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outcasts

Featured Images Tournaments

Malifaux – Henchman Hardcore and Enforcer Brawl

I had a free Sunday so I went to Wet Coast GT for just the one day. They were running Henchman Hardcore, an alternative Malifaux format where you get 20ss, must take a Henchman as your Leader, no summoning and the only Strategy is Turf War and the only Scheme is Assassinate. The goal is to run at the center and hurt your opponent — a decidedly “unMalifauxy” goal, in my opinion.

It’s not my favourite format, but it was nice to play Malifaux again. I took Kang and 3 Rail Workers and got my ass handed to me.

After that, we played an Enforcer Brawl with….9 people? Maybe 8? You get 1 Enforcer and one upgrade. You get 1VP for wounding an unwounded model (2VP if it’s more SS than you), 3VP for killing something (4VP if it’s more SS than you) and -3VP for dying. I took my Ice Golem because I haven’t really played with it a lot, and wanted to show it off! He ended up being excellent, as whenever he died I tended to get 2VPs for doing damage to someone for his explosive, which means I lost fewer points than others who died.

I won this event, but only because Mark won and Mark was the TO. Mark also played an Ice Golem, he just died a lot less than I did. 🙂

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The next day CHOP! chat got excited about Malifaux again. I think the confluence of WCGT and the GenCon order stuff going up caused folks to get excited about it again. I pulled Taelor out of my to-do pile and put some paint on her. A few hours later, this was the result:

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I was tempted to leave her albino after I had shaded basecoated her boots, pants, shirt and hair. She had this crazy goth look to her that I really liked. So I ended up leaving her skin less coloured than I would have otherwise, adding white to the Dheneb Stone when I highlighted, which took a lot of the pink out of the colour.

Otherwise I was just trying to copy this drawing. The pants really are that shiny — I tried to tone them down but have been unsuccessful so far. Still, I really like the contrast here.

Featured Images

Outcasts (not really…) – Johanna

Finished Johanna. I’ve been not happy with her paint job for several hours, but have to put it down.

I think I’m unhappy with the colour choices I made. The blue is to light, but making it darker is making it splotchy. The red is to close to her skin tone, so there’s bad contrast between her chest and the shirt around it. There’s a spot on her inner right thigh that is refusing to hold any more paint, so making shadows is proving difficult. I had a face that I liked, but then I started to paint eyes and I completely botched the face up. And the base looks like a pile of shit smeared on a bunch of poorly-scaled mechanical parts.

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Sigh.

In the end, the paints are pretty decent, and the shirt is pretty decent, and the face is pretty decent, and the eyes are pretty decent.

I added some foliage to cover up the shit-smear base. I black lined the shirt/chest edge to create more contrast. I let her dry upside down to try to get paint on that inner thigh part. And I finished the eyes and then went back to fix the face so it’s alright.

She’s a part of the Outcast faction, but since she has such synergy with M&SU, I don’t think she’ll ever appear in an Outcast crew for me. Both Ramos and Kaeris are M&SU with a lot of good M&SU models, so she’s a really solid support choice for those crews.

 

Work-in-progress

Malifaux, Laziness, Models, Excitement

I’ve been super lazy recently. Not in life, nor in painting, just in posting. I finished up 2 new Fire Gamin because I wanted to play with them (spoilers, for my opponents this weekend!) and another gunsmith. I got started on Ramos (!!!), finished Chiaki (!!!…wait, she can’t go with Ramos…) and spent some quality time on Chakax for Foodhammer (or is he…surprise ringer for Malifaux!)

Last night I realized I needed to apply pigment to Johanna, so here’s a cell phone photo of her and the finished gunsmith.

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I just haven’t felt like I’ve had time to pull out the photography equipment to take any decent photos of the 4-5 posts worth of models I have sitting on my desk. A lot going on, and when it isn’t going on, I’m hanging with my sweetheart.

However! One of that many things will be a 4 player Malifaux game on Sunday! We’re going to play Prison Riot, from the Schemes and Strategies deck. I said this about it, when Duke picked it from the list:

Yes, Prison Riot sounds like rounding up lemmings while 3 other people are also trying to round up lemmings in the other direction. 😛

It sounds amazing.

