All Posts By

Craig

Tournaments

Adepticon 2013 – Opener

Posted on April 23, 2013

I have a ton of stories to tell about Adepticon. This isn’t one of them, but is rather an opener to let you know that I’ll be posting a bunch of cool photos and a lot of words in short order.

I did a ton of things – Fantasy Team Tournament with Patrick, a 2-day Blood Bowl tournament with the Pahaux Flamewalkers, a photography class, a glazing class and played a few board games. Drank a lot, got hungover, walked all over the suburb of Yorktown/Lombard and met some very cool people. I’ll probably be writing in chunks to split it all up – I’m thinking:

Day 1 – Seattle
Day 2 – Getting to Chicago
Day 3 – Team Tournament
Day 3 – Shenanigans
Day 4 – Blood Bowl
Day 4 – Photography
Day 4 – Glazing
Day 5 – Blood Bowl
Day 5 – Shenanigans
Day 6 – Getting Home

It’s a good thing I really enjoy writing. I hope you enjoy reading! First post will be written on the Skytrain tonight!

Featured Images

Lizardmen Blood Bowl – Pahaux Flamewalkers

Posted on April 8, 2013

I’m pleased to present the Pahaux Flamewalkers! Hailing from the City of Ash, this team has been sent to win at Blood Bowl by their Slann Relic Priest, for reasons that no one really understands. He mumbled a bunch and the head skink pointed at a few guys and off they went.

The painting of these guys followed a similar pattern to the Krox. After the dark wash, grab the colour that started underneath (or a similarly bright colour). Mix a bit of water and a lot of acrylic medium with it and apply gently to the affected areas to create a soft and sloping highlight.

I’m officially a big fan of the acrylic medium.

Looking back now, I wish I had taken the time to assemble the models better. These are some of the best models I’ve painted in years, and they suffer from rushing through the assembly, as you may be able to see with some of the photos below. However, Adepticon is in 11 days (holy hell) and I’m playing in a Saturday/Sunday tournament with these guys, and they needed to be finished!

Ready to beat people up and think about scoring goals.

I used GW ‘ardcoat on the helmets, finally finding a situation where I needed a glossy coat.

This guy has frenzy, rawr!

Featured Images

Lizardmen Blood Bowl – Kroxigor Final

Posted on March 18, 2013

I decided to finish the Kroxigor first, since he was a big, centerpiece model.

I wanted him to look similar to the Krox in my Fantasy army, but I failed at that. Those Krox don’t have any yellow on their scales, and most of their back is grey as opposed to the all red that I have going on here. He still looks pretty badass, but he isn’t the same.

After the Mephiston Red base and the “wash” that I did from the last post, I used some GW Lamenters Yellow glaze to see what it did. Woooah boy, did that make things yellow! You can see it in these photos, there is yellow on the edges and in the cracks. Then I took a Matte Medium+Bleached Bone+water combo and gently did all of the edges of his scales. The end result is this sort of yellow, sort of pale off-white, really red, thing. I like it, but I think it’s much to much red.

Working on the rest of the team next, who are also much to red. Worse, the skinks even have red helmets right now…need to figure out what I’m doing with the “team uniform”. 🙂

Musings & Meta

Space Hulk Scenario

Posted on March 12, 2013

Not actually a painting-related post, but it’s art of a kind, so I post it.

Cleaning up my desktop this morning in preparation for downloading Heart of the Swarm (yay!) (there’s a lot of movies on my desktop…) and I came across a Space Hulk scenario that I’d designed for a GW contest back in the day. I put a damned lot of effort into this scenario, from counting tiles to ensure that each movement was possible, but only barely out of reach from the Genestealers, to taking photos of the desired setup and cropping them onto a grid-like background.

The GW in question gave me a Blood Angels book for my effort, and I was the only person who entered. >.>

This is particularly amusing, since I just sold my copy of Space Hulk 2 weeks ago. It’s not a great game, with very little tactical depth and the only redeeming feature it had was that it was absolutely gorgeous.

