I still think this model needs something more. I wanted to stiple like a Camo Green on his back, but I’m afraid of screwing it up …again.
In the end, I did various layers of Codex and Fortress Grey, and a good number of washes of green, blue and purple.
I think he turned out pretty good and original considering he really shouldn’t be painted at all! 😛
I decided that I liked the new Killjoy model. The old one was so 2D and fugly that I couldn’t bring myself to give a shit about him. The new one is still ugly, but not ugly in a model sense, just in a *shudder* sense.
GMorts Chaotica did an unboxing of him, and I’m super glad he did otherwise I wouldn’t have had the forethought to magnetize his chain arm! I swore the chain was going to snap while I was cutting it off the sprue…
He probably won’t see paint for a bit – have a few other projects I’d like to get painted first, and a few summer-outside-like-things starting up!
My last few posts for my Arcanist bases (previously called “Malifaux” bases, before I got an Outcast crew!) ended up muddled between a few different posts, making it hard to refer back and repeat. Here’s a summary of how I did my bases for some Steam Arachnids!
I prime everything white these days. I drank the koolaid on starting with bright colours and shading down.
Rhinox Hide all over the gravel, Mithril Silver on the rails and Vomit Brown on the railroad ties.
I bought the “new” Seraphim Sepia from GW, but it wasn’t really as dark as I wanted so I put Nuln Oil all over. This was really super black. Much more black than Badab Black, much less…shadey.
Wetbrush up the gravel with Rhinox Hide and Scab Red, then drybrush Tallarn Sand and lastly Zamesi Desert.
It’s not the same scheme as how I did my last bases, but it’s more concise. I think it’s more…I don’t know. It’s brighter in places, but also darker in others. I think it’s the Nuln Oil, in that where it dries it’s really dark, but otherwise it has very little coverage.
I was waiting for a friend to give him some free stuff, and musing on why I’m ok giving away some stuff but not ok with the deep discounts that folks are forced into to sell their barely used models. I’ve given away a ton of stuff – I once gave away an entire 1500pt Ork army! I haven’t done anything that big recently, but whenever I’m looking at something I don’t want in my house anymore, I have an internal debate about selling vs gifting. So what’s the difference between giving it away and selling it for cheap? I’m thinking about a few things.
I’m thinking about the value of things. How it the item valuable to me? Is it worth money to me?
Here’s a summary of a few items I’ve gotten rid of recently:
There is a decent amount of joy that comes from giving hobby stuff away. If you give it away, and it has value, then you are making someone else’s hobby life better. And that feels good. This is an expensive hobby, and people love getting free things.
You all definitely have a ton of models in your closet. Go open that closet, find some models that you’ll never use again and find someone to give them to! Your closet will thank you, your hobby guilt over having to many models will thank you and best of all your friend will think you’re the coolest person on the planet! (at least until you crush him while he’s using the models you gave him…:P)
I may have mentioned winning the transparent Tara box…she needed a crew to go with her…and she ended up Outcast instead of Resser. The main reason was that I wanted to try out using the Malifaux Child with Tara, and then I found Hans in a local games store and I’ve always wanted to shoot 36″ so here we are!
I am still considering Resser Tara, because The Hanged is gross and looks fun to use to make your opponent cry. But I like that both the Child and Hans can be used in other crews as well!
I picked up two of the metal Death Marshals on a deal, and grew to really like the models. I cut away their faces, glued on some skull heads and sculpted some flames from their head, which I’m pretty happy about! It’s subtle, but I think much cooler than the original human heads.
Today I said goodbye to this ancient, ancient tool of mine.
I’ve used this ice cream container lid since I was 19 and living with my dad (who had two growing boys and stocked 4L tubs of ice cream still!) I stopped using it in favour of a disposable piece of parchment paper on a spinach container lid (ha!) last year sometime, but couldn’t bear to get rid of my old paint palette.
I remember the joy of finding when the acrylic paint had gotten so thick that I could slowly peeeeeeel it off and have a rubber impression of the colours I’d used that year. I remember when the plastic started getting so brittle that it was cracking at the sides, so I had to be super careful when mixing glue and water, lest it spill out over the sides.
Bye little lid, you served well.
Have you got any tools from years gone by? Anything you should say goodbye to?
I was waiting until I had a few models to photograph, since this one has been sitting in my case since AdeptiCon. I painted her in bright green, but I kind of wish I’d done bright red instead – the green is a little too sundress, and not enough dancing-girl.
I tried to copy someone else’s stocking painting by adding some pink in with the black at the knees and the back of the calves. I also decided that she looked better with her shoulders on display, rather than how the sculptor decided with it being a crop-top dress. Most people who have seen her agree that this was a good call. 🙂
I hate human skin a little less now that I’m using glazes. But you can see that eyes are still escaping me…
Believe it or not, this is the first non-AdeptiCon related post I’ve written since AdeptiCon. It’s been a long back-log. 😛
I won the Nightmare Tara Transparent Edition at the AdeptiCon Story Encounter. I told Jamie, and he said he’d be happy to trade for her. I told him I was thinking of keeping her. >.>
I had originally planned to only play crews that I could build from what I had already – ie, Ramos from Mei, Hoffman from Ramos, etc. But fuck it – someone gives you a sweet set of transparent models, you play with those!
Unfortunately, I screwed up. I was so worried about frosting the outside of the Nothing Beast, I frosted the inside. >.< I was upset about it, until I had a brilliant idea to fix the problem, and have something original.
I’m going to paint parts of the model! So parts of it are all smokey and other parts are opaque! It’s kind of scary painting something so unique, but it’ll be awesome when it’s done!
