Browsing Tag

arcanists

Arcanists – Ice Golem final!

Posted on May 4, 2015

I finished this guy up just after GottaCon, and I’m stoked with where he ended up!

I did a lot more with this guy than I originally thought. I used the Drakenhof Nightshade wash in the recesses. When it dried, it looked like a “skin” over the model, so I used ‘ardcoat to re-shine it, successfully. I put the Secret Weapon snow on, which I still love, but I think I used too much. 😛 Then I drybrushed white on top and over his face and called it done.

Until I saw a post on A Wyrd Place talking about re-varnishing over the white drybrush…

The LED isn’t as noticeable in these photos, because it’s a photo, but it’s really cool in person. 🙂

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Arcanists – Kaeris

Posted on May 1, 2015

I picked up Kaeris at Kippers Melee at my first Malifaux tournament and left her in the box for almost 2 years. Now that I’m trying to expand my Arcanists so I can have a better arsenal for tournaments, I thought I’d paint her. 🙂

I ended up really happy with her, despite my human skin woes. Really close to the colours I wanted (thanks Oso!) and I love the OSL, particularly where it meets the rock. I finally got something that looks like a “pool” of fire and she’s pulling it out of the ground.

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Iron Painter – Round 1

Posted on April 22, 2015

I signed up for the Wyrd Iron Painter competition. It’s rough – 5 rounds, each round there is a random theme you have to model to. You are randomly matched against another contestant, and you have to beat them in a score out of 20. 5 points for Theme, 5 points for Technical Skill, 10 points for Aesthetic.

Here’s my entry (click to open in bigger view)

Here is my opponent’s entry. The Theme was Fools Gold.

Each round is 2 weeks, and this round ended April 19th at midnight. It started on April 3rd. I had 1 day before I left (mercifully, my fiance was out wedding dress shopping for half the day…) and a day and a half of sick and jetlag to do this.

I’m pretty damn pleased with myself, given those constraints! I did have a number of potential models out and available, and I lucked into the fact that I was planning to do Willie soon, so I had a decent idea of how I wanted to do his base, and that he worked well with the theme.

The sickness and jetlag has taken all of my ability to remember more than 30 seconds ago, so I’m really having a hard time recalling what colours I used. I know I used Tallarn Sand for the first layer of his skin, to see how it went, but there’s very little actual skin tone remaining.

Things I’m not happy with:

Using pure white was a miserable idea. It doesn’t get shaded easily, it just gets dirty looking. So his pants are off-and-on in places.
The shirt I was trying to make look like a black checkered mesh over skin, but the skin is dirty and messy as well.

Things I’m pretty damn happy with:

The layered base.
First use of Army Painter tufts. Super easy, and awesome.
The gold. I really wish I could remember if it was Vomit Brown base or Sunburst Yellow base. But it was easy after that – I used Dementor Yellow to make the yellow more yellow, then a very light drybrush of white on the top of it for some shine. Seraphim Sepia is lightly placed into some of the crevasses to separate the dynamite out from each other piece.
The blending on the wheelbarrow edges.

It’ll be a miracle if I make it to round 2, but at least I’ll have most of the entire 2 weeks to work on the piece! Results for round 1 are said to be available April 23rd, round 2 starts April 24th.

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Arcanists – Arcane Effigy

Posted on April 19, 2015

This guy has a hell of a story, starting more than a year ago, and I finally found my love of him. Starting from this great source, and ending with me re-buying the model so that I could get his book.

I really love the subtle contrast between the brighter blue “orb” lower body and the dark dark blue jacket, and the much greater contrast between all the blue, and all the different yellows. The browns are more yellow than orange or red, the candles are yellow and it’s great.

Disappointed that the top photo has such poor lighting on the right side, but the bottom photo is much nicer. 🙂

I got home from Japan late last night, and I’m sure you can read all about my trip on my other blog. 😛

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Arcanists – Children of December Final

Posted on April 16, 2015

And here’s the whole crew!

Without a wendigo…not a fan of the model, and I think it’s even worse in translucent blue. >.>

Same paint scheme as for the Ice Golem, just without the LED in their torsos. 🙂 I thought about painting Rasputina like how I painted Tara, but decided I was pretty happy with leaving her blue.

Work-in-progress

Arcanists – Children of December

Posted on March 29, 2015

I looked at my Arcane Effigy and decided I didn’t want to finish him, and so I started basing my Children of December translucent crew.

