Browsing Tag

fantasy

Stegadon Base Coat – “Glaze”

Posted on May 18, 2013

Glaze is in quotes because this isn’t glazing…well, maybe it is, but it’s not what people usually mean when they say glaze. I’m feeling like this is really part of the base coat of the model. I’ve painted some bright colours on, and now I’m darkening them a bit.

I took 1:1 Chaos Black and Matte Medium, added a boat-load of water, and wazzed that all over the entire damn model.

Still watching (listening to…) The Voice. Doesn’t make for good painting, even if it’s an easy job.

It actually looks much much worse than the photo makes it seem. The paint has dried in a patchy, horrible way. If you click on the photo and open a bigger version, you can see what I mean on the back leg.

There are a few spots where, while I was painting after working out last time, the paint isn’t adhering to the model. Oils from your fingers slide onto the model, and because our paint is acrylic/water based, it does what oil and water do and doesn’t stick. One spot was so bad I asked my club mates for advice and it was recommended that I sand it down. I did and that fixed the problem, but there’s a few more smaller ones to fix.

Right now, I’m a few posts behind. This is good because I can say that despite how embarrassed I am to post a photo of this model, it’s turning out ok tonight (which will be posted…in the near future. :))

Work-in-progress

Stegadon – Base coat finished?

Posted on May 14, 2013

I’ve finished the base coat for my stegadon. This was a simple matter of repeating the same process as I did for the grey, but for some other colours – blood red, ushapti bone, snakebite leather and dwarf bronze.

At this stage of the process, I start to think that I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just taken a $70-80 model (I don’t recall) and coated it in a ridiculous colour which is completely different from how I’ve worked for the last 10 years. That other process started with black and worked up. This process starts with white, puts a bright base on, then washes down and then builds up again on the raised areas.

If I keep this up, you’ll see this whole thing, and cringe with me as I do it. My next post in particular is going to be super embarrassing.

Work-in-progress

Major repair

Posted on May 14, 2013

This is really stupid. I had about 10 skinks, 3 temple guard and a cold one rider not make it back successfully from Adepticon. Spent the night pinning things.

I have couple GW drills, and I bought a pack of really small bits from Central Hobbies. For whatever reason, I use the insides of computer network wire for pinning. I guess I just had a lot of it around when I learned how to pin, and it’s reasonably strong and thinner than paper clip. Call me weird… but if you do, tell me what you use to pin with! 🙂

One nice thing – after the repair, I puttied some more bandages on the 2 already built temple guard I bought at Adepticon. I need 4 more for my OFCC list (and 24 is just a good number in general for temple guard) so this is the start of that.

After all of this, I’ve got some painting to do. Probably take the Scorched Brown for the weapons and some Codex Grey for the models and get rid of any unpainted breakage lines. Bah!

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

Sculpey!

Posted on December 21, 2012

More inspiration from my new hero! He uses the baked sculpey in a lot of different ways…but I’m just a beginner, so I decided to make stone blocks with it. I didn’t screw up…but I didn’t do it right either.

You can buy this stuff from Michaels for a few bucks, in any colour you like. I choose white…because…I did.

Open the box and it’s this strange stuff that’s a little brittle to start with. Roll it around and when it warms up in your hands it becomes super pliable. I spent a few minutes shaping it into a long and flat piece of stone for my stegadon Engine of the Gods howdah. When I was happy with the general shape, I used my regular GW sculpting tool and some water to flatten out the fingerprint marks. Then I took the end of one of my paint brushes and rolled it around to create a smooth stone-like texture for it.

Cat hair comes free of charge on all my models…

This part was all easy…

It says to turn the oven at 275F and bake for 15 minutes. So I put it on a piece of aluminum foil and tossed it in there. 15 minutes later, I pull it out and check the consistency. Pretty soft…it says you should bake longer for thicker pieces, which this is, so I put it back in for another 15. 45 minutes later I pull it out and it’s still soft. So I turn the temperature up. 15 minutes later, it’s smoking. But still soft. Another 15 and it’s still smoking…and still soft. I think it was in the oven for almost 2 hours by the time I was done. Still soft. But I had to go to bed. It was hard in the morning and it looked like this.

This thing is going to be so awesome…

It’s supposed to be plain white…but it’s stone-like, and it’ll be painted over, so I call it done. 😛

I did two more pieces the next day (not shown) and put them on for the higher temperature for 15 minutes and they were smoking when I pulled them out. Slightly less dark, but still more pink than white. So…maybe 275F at 15 minutes is the right thing to do.

Featured Images

Stegadon Base: 3

Posted on December 9, 2012

I thought I was done after the last post. But a few things happened. First – I let it sit on my desk for a few weeks. And second, I’ve been reading Mr. Wappel’s blog daily, and he’s been painting some lava bases. My base is mostly black. It’s not mostly lava. There’s no majesty to it! The combination of looking at it every day, plus looking at a better done one every day, made me come back to it.

The first thing I did was re-lighten the lava parts. Last time I had black washed this section to give it some depth, but it was to dark. So I heavily watered down some Cygnus Yellow and some Blazing Orange and went to town in the cracks. I brought the orange up the edges of the cracks a bit, trying to bring some more light to these sections, since they are pretty small compared to the rest of the base.