Featured Images Photography

Wyrd Summer Painting Contest – Photography

Since I have an interest in miniature photography as well, I’ve got one last post here on how it all came together after the painting was done. Here’s two photos for reference.

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Setup

Getting this all set up was a bit of an ordeal!

First, I was glad the kitchen table had been cleared – I was playing a 3-player game of Malifaux with some friends that afternoon, so I didn’t have to move our crap from it!

The backdrop I’d previously purchased to take photos of my Daemon army (and, obviously, for future things like this!). When I unraveled it and put it on the table though, it was to far away – I’d previously measured that I wanted my diorama to be about 7 inches from the lens. So I grabbed an end-table, cleared the stuff off of it and rested it on the kitchen table to provide some support for the backdrop. Initially I put two glass cups on top, but after thinking about the consequences of glass falling, should I bump the setup, I found some metal and plastic cups instead to hold it up. (what I’m getting at here, with the end table and cups — you find ways to make it work!).

I had some brown material sitting around for another project, and put that on the bottom to provide “dirt”. The goal was that the backdrop would be sky, and the diorama wouldn’t look out of place on a dirt brown floor.

Then my standard 2-light setup, with my tripod. I had to bring over a third light – my painting light from my desk – because I was getting shadows I didn’t want. Because of the heat we’ve had the shutters closed and I didn’t want to open them, and didn’t have enough ambient light from living room light fixtures to solve the shadow problem.

Then, put the diorama on the backdrop.

 

Photography

Because I had an idea of what settings I wanted to use (in fact, the camera was still on those settings), I knew where to start. I had to remember to set the ISO back down to 200 because I wasn’t taking super grainy test photos anymore.

I took a variety of photos. I adjusted the aperture up and down, and the focus up and down, in order to ensure that I had the photo I wanted. Once I was done taking photos, I didn’t want to have to go back and re-take any, so I wanted to try to get as many as I could. I moved the model around as well, in order to get different angles that didn’t have my living room in the background.

 

Editing

Here’s a picture of the final image again, just to help remind you.

Final

When you take a ton of photos, you then have to go through and delete a ton of photos. I only wanted to submit between 3 and 5, but I’d taken 30. I loaded them all up in Lightroom, and started deleting. Some of them were super easy – focus was all wrong, lighting was all wrong. Some of them were harder – do I have enough photos that have the Gunsmith in focus? This photo is dramatic, but this other photo shows more of the diorama. And similar to making a resume, or a Magic the Gathering deck, anything you put in that isn’t perfect is just making the whole thing worse.

I got it down to 7 good photos and moved on.

Lightroom has a host of great editing features that I use regularly. I adjusted the white balance on every photo – usually I do this physically with a white card and the camera setting, but I had forgotten. >.< I also click “Auto” for the brightness, contrast, whites, blacks, highlights and shadows section. Auto isn’t perfect every time, but it’s a good baseline. I find sometimes it will adjust my photo to an extreme, so I have to pull it back a bit – most often in the Whites or Brightness.

I also use Lightroom to crop. All my photos are taken 4:3, but sometimes a different ratio works better, and sometimes I need to crop to get a better photo. As well, because my lens (grrrr) has a couple spots on it, I need to use the spot remover in places.

You’ll notice there are only 5 photos in the final image, and during this process I realized that two photos were unnecessary – either not good enough, or showing something I’d already shown. Deleted! Do not be afraid to delete! You’re only making your project better.

I saved all of the photos as JPGs…and then moved onto the step I don’t usually do. I opened each photo up in Paint.NET…and smudged the lines on Killjoys side. I don’t feel bad that I did this – it’s all a part of submitting the best photo you can. At the same time, that line bothers me and I wish I could slow down enough to make it go away on future models!

The very last step was to create a brand new image that was 800 pixels wide, and as tall as the combination of all of the images. The contest rules required that photos be no more than 800 wide, but that you could use as much height as you wanted to show additional angles. I copy and pasted each image into this new one, leaving a 2 pixel white separation between each image to help set them apart.

