Browsing Tag

lizardmen

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”. 🙂

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

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!

Featured Images

Skirmisher Movement Trays

Posted on November 4, 2012

I’ve been following this great blog recently by James Wappel. He has some absolutely fantastic painting on there, regularly, and recently a number of modelling projects as well. He’s working on a display tray for a tournament that he’s going to right now, which is a great read.

I read through most of his archives, and one of the posts was on skirmisher movement trays. I have this problem – whenever I move my skinks, I always end up breaking the laws of physics. I move one model at a time, each no more than 12 inches, and when I’m done, the unit is no longer in anything resembling a formation. Or if it is, I’ve moved several models 18 inches and cheated.

These were pretty simple to put together – most of the materials are at Michaels :). Matboard, cut with an exacto blade. Measure out your models bases with a half inch space between them. Pull apart pieces of cork as spacers and glue them down with hot glue. White glue sand down, and bingo-bango, you’ve got a movement tray. Repeat times 6.

I’m using them for 3 units of 11 skinks each right now, but I did them in groups of 3, so when I decide to play with Chameleons again I’ll be able to take units of 5 easily.

Primer was no problem, although I worried about the cork slightly…if it wasn’t actually cork…that foam stuff melts under primer. Drybrush my two greys, sprinkle a little dead grass on it. Done!

Thanks for reading!

Featured Images

OFCC Army

Posted on June 20, 2012

OFCC in Portland (or Vancouver…) this weekend! I’ve never played with such a large army before (2800pts), and I’m really looking forward to the event! Driving down Friday with some of my Warhammerz friends, coming back Sunday sometime.

If you look carefully, you can see the finished Scar-Vet BSB in here, but I forgot to take some solo shots of him while I was doing this last night. Another time.

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