If you have the transparent models – buy plastic glue. I picked up Tamiya Cement (but in English) and glued the Void Wretches together. So much nicer. So much less worry about creeping glue.
I also bought the Citadel Imperial Primer. It’s a paint on primer, since I wanted to prime but can’t spray. With this stage, this product began to enter “totally f’d up” territory. Apparently you have to shake the ever living shit out of this product. It starts very watery, but after shaking it’s much thicker. Let me say that again, in larger text so everybody makes sure to read it —
I didn’t on this model. I started to paint the bits and found parts of the primer sloughing off. I tore away large strips and continued painting. After a while, it seemed like it had done coming off but I didn’t trust it. I started to rub with my thumb, and all of the surfaces came away.
To be fair to this product, after I had shaken it very well and tried it on the Void Wretch bases it stuck as well as I expect primer to stick.
To continue the horrible madness of the Nothing Beast. I decided to stick it in Pine Sol for the night and to just strip it and start again. The next morning I toothbrushed the model and got most of the paint away…only to find that some of the pine sol was stuck inside the model. Facepalm. So then I try to tear apart the torso of the Nothing, and find that the plastic actually has a weaker hold than the super glue I originally used and so it ripped the plastic apart.
I rinsed the model off and put it aside. Sometimes you just have to walk away for a bit to clear your head.
That afternoon I inspected the model and decided it might be salvageable. But that if anything else went wrong, I was going to stomp on the model and go buy a new box on EBay, even if it cost me $100+.
So far it’s going pretty well. The opaque covering looks really good next to the transparent layer. The primer has stuck. The inside is not filled with fluid. And the areas that were frosted are covered. If nothing else goes wrong, this will look amazing.
Wish me luck.
I’ve been steadily changing and upgrading my photography setup whenever I can. There are some inexpensive things you can change, and some expensive things you can change. Here’s a few things I’ve changed since my last update.
The soft box is great, but it’s limiting. I wanted to be able to take photos of more models and it wasn’t big enough to take a picture of more than 1-3 models, and almost certainly not a unit without getting cramped.
I kind of hacked together a diffuser for each lamp. I bought some white cotton, a knitting hoop and some bendable metal rods. I put the cotton inside the hoop, and used the rods to place this directly in front of each lamp. In this way, the lamps are now much more portable.
This was an inexpensive fix, but it required some ingenuity.
Now that my lamps are portable, I had a bit more space, but not by much. I had printed out a gradient image on a piece of 8.5×11 paper, so my photos are still limited to whatever can fit on this paper.
So next, I had printed out a gradient on a 3 foot square. This is huge and unwieldy, but now I can fit an entire army on the paper. Now to determine what I can’t fit on this…
Perfect.
Uhh…who do you think you’re fooling?
This piece cost me about $70 to get printed. It’s made of a strange paper material that isn’t cardboard, but is still thicker than most other paper I’ve felt.
Then I bought a new camera. >.>
It’s a Lumix GX7, one of the best of the latest round of mirrorless cameras. It has a ton of features I could write about, but you can look it up if you care.
Something about this latest round of photos has a feeling to them that I can’t explain. I have to blame the camera.
This photo knocks my socks off. The paint job is nice, the photo is amazing!
(I bought it for a lot of reasons, not just miniature photography :))
It’s one thing to take photos in my own apartment, with all my stuff. It’s quite another to go to a convention and try to take photos of beautiful models folks have.
My favourite lens, the Panasonic/Leica 25mm, has a terrible focus distance. Even though it’s a tighter lens than most, I can’t get closer than about a metre to the object before it can’t focus anymore. So even though the photo is beautiful, the model is tiny inside it!
My normal lens I use for models is the Olympus 30mm macro with a 4/3->m4/3 adapter. This is miserable for walking around because it takes about 2 seconds to focus – longer than I have time for in a lot of cases. I could manually focus, but it also has a minimum aperture of f/3.5, so indoors or at night I’d have to push up my ISO to get reasonably bright photos (without a tripod, since I’m walking). At that point, noise is introduced and we’re back to not great.
At AdeptiCon, I only used my 14mm f/2.5 m4/3 lens. It’s a wide angle, but the focus distance is quite nice for models and it’s bright enough to take photos all day. In a perfect world I’d have preferred something with a longer focal length so I could get tighter photos, but the fact that the lens is only about an inch long is the final reason why this lens is great for this use – the camera fits in a pocket (or my leather satchel :)).
The only significant downside, is that you really have to watch your depth of field. At f/2.5, the depth is pretty small. Ok for a model, not ok for an army. I saw a photographer walking around AdeptiCon with an external flash, and I’m thinking about that now. Add a bit more light, and you can push up the aperture more and still get nice bright photos!
To paraphrase Dale – I couldn’t be arsed to set up my photography stuff for this model. It’s hideous. It’s supposed to be a Swiss-army knife of cool construct buffs, but instead it says…HI GUYS!!
While looking for conversions to make it suck less, I found an image on Google that was kind of neat. So I bent up the awful looking legs, bent down the awful looking arms and glued two Ork shootas to it’s back as a jetpack.
I used it once or twice at GottaCon, but I found it to be of limited use. It has a single purpose (in my crew) – making my Rail Golem kill things faster. Sure it can give +1 Armor to another construct, but paying 3SS to buff a Rail Worker or Gamin doesn’t seem that awesome.
I’ve also used it with Ramos, and it works well as his Scrap Starter Kit. 1ss cheaper than an Electric Creation and Joss can cleave it in half to get 2 Scrap Markers to start summoning from.
But let me tell you, that when I needed something dead, Rail Golem with (+) to damage flips is real good.
