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Craig

Veer-myn – Final

Posted on June 5, 2013

Bought some lamps and new lights to replace my old ones this evening. Pulled out all of the photography equipment and here’s what I ended up with!

The entire team! …they don’t have a name yet.

Took 4 photos of each of these models to make a little collage. You can click through the images to see larger versions, as always.

One of the strikers. There are 2 variants of this model.

One of the two guards. There is only one variant of guard.

The paint job on these guys was pretty quick. 3 layers on each area, base coat, wash down, highlight up and it was nice to get back to a workflow that I know pretty well and can do quickly.

After applying the transfers last night, I came back and used the matte medium to flatten out the gloss. Then I took a sponge and splattered on some Boltgun Steel and Umbral Umber to muddy the whole thing up.

Still really disappointed by the damned mold lines. I swear to you, I checked every model for those things and every time I turn a model around there’s another that I missed. There has to be a better way to find and remove them!

Veermyn – Waterslide transfers (decals)

Posted on June 4, 2013

I picked up some of the Dreadball decals since they look way better than my free-hand numbers painting. Would you believe that I’ve never applied a waterslide decal in my life? I’ve bought next to a billion orks, with 10 billion decals, and I’ve never once used one.

I’ve been reading the Forge World Masterclass Vol 2 book, and it reminded me that decals can look good and not “fake”.

I’ve been using this guide from the blog “From the Warp”, which didn’t steer me wrong. I think I would add three things – use both tweezers and hobby knife when picking up the transfer, don’t put to much water on the model, and have a paper towel handy.

You need one implement to move the decal from the water to the model, and a second implement to get it off the first implement! I picked up with the tweezers and removed with the knife. The water thing is because otherwise you’ll have no control over where the decal slides to once it’s on the model. The paper towel is because no matter how much you think you’ve master point 2, you’ll eventually add to much water and need to soak some of it away so your thrice-damned decal will stop sliding around.

Thinking I’ll head to Staples tomorrow and pick up some more lamps, so I can photographize this week. This team is a decal-weathering away from being done! I love a project that starts and finishes in 4 days. 🙂

Work-in-progress

Veermyn – Base coat and more

Posted on June 2, 2013

I’m scared of my howdah, and I had an urge to paint purple so I pulled out the veermyn.

Rucksack tan skin, liche purple clothes and rune fang steel gloves and armor. They might be done Monday…doing it fairly quickly. 🙂

Work-in-progress

Howdah – Base Coat

Posted on June 1, 2013

Forgot I had this on my phone. 🙂

Finished the base coat of the howdah. Brown/grey stone for the slabs, a wooden brown for the connecting pieces, “obsidian” for the poles, brass for the engine and some bright planety colours for the spheres.

Work-in-progress

Howdah – Beginnings

Posted on May 28, 2013

I had to edit this photo…it was so badly cropped and colour balanced, I couldn’t leave it. 😛 Still pretty orange though…

We last saw photos of the howdah from afar a month ago. It’s been entirely white primed since then while I focused on one piece at a time.

I made a bad bad mistake here. Duke came by last week and said “that looks pretty cool! Does it come apart so you can paint the inside?” … $#$@!!. I wasn’t going to take it apart, so I did my best.

The inside is very quick paint job, to get it over with. A solid layer of Mephiston Red (still watered, just not that much). Then a couple layers of Lamenter’s Yellow to make it more orangey in places. Then a very messy top layer of black. Mr. Wappel is doing something similar with his Rock Golem – in his case it is meant to show that the outer layer is cooling and the inner has a lot of molten rock. Mine doesn’t look anywhere near as nice, but I’m hoping to gloss over that…

The sculpey has a layer of Dheneb Stone on it, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. I’m planning to darken this with glazes of some medium browns.

I’m thinking of making the side pillars obsidian. I think it would contrast nicely with the greens and browns of the rest of the howdah, but also give it an “other worldly” look. This is technology, folks, but it’s old and dusted over.

Work-in-progress

Stegadon – Mostly final

Posted on May 26, 2013

A few photos of the steg body, mostly done.

I say “mostly” for two reasons.

Every time I pick it up, I find something else I want to touch-up on it.
I showed it to Patrick and he said that the feet looked awkward.

The scales are still not where I wanted them to be. The top scales look great. They are this beautiful orange colour, mixed with some slight yellows and reds to give them an organic look. The side scales aren’t there yet, but every time I look I’ll apply some more Lamenters Yellow, which brightens them. Then they get shiny, so I have to do something to bring the shine down. Then they get darker, so I apply more Lamenters. Rinse and repeat. I wish I knew how the top scales ended up looking so perfect. The sides are getting better though, but I suspect they’ll bother me until I put a giant thing on top of the model to draw my eye away. 😛

When I modeled the base, I built it up and then put the steg on top to see where it sat. I puttied the base up until it fit mostly, but since I didn’t glue it on until recently, it wasn’t a perfect fit. All of the feet were off the ground in some way and Patrick noticed, so I fixed it. This was easier than I had thought!

I puttied messily under the feet, just stuffing it in there to fill the gaps under each foot. After that dried, I took the oxid paste and spread that around the edges of the putty. Wash on black to get the recesses, then drybrush codex gray to get the highlights. I’m probably going to glaze some oranges and reds to bring back the “heat”, but I’m mostly happy with how this fix job went.

Photography

Bad photography

Posted on May 23, 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).

Work-in-progress

Stegadon Body

Posted on May 21, 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!

Work-in-progress

Stegadon Flesh – Glazing

Posted on May 20, 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…

Technique

Wet Palettes, and more.

Posted on May 19, 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.

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