All Your Base are Belong to Us

It has been a long while I know. My life has been crazy with work and family issues. I have continued to paint when I can and I finally have the photography set up ready to go again. I have a pile of pictures available and I hope to update regularly for the next few weeks.

Now on to what you are really here to see. The competed Project Scythe. Mostly this is just basing. There are a few touch ups you may notice, and its sealed now so there is subtle shift is tone/sheen. I always coat at least once with Testor's  gloss coat for durability and then hit is will Testor's Dull coat to take the shine off.

Distractions: Song of Ice and Fire

A couple of weeks ago George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons came out. Its book five in his Song of Ice and Fire series. The first book, A Game of Thrones was recently adapted into an excellent TV series by HBO. Anyway its hard for me to emphasize how good this is. Martin's worlds is fantastic, and his willingness to do anything to any character has developed into a well deserved legend. If you ever read any fantasy novels I really suggest you check it out.

(As usual this is simply what I have been spending my time with rather than painting. I don't get anything in any way if you buy this book, I don't know the author, I just think its an excellent read).

One Painted Model

This is shaping up to be the next to last post for Project Scythe. Here is our monster, completely painted, but not yet based. I am already at work on the larger quark rocks for the base. In short order this should be ready to be sealed.

Back in Black

This doesn't look like much. After all the work I did its just one more layer of paint. The strange thing is though that getting the black on the plates of the this model is the most time consuming step. With the extreme contrast any mistake is obvious. Worse the plates have all kinds of nooks and cranny's and missing any of them leaves a bright spot in the middle of a sea of black. Still he is looking good not. Shading is all that's left.

Distractions

So periodically I get distracted by something that eats up my painting time. That has been happening a lot lately. It occurred to me that maybe I should share. Lately, my biggest distraction has been a computer game a friend of mine introduced me to. Space Pirates and Zombies (SPAZ) is currently still in beta and therefore available for 25% off or $15 (US). Its an old school top down pace shooter. You build a fleet and blast your opponents while gathering resources and upgrading things. It can get a bit repeatative, rather like traditional grinder games like Diablo, but that isn't always a completely bad thing. There is enough flexibility in the game that you can get a good ship that suits your style. For example, I prefer beam weapons because they hit instantly rather than having to lead your targets. I also like to load up on powerful launchers. Thus my current ship lets me hang back and beat off enemy fighters with my beams while my wing-men harass a larger target. When my missiles are ready I close, strip their remaining shields with my beams, and the let them have it with a big missile volley. Its perfectly legitimate to play other ways however.

I am including a link below, but I want you guys to know that I am in no way affiliated with the maker of this game. I just like it and thought I would share.

http://www.spacepiratesandzombies.com/

Striders

A while back I needed these for an upcoming tournament. As a result these were painted fairly quickly to a tabletop quality. Still its amazing how much better a painted unit looks than a non-painted one.

This is the unit attachment. 

Here is the solo that goes with the unit. The yellow scarf helps it stand out when necessary. 

Two for one posts!!!

I whipped these up with some medium bases and the banners from Man o' war Kovniks which I ordered from PP online. I cut off the anvils on top carefully and gave them to a Khador playing friend.  They feature some really nice shading, especially on the green and purple ones. I colored them specifically not to match any of the armies I regularly play.

Scythean Skin!

OK so in all the time I have been away I have put very little time in to project Scythe as I have been waiting to be able to get pictures. That means it will be moving up to the front burner as I am going to want the Scythean for some upcoming games.

Below you can see the big fellow with the rough skin. This is achieved with a series of washes each wash gets darker but also get thinned down more with water and glaze medium. The first wash is golden yellow, followed by bubonic brown and then a mix of bubonic brown and graveyard earth. All paints in this sequence are Citadel.  During this process I am not too concerned with neatness. Everything that is left is gong to be getting much darker coloration. I will also go back and clear up any areas where the wash pooled too much or otherwise doesn't look right.

