lines. Bah!
By Craig, on May 11th, 2013 While I was planning my Iron Brush tournament, I started reading the Blood in the Badlands rulebook for scenario inspiration. I was so inspired, I immediately started writing thoughts down for a campaign I wanted to run! I managed to put the idea down long enough to finish the tournament, but picked up the campaign idea again shortly after.
The last scenario in the Blood in the Badlands book is a massive multiplayer game with two tables. It’s a Storm of Magic scenario. The people on the primary table are fighting to win the campaign. The people on the secondary table are…fighting to get onto the primary table so they can win! I think it’s a delicious game mechanic, and I wanted to build some magical terrain to go with it! Floating rocks!
 A friend just happened to be trying to get rid of some pink foam at the same time I needed some foam. I recommend using a hot wire cutter with the pink foam – it makes a really nice cut. But in this case I just wanted some rough stone (and I no longer have a hot wire cutter…), so I cut away with a knife I had sitting around the kitchen. Something with a little more heft than a hobby knife, more like a steak knife…but not the steak knives.
 Some rocks gluing, and some flying stands. I cut successively smaller round sections of the foam, and made 3 layers to each rock. Then I took some of the scrap and cut some good edged pyramids from them.
 This part always takes forever. My usual method of applying gravel to bases. Take white glue and water it down. I use a GW tank brush to spread it around, and apply the gravel. I used 3 different sizes of gravel here in an attempt to make it seem more realistic – nature doesn’t have identical rocks lying around! After that layer dries, I apply another layer of watered down white glue. Wait a long time in between layers. I do more white glue until I’m happy that the gravel isn’t going to fly off when I touch it.
 Another James Wappelism. I had Patrick pick me up some red Oxid Paste from Vallejo. I’d never used this stuff before, but I watched a video on YouTube. The guy took a toothpick and applied it gently to his bases…I took a paintbrush and wazzed it all over instead. It has the consistency of one of the more solid GW paints – thick, but still able to be brushed on quite easily. I think in hindsight, that it should be used more like the varieties of gravel – to provide more “interest”, instead of being a thing that is everywhere. I’ll play with it some more.
I’ve just finished these tonight, and I’m hoping to figure out how to make a gradient backdrop and some decent lighting and maybe get some good photos tomorrow!
By Craig, on May 9th, 2013 A minor hobby tonight — making the veer-myn set of “flying” strikers so they have 2 paws on the ground. Just bent their legs a bit and then glued and puttied to fill the gaps that were left. It’s not a great fix. Thinking of putting some gravel rubble on their bases (they are rats, after all) to provide another anchor point for the hands.
Regular Wednesday night CHOP gaming tonight. I wouldn’t call it “practice” for OFCC, since practicing would require something that I’m calling “recall of lessons learned”, but played with my proposed OFCC list tonight and it’s alright. The Engine is new and odd. Actually choosing to put that many points into Heavens magic as a valid and strategic choice, also odd.
I bought another K&R case the other day, along with some new foam which is 2 layers of 10×5 rows. This is fantastic, because combined with a half layer of pick’n'pluck, I can fit my entire 2800 OFCC army into a single regular case with room to spare. Brilliant.
By Craig, on May 7th, 2013 I’m torn between wanting to paint up another Dreadball team, and working on the Steg which I need to finish for OFCC (in June, thankfully). Last night Miranda and I were watching The Voice when I realized that I didn’t really need to watch most of the show. I probably couldn’t paint and watch TV, but assembling models should be fine.
I’ve enjoyed playing with the humans, but all of the talk on the intarwehbz about how they are OP bugs me. I don’t like OP things, I tend to shy away from them. I like things with obvious weaknesses, and the humans are so jack-of-all-trades that they don’t have many (except when the orx player gets the drop on sending your guards off the pitch). Veer-myn aren’t the worst team in the game, but they have some weakness – a Skill of 5+ means they’ll need some luck to grab or throw the ball, even though they are movement 6 each and Speed 3+.
I was thinking while assembling these guys. Mantic (so far) has no where near the quality of models as GW. GW plastic is crisp, solid and their newer models fit together near perfectly. These veer-myn have soft edges in their fingers, bend quite readily and the detail just isn’t as crisp. Three of the models had sprue-poles up their asses as well – they’d been cut away at the factory, but I had to clean up this 3-4mm sprue point at the meeting point of 2 legs and a tail.
But I will continue to support Mantic, because I believe that this can be fixed and that their attitude is refreshing. I think that anyone who uses Kickstarter as much as they do “gets it”. Their head-honcho was seen around Adepticon. He personally showed up at the Blood Bowl tournament I was at to give Dreadball prizes to the tournament. They are on Facebook constantly with neat videos and one of their primary game designers has a blog where he goes into detail about why he did certain mechanics. I eat that shit up.
After finishing my Blood Bowl team I realized that I needed to work more on modelling. But I really don’t know how to fix this problem…
 Their hands are supposed to be touching the base… A lot of cutting and putty, I suppose.
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pigment.apply Pictures of models, posted in an attempt at motivating everyone to paint more models. It's a vicious cycle, you know.
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