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Work-in-progress

Everything before it’s done.

Some floating rocks

Posted on May 11, 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!

Work-in-progress

Minor repair

Posted on May 9, 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.

Work-in-progress

Veer-myn Dreadball Team

Posted on May 7, 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.

Work-in-progress

Stegadon – Body 1

Posted on May 6, 2013

I wrote a big thing here, but I’m deleting it to post in a moment.

I’m painting the body first, as I’d like to glue it to the base and it will have the most visual impact – right now I’m playing with an empty lava base as an Engine of the Gods! I took Fortress Grey and mixed it 1:1 with my Golden Fluid Matte Medium and enough water to make it flow. I slathered that all over the skin, and I’m done for the night.

Was on vacation last week – work tomorrow will be a rude awakening! 🙂

Work-in-progress

Stegadon – Done building

Posted on May 5, 2013

I had mostly finished building my converted Stegadon a few months ago, just before the Adepticon/Dreadball/Blood Bowl frenzy overtook me. Now I’m starting to get planning about OFCC in June, and really want to play with the Engine+Carny dino list in their 2800 team tournament!

Since these are draft photos, they won’t be using any of the photography techniques I want to apply to the final images. 😛

The completely assembled Engine.

I’ve built the steg so that it disassembles really nice, for a few reasons. Partially because I’ve built a giant howdah and will need to fit it into a case somehow! And partially so that if I want to play with a regular Ancient Steg (or regular Steg, if they get ok in the next book) that I have that option.

The howdah is built from pieces of baked sculpey shaped into carved stone blocks, as well as the top piece of the Empire Hurricanum. I tried to use more from the Hurricanum, but it’s just such a ridiculous model and so huge compared to the smaller steg that I had to break it down to just the middle bit.

Each of the skinks has pin-wires glued to their feet so they can be removed easily.

The priest is the skink chief model that is holding a heart in one hand, and I gave him a staff to make him more priestly. I love most of the chief models, and it’s sad that they aren’t viable in the army! He’s had a bit of the same mummified wrappings that the Temple Guard have – as the favoured priest, he was buried with the Pahaux slann and his bodyguard upon the slann’s death.

All the bits laid out. Left to right: Howdah back, 4 skinks, priest, howdah front, steg ceremonial plate and the steg itself.

A closer look at the howdah back bit.

Also have 4 more temple guard to paint, and 2 Dreadball teams lined up. I bought Dreadball Veermyn at Adepticon and I’m stoked to try to play with them!

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?

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!

Work-in-progress

Dreadball Base Coats

Posted on January 4, 2013

As no one provided any suggestions on what colours to use on my two Dreadball teams, I decided that bright green and bright blue were the right choices.

DONE.

Kidding. (Although I would have loved some feedback…sometimes a guy just wants to know that people are reading!) Mr. Wappel writes about how he does his basecoat in really bright colours, because he shades the colour down afterwards. I thought I’d try that on these models. So I primed them all white, and then did an airbrushed basecoat of Goblin Green and Meredius Blue.

I’m planning on focusing on the human team first. Think I’ll water down the Dark Angels Green and see where I end up. Nice thing about these models – they are all armor. No silly straps or faces to get in the way.

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