The contest rules also stated that images must be less than 300kb, so when I saved it I set the JPG quality settings such that the final image was 294kb. It’s good that I got rid of those 2 extra photos, otherwise I’d have had to sacrifice more quality! This was something I hadn’t accounted for, so I’m glad it worked out by accident!

 

And that’s the end! I’m writing this on July 15th – I was told not to publish any photos or articles before the voting was done on July 27th, so I’ve scheduled all of the last posts. As I write, I have no idea what’s going to happen! Excitement!

Featured Images

Wyrd Summer Painting Contest – Final

And finally, here’s the photo spread I submitted to the contest. If you’re a good reader, you’ve already seen it as you went and voted for it a month ago when I asked you to! 😛 By the time you read this, hopefully we’ll all know who the winner was, and have all seen a ton of amazing looking models!

Final

 

I’ve got one more post in this series – the final photography and image editing.

Work-in-progress

Wyrd Summer Painting Contest – Building the Base

I took my Dremel once again to the piece of hardboard in my closet. I cut out the basic design with a cutting bit, and then used two different sanding bits to smooth and bevel the edges.

The tree is a fascinating thing. I bought a $5 loop of wire from Michaels and wrapped two pieces together in a “C” bend. Then I wrapped another piece around to make another root, and then another and so on. Then I started cutting smaller pieces and wrapped them around each root and up the tree trunk to try to give the base more size than the top. After a bit, instead of wrapping the wire around semi-randomly, I started wrapping it on a circle around, so that under the top layer there is a tree-like mess, and on top is semi-uniformity.

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I went back and put my models on top of the hardboard, and drew on the piece so I knew where they would go. I sketched out where Killjoy’s cobblestone would start and end, and drew circles around each base.

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Then…I made cobblestone. I’ve done this before on my Plaguebearer bases, but this was a little different because each piece had to be slightly different shape and size. I pressed the Milliput onto the hardboard, making sure to keep a circle open for Killjoy, and then started carving into it with one my putty tools.

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After that dried a bit (it’s very hot in here), I puttied up the back in a smooth layer. This would be built up a bit, so I just wanted something to build on.

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I used the Vallejo Oxid paste and painted it all over the hardboard where the Arcanists would stand. In particular, I wanted to get it on and under the tree to make sure that it was a part of the scene. Since it is such a different and other-worldly shape from what you would expect, I had to make sure to bring it back into the scene.

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Last, I put another layer of Milliput on top of the back layer and carved a different kind of stone design onto it. It’s not entirely square. >.>

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Work-in-progress

Wyrd Summer Painting Contest – Setting up the photo

All of the models posted recently were painted for a diorama for the Wyrd Summer Painting Contest! Building a diorama is as much about framing and composition as it is about technical painting and modeling skill. In my case, it’s also a little bit about photography!

I wanted to set up a scene such that the 3 models would be in sharp focus, but that the house in the background would be softer. This means adjusting my cameras aperture, as that controls the depth of field. For these test shots, I decided to angle the camera such that it was perpendicular to the line created by the Gunsmith and Killjoy, which put the Fire Gamin a little further towards the camera.

I took a number of different photos, but because these are all test shots I set the ISO to 256,000, which means I can get in focus shots without needing to pull out all of my lights. I moved the aperture setting up and down to see where I got the best results, I tested where to have the camera physically to get the photo I wanted.

The shutter speed isn’t important in either the test photos, or the final shot, because it’s only job is to ensure that I don’t get blurry photos, and that I get the amount of brightness I want out of the final photo. Basically, I adjust the shutter up or down to ensure brightness after I’ve decided on the aperture I want.

You can see one such photo here. At f/2.8, Killjoy is nicely in focus (as he’s the focus target), but the Gamin is blurry!

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I swapped out for a bigger piece of hardboard and pulled the models further away from the house so I would have more “focus space” to work with. I set the aperture to f/4 but couldn’t get what I wanted still. Lastly, I set the camera to manual focus and then I finally got the photo I wanted.