The next thing I had to do was to give some variation to the black parts. I had previously painted this with two different colours of black, but this wasn’t useful at all. I took Khador Red Base, Scorched Brown, Cryx Bane Base and mixed them with a lot of water and washed it over all of the black. Then I added a little bit of the Blazing Orange, trying to bring the lightest parts and the darkest parts together. I still wanted those red and ragged edges, but I wanted more!

I mixed some of the Cryx Bane Base and Bleached Bone and dotted my grey rocks with them. The two greys I had previously used were the same colour, but different shades. Now I have little specks of slightly different colours in these areas, and I think it’s more interesting. I took a similar wash, with less Bone in it and washed the black areas with it, trying to get more “rock” out of it. After I’d done this, I didn’t have enough red, so I washed with Khador Red Base and Scorched Brown again.

Work-in-progress

Stegadon base: 2!

Posted on November 23, 2012

Wanted to take a break from working on my Android app tonight, and thought I could gather the courage to paint my stegadon base. The problem is, that I’m pretty happy with how the sculpting went, so if I screw up the painting it’ll be tragic. Take heart and stare down the enemy!

I started by doing the part I knew I could do. Drybrush a Codex Grey and a Fortress Grey over the rocks. This is the colour scheme of the rest of my bases for my Lizards, so this was a foregone choice. I wanted the volcanic rock area to be mostly black, so I took some P3 paints of Thrallmar and Coal Black and highlighted that up. You can see the last layer of black here quite clearly at the lips of the channels.

Now we get into the scary part. I started with my Raphael brush, but felt it was to big for the job and dropped down to the GW Fine Detail. A good lot of Sunburst yellow later, and I have yellow rivers running through my base.

Next layer was a bunch of watered down Fiery Orange just above the top of the yellow. Because it’s watered, some of it flows into the yellow and the pigment spreads out to be a little transparent. After this dried, there were spots that looked a little “dry”, so I went over it with Badab Black, which I then took a wet brush and spread around in the channel. Effectively I watered down my wash.

Two last layers – a Baal Red wash over the top of the orange and the lip of the channels. This was somewhat plain, and I wanted a more obviously glowing effect. Heavily watered down some Blood Red and painted it over the area I had just washed, which gave a great looking effect!

Overall, I think that the lava looks ok, the big rocks look ok and the volcanic rock looks…eh. But the plus side is that I’ll have a giant dinosaur standing on top of it, so it’ll be fine. 😛 I’m not certain what I would do differently next time. I feel like there is to much black area, and that the bottom of the lava doesn’t look right. Maybe a little bit of water effect? That would be neat. Maybe if I tried to make a flowing texture with the putty? I won’t be doing this again for a while anyway, so it’s not a huge issue. 🙂

What will be interesting…my lizards are traditionally a Shadow Grey. That’s a lot of grey in one spot, even though it’s not the same colour. Any thoughts on how to resolve this problem? I’ll make something up if you don’t. 😛

Later!

Work-in-progress

Stegadon Base: 1

Posted on November 6, 2012

My Lizardmen have sort of a yellow/red and grey colour scheme going on. The idea was that it was volcanic/lava colours, to better blend into their natural environment. I’ve looked into “lava” bases before, and while I was able to find some that looked ok (most of them are for 40k…), I’ve never gone ahead and bought them.

A quick search last week showed me that I might be able to…make them myself. So here I am, testing this idea on the largest base I’ve got.

I started with more cork. After using it on my skirmisher movement trays, I’m pretty impressed with the stuff. It looks like rocks when you’re done! The only concern I still have is longevity – will it all last longer than a few days.

After the cork, I set about trying to emulate this YouTube video on making lava bases.

I got a box of Milliput, so I wouldn’t feel like I was mushing hundred dollar bills onto my base (in the form of GW modelling putty). It has a very different texture than the green stuff I’m used to using – I used the “standard” milliput and it’s much more grainy when you’re mixing it together. Comes off on your hands, almost like a flaky dough.

I mushed it on there and then tried to use my sculpting tool to smooth it all out. That didn’t work, so I ended up wetting my finger and using that. Worried about fingerprints? Me too. But the tool I have is to thin, and so it left edge marks where it depressed into the putty.

After I’d covered the base, I used the tool as shown in the video to cut in and pull the putty apart to create channels. Then I used my exacto blade to cut mini-channels.

Lastly I used some extra putty to build up a step on one of the cork pieces for the stegadon’s back foot – he’s kind of standing on a rock or something.

I want to paint this separate from the model, so now I’m thinking of how to attach them afterwards. Patrick says he hasn’t had any issues with this sort of thing, but I’m thinking I’ll try to pin it, and then glue the pin down after painting.

For colours, I was thinking: the rocks my usual drybrush fortress/codex grey, the puttied ground a darker grey/black and the channels a red/orange. I’m hoping to do some source lighting such that the edges of the channels can “glow” a bit, but we’ll see how successful that is.

I would love if you would give your opinion on colours! What would you do with this?

Thanks for reading!

Musings & Meta

ChumpHammer

Posted on November 5, 2012

Doing a small advertisement for a few friends who are doing some neat work. A new Warhammer podcast done by Dale, Peter and Jordan. So far they have 3 episodes, about 2 hours each. I was listening to them while modelling, but I don’t do that nearly enough (see my posting schedule for details…) so I started listening to them on my workout last week. Probably do that more – they are pretty funny, and I think I almost learned something about Lizardmen.

http://www.facebook.com/Chumphammer

http://chumphammer.podomatic.com/

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