Here’s a link to the scenario if you want to check it out!

Work-in-progress

Lizardmen Blood Bowl – Shading

Posted on March 6, 2013

I tried something new today. I’ve been reading about glazing more. The idea is that you put down a basic colour, and then shade, highlight and tone it with transparently coloured pigments. This post isn’t about that, but we’ll get to it.

My last attempt at glazing on the Dreadball team failed miserably – the pigment clumped in the water so that when it dried, it created patchy dark sections. It was pretty ugly, and only saved by “liquid talent”. I did some research and found that people use dish soap as a mix instead of water, which has the properties that it still dilutes the pigments, but that the pigments (apparently) don’t “float” on the surface, but instead spread out better.

Dish soap sounded like a home-made hack, so I looked further and found that another solution was to get acrylic medium and use that. I did, and my next post will be more glazing related.

But to start, and get a handle on how this stuff handles, I mixed the acrylic medium with some black and a bunch of water to try to recreate a wash.

There were some not-great spots on the Krox shoulders where it sat wrong, but overall I think it was a success! I haven’t done anything more here than mix my own Badab Black, and even then it doesn’t have the “fall into the crevasses” property that the GW stuff has, but I think it was a good step towards using it.

The medium has an almost glue-like consistency. When I mixed it with the paint, it didn’t seem to get any more diluted, like when I use water. To be safe, I added some water to get the very runny consistency that I’m used to working with. I think that this might be a necessary mix, since the goal is thin layers, and this stuff is thick like paint out-of-the-pot, although with less pigment density.

Next post is the finished Krox!

Work-in-progress

Lizardmen Blood Bowl – Basecoat

Posted on March 5, 2013

I decided to paint all of the basecoat of my team before moving onto the highlights. I usually paint an entire colour at once, but I’ve read that this way you can judge all the colours at once. I primed white, and since everything looks darker next to white, it would be harder to tell if the colour you’re painting is actually the shade you want.

So here we are – Codex Grey, Mephiston Red (a lovely colour, by the way), Bleached Bone, Dwarf Bronze and the Goblin Green bases. That’s it – no shading, no highlighting. Just some water and some pigment and me trying to cover the white.

I haven’t painted Goblin Green bases for years! Since I discovered that they were horrendously boring.

Also you can see the Krox conversion I did here. A couple Ogre fists and a lot of hobby knife later and you have one awesome Krox bruiser!

Work-in-progress

Lizardmen – Blood Bowl!

Posted on February 20, 2013

There’s a story here, photos below. 😛

Many years ago, I was playing Blood Bowl with a great group of people at the PR GW. It was awesome, but I was playing a Vampire team, and they are absolute shit. Garrett was playing Ogres/Halflings, but had just started putting his Lizardmen on the table in Fantasy. Dreams appeared in my head – lizardmen…blood bowl…

Years pass. Somehow I paint up a lizardman Fantasy army. I love it.

I buy the Blood Bowl PC game on Steam and play lizards there. It’s a great game.

Adepticon is coming up. I’m convinced to go, but there is a massive wait-list for the Fantasy tournament that my buddies are going to. I put my name on it, but I’m not convinced. I look at the schedule of things…and decide — fuck the Fantasy tournament, I’m going to do everything else. So I set my sights on the Stupor Bowl as my weekend game. The Vampire’s won’t do, they make me so bitter, but thoughts of Lizardmen dance in my head…

So I get Darren at Strategies to order in the original Lizardmen Blood Bowl team because I think they look cool. I get the models…ehh…the saurus look awesome, but the skinks are a little lame. And the saurus are about the same size at modern skinks. I look around at what other people on the internet are doing…and I find some amazing examples. Poke through my bitz closet to find that I have a ton of lizard bits kicking around…and now it’s on.