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I assume that the auto focus was focusing somewhere just behind Killjoy, which put the Gamin to far out of field to be in focus. This photo I manually focused somewhere on between the Gamin and Killjoy, allowing them both to be in focus.

Again, because these are test photos it’s perfectly fine that the gunsmith is to dark, shadows are all over the place and that the image is really grainy. We’re just trying to set up the framing!

Now, it’s important for me to remember that when I’m done I’ll be taking a few different photos from different angles, but I wanted to have one where I had put the work into getting exactly the photo I wanted, before I started building anything!

Featured Images

Outcasts – Killjoy – Final

This is probably the nicest model I’ve ever painted.

Don’t get me wrong, Killjoy is a fugly dude. But something about those rolls upon rolls of skin…the invitation to mottle and bruise him…to go a little overboard with the shadows in places and to paint definition (more rolls…) where none existed. It was brilliant. The base coat didn’t look like much, but it ended wonderfully.

This model is mostly skin, and as such I spent several hours on said skin. I really couldn’t tell you what I did, but in essence it looked like:

  • Kislev Flesh
  • Kislev Flesh mixed with SW Amethyst
  • More of that.
  • Kislev Flesh mixed with Skull White
  • More of that.
  • Go back to the top of the list and move down the list until it looks right.

It’s mesmerizing.

And worse, because I thought it was beautiful, every time I picked it up I found something else that needed fixing for it to be perfect. I need to finish the rest of this entry quickly so I can photograph it and be done with it…

After that, the rest of the model is pretty boring! The fireball was painted the same as the Fire Gamin. I used the Lamentor’s Yellow to do a bit of OSL around his stomach. Bloodletter Wash on his open wounds and around the open areas of his mouth. A simple Mithril Silver plus Badab Black (yes, I still have some!) and Seraphim Sepia on the metal. His wraps were Sepia’d, then highlighted with Fortress Grey (don’t ask why I did this, I had a whim) and then spot painted with Waywatcher Green glaze.

I continued gluing SW leaves to his base, because I really like them. 🙂

 

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If you’ve read this far down the post, you get a super secret Easter Egg. Before I submitted the final posts for the painting contest, I edited out the very obvious join-lines on this guy. >.> I still fail hard at model assembly, but at least technology can help me out!

(And just so we’re clear – the only photo editing I do on my blog is to remove spots created by the lens, and adjust lighting and colour balance. I’d never lie to you guys! :))

Work-in-progress

Outcasts – Killjoy – Basecoat

Killjoy is starting off with this thread as his inspiration. That paint job is creepy and terrific, but obviously I want to do my own thing here!

I started just with Kislev Flesh for his skin, and Ushapti Bone for his wrappings. I may change the wrappings colour as I go, in order to create contrast. Mithril Silver for the metal and the fireball in the middle of his chest is Sunburst Yellow to match the Fire Gamin that’s shooting it.

It isn’t done, but he’ll be on my standard Outcast bases when he’s done.

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Work-in-progress

Outcasts – Sculpting some fire

Sculpting has been something on my “todo” list for a while, but it’s been very hard to up and just do it. I’ve had some opportunities recently to try some simple stuff, so here’s some more. I’m trying to sculpt a fireball impacting on Killjoys chest.

I started by just mushing a thick misshapen cylinder of putty onto his chest. The idea is that it’ll look like a fireball that’s being shot by the Fire Gamin, so I have to ensure that the angle looks reasonable and that the size of it is similar to the one that’s coming out of the Fire Gamin‘s hands. I left that overnight.

The next morning I pulled little pieces of putty apart and rolled them into snakes that were roughly long enough to go entirely around the cylinder on his chest. I’m aware that this first photo looks phallic.

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After I’d sufficiently mushed the putty around the cylinder, I took a pair of tweezers and pulled the putty back away from his torso. The fireball is travelling towards Killjoy, and so the wind against it will push the flames backwards. I did this 5 times, to cover the entire cylinder with flames.

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At the end I took a bit of putty and mushed it onto the end of the cylinder, then pulled it away. This pulled the new putty off a few times, and tore it in places, but the end result was what I had wanted – a bit of a wisp of flame at the tail of the fireball!

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