Good times. 🙂

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Arcanists – Kaeris, Ramos

Posted on February 27, 2015

No time for big photography setup, but here’s Kaeris and Ramos on a box of Hanged. 😛

The fire was a pain, and I hate painting faces. I started with Sunburst Yellow and went up with some Blazing Orange, which I mixed with Flesh Wash over successive layers to get a more brownish red, then I mixed that with Codex Grey to cool it off and then with Black for the final cool layer. It looked super messy when I was done, but I think I’ve fixed it by going back over with the Orange and some watered down Yellow in places. Also, adding the OSL brought some focus away from the bright yellow pillars, and towards the ground and her clothing.

Faces, I hate faces. Painted with the P3 Ryn Flesh, then with Game Ink Skin Wash, which I tried out. It’s hard to tell if it was better than the Secret Weapon Flesh Wash. I mixed it with the Ryn Flesh up and got to a tone that wasn’t horrible. Then the eyes. White in the eyes, which gets everywhere. Then desperately try to get a spot of black in there that doesn’t look cross eyed. I got the right eye with little trouble, but as usual the other eye wouldn’t cooperate. I painted back over it 5 times before I got something that wasn’t horrible, but then I had to repaint most of the left side of her face. Faaaaah…

Ramos is less interesting, just a lot of greys. Also, the skin again. Stupid humans. And I mostly finished him off about 3-4 weeks ago, so forget what I did. I don’t think I’ve posted any photos of him!

Work-in-progress

Arcanists – Ice Golem, gluing the back on

Posted on January 30, 2015

I was brave and glued the back on the model.
This was kind of scary, since I don’t get to touch the wiring ever again and hopefully it’s solid.

I sculpted a icicle on his arm where a particularly nasty white section was from where the sprue attached, and a few more icicles on his butt where I drilled into it to get the wires through. I painted these with a Vallejo white primer that I picked up a few days ago, as opposed to the Imperial Primer that I used for the Nothing Beast.

Work-in-progress

Arcanists – Ice Golem, UNLIMITED POWER

Posted on January 27, 2015

Got the LED wired up inside the golems torso today!

This was also the hardest part of this project.

Holy hell, there have been a lot of hardest parts.

The problem here is that I’m trying to do really small detail work inside of a narrow area. I have both needlenose pliers and good tweezers and I used both, switching tools whenever I needed something strong or something agile, because you can’t have both! At one point I feared that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I ended up pulling the LED out and using the tweezers to pull loops into the inside wires. Then I turned those loops so they were face up, and dropped the LED into the two loops. Then, I carefully tightened the loops around the LED leads.

Once I got the LED wired up, I tested it again.

Then I soldered it in. Also the hardest part. Here the challenge is to get the solder onto the wires with a hot iron, without letting the hot iron touch anything plastic. Inside of a plastic box. A narrow, plastic box.

After I got it soldered, I worried that the metal bits were to close together. I’m about to glue this thing inside, and I never get to touch it again. If the wires ever touch, I’ve created a short and I don’t get light anymore. So I went back and adjusted the solder and pulled the leads further apart and…

Now I have a light inside of a torso. 🙂 From here, it gets real simple – glue the rest of the golem together.

And don’t fuck up the paint job. >.< I have to sculpt icicles to cover the holes I made while drilling for wires, and paint those icicles. A fellow on A Wyrd Place used washes to provide contrast in the recesses of the transparent model and I think I might do that. Then I’m going to use the Secret Weapon snow mix on parts that might have snow.

Still a long way to go!

Work-in-progress

Arcanists – Kaeris, basecoat

Posted on January 24, 2015

As with the Arcane Effigy (which I didn’t end up using…), I wanted to put some colour onto Kaeris before my game.

Instead of creating my own colour scheme, I’ve been using Google Image search…here’s my inspiration this time. I want her cloak to be a little more grey to link up with my gunsmiths, but it’ll be a little more blue by the time I’m done.

It’s codex grey on her cloak, snakebite leather as the brown, burnished gold (that’s important – there are a few golds in the GW line) wings, runefang steel for the metallic grey, and the P3 skin paint and I bought something called moon yellow from Vallejo because I was in a hobby shop and was out of yellow. We’ll see how the Vallejo paint works out for me.

I didn’t write anything about it at the time, and have long since forgotten what I did, but I’m pretty stoked about the base. It’s using my new plan of using a variety of glazes on top of a base colour, and then going back again with a top layer (in this case, a brown) to unify the colours. As well, I made sure to pay attention to where her shadows would fall from above, so there is a much darker section under her.

First time playing with Kaeris this weekend, hoping she’s amazing!

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