Ignore the stray cat hair…

I realized recently that my sculpting wasn’t going to get any better if I didn’t actually do it. So here I am, sculpting some more things. A few hats, and just did that loin-cloth thing. Baby steps, but maybe I’ll be good at it one day?

Featured Images

Dreadball Humans – Final

Posted on February 19, 2013

It turns out that I’ve been painting a bit in my free time (ie, when not on vacation), but didn’t realize it. Finished off the Dreadball team tonight! And I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.

After I last left them, I put a few sections of Bleached Bone on them as a contrast colour. I probably didn’t place it well, but eh…I think I should have used a darker colour on the chest plates. It’s ok as-is, but I think a strong dark contrast in the middle is a better idea.

Then I painted some metal bits. Wash the ever-living-shit out of them. Devlan Mud (yes, I still have 3 pots of the Mud) over the metal to burnish it a bit and bring the Bone down in shade.

I think the finishing touch was the base edges. After I had finished painting them, I realized what my general problem with the models were – they weren’t flashy enough. Every army I have has some wickedly bright colour on it somewhere, where these guys were all darker green. Some bright turqoise, some white and BAM I have a sweet edge highlight that’s somewhat reminiscent of the electronic grid they play on.

Next project – converting a Lizardman Blood Bowl team!

Musings & Meta

Updated theme

Posted on January 10, 2013

Updated my theme to the latest version. I haven’t done that since I install it. I was worried because I had done some minor modifications to the original, but it worked out ok. Except that it deleted all of the headers in my header folder and put it’s own in. So I had to Google Cache to get my header back…

I also changed a setting to try to improve the IE experience…seems the compatibility mode on IE8/9 breaks the site, so don’t use those if you can. I’ll try to figure out how to make it stop.

Let me know if anything looks bad or doesn’t work the way you wish it would!

Work-in-progress

Dreadball Human Shading

Posted on January 8, 2013

I wanted to do these guys relatively quickly, and I started the project with no idea what colours to use, so I really can’t be to weirded out that I still have no idea what colours to use, and that they aren’t “the best models I’ve ever painted”. 😛

The shading technique requires some care to be used, which I did not use. I slapped paint on all over the place!

After the Goblin Green incident of last post, I took Dark Angels Green and watered the hell out of it and applied a layer. Then, feeling whimsical, I took Lich Purple and watered the hell out of it and applied a layer. That was weird. Then, feeling less whimsical, I did the Dark Angels layer again, which removed all traces of the Purple. I was kind of hoping that they would blend in some way, but I guess that’s not what I did. I had a fever. Paint happened.

After that, I took my newly purchased Caliban Green (my DA was pretty dry…) and mixed it with a more water and Rhinox Hide to shade down in the crevasses. Lastly, I mixed the Caliban with some Ushabti Bone and shaded up a bit.

I think these last two were an attempt at solving the problem I’d constructed with my slap-dash – somewhat blotchy paint. It didn’t work out great, but you live and learn. I think after the bases dry, I’m going to dullcoat these bad-boys and see if it solves some of the problems, and creates new problems. Worked out fine for the vehicle weathering…

Secondary-freaking-colour

So now I need a secondary colour. TO MUCH GREEN. I was hoping to copy the green dudes from the book, but that’s to much green too. I’m going to paint some Ushabti stripes on them in places, but I feel like they need a big solid chest-piece-changing colour on them.

I was also thinking of painting their helmets.

Chest? Helmets? I don’t think I can pick two more colours, so just one. And putting the same colour on the chest and helmets is overkill. So maybe just the chests. Maybe just Ushapti. And some stripes.

When you really need a black…

Don’t call P3. They have a colour called Thamar Black. They should have called it “when you need a shade that’s close to black, but still has streaks of the underlying colour after 2 coats”, but I guess they didn’t have room on the bottle. Base black provided by GW and 1 coat. BOOM.

Later!

Older Posts

Newer Posts