Out of Action

It has been a long time since I have posted but I have good reasons. A few weeks back the graphics card on my computer burned out. I don't have on board video so that left me with no way to post. Then I got Portal 2 and that ate a lot of my posting time. Finally I just got back from a trip and my SO who isn't back yet (at a conference) has the camera. That said here is what I have been up to.

I finished the Sorylian test cruiser. I have the skin tones roughed out on the Scythean, I painted up a huge unit of Legion Striders, a full units of Protectorate Bastions, and I built and painted some flag terrain markers. Finished some other smaller things too like a pair of spare Protectorate flame guard.

Hopefully I will have some pictures of this stuff to post soon.

More Old Warcasters

I have been having some issues keeping my photography rig set up lately, also the hockey playoffs have been eating in to my painting/blogging time. I have got a few things done, but I don't have pictures. What I do have is another old warcaster. This was years after the last two, and painted to what I considered a pretty high standard at the time.

Old Warcasters

I have been playing Warmachine for years now. Since back when there were four factions each with four warcasters. Today I am posting up pictures of my first two. At the time I worked really hard on these, even adding a little crude freehand (the menofix on Kreoss' hat and the runes along the bottom of Severius' cape. You can see my progress, Severius, the second one, has much better highlighting than Kreoss. Still I would consider these only table top quality now.

Project Scythe Now With Paint!!!

After all that work to get this built things are finally moving along quickly. You can see the model was primed white. I also have my first coat of paint down. I do the yellow skin color of my warbeasts in an unusual fashion. This coat, Citadel Sunburst Yellow watered down to not quite a wash, is actually the highest of the highlights. I will be adding a series of progressively darker, and thinner washes, then I will go back and touch up the highlighted areas. 

A lot of people will tell you never to prime white because you have to go back and all the shadows between sections. However, since the plates on this model will be so dark anyway I find the white primer saves me a great deal of time trying to cover black primer with yellow. The darker paint on the other parts of the model also mean I can do the skin with a series of washes and not worry to much about how neat I am as I will neither be hiding detail not putting down a hard to cover color. 

Project Scythe Putty

I have the putty work done on the Scythean. You can see where I filled in the gaps and smoothed the seems. I did this for pretty much every piece. I use Games Workshop's green stuff, and Vallejo plastic putty for this.

The putty looks rough, but it actually been blended against the model so that it feels smooth. I use a combination of things to do this including a modeling knife and a few odd tools I have lying around. Sometimes I even bend a paper clip if I need a specific curve in a hard to reach area.

Next up for Project Scythe is can of primer...

Project 60

Here is how this works. I get one miniature, primed and assembled. I spend one hour painting it and snap pictures at five minute intervals. Photography time does not count towards the hour. I also stop the count to allow washes to dry. 

Today the miniature is the Attendant Priest from Warmachine. In games terms this model accompanies a mercenary unit and this made me less concerned about the paint scheme matching exactly. I have never attempted this before. Going in I had no idea if an hour was going to be enough time or too much. Turns out that a little more time would have been better, but I didn't do that badly. I also learned that I need to figure out how to keep the camera zoom at the same setting. It kept turning off and resetting the zoom level so the picture below is not as consistent as I would like. Still you get a pretty good sense of my painting process here. You may need to click, this is a fairly big picture. 

The final result you can see below, the only changes I made after the hour was to touch up the black part of the base.

I enjoyed this process immensely. I hope to try it again when I can, either on a model used for this specifically or when I get another good candidate.  

Project Scythe Assembled

So finally the first look at our monster all in one piece. Building this things was a significant project. There is a pin in every single part, and two more holding it to the base for a total of 17 in all. After I snapped off three drill bits in my Dremel (Alway wear your safety glasses) most of them were drilled by hand too. 

Now its time to fill the gaps and hopefully soon prime this beast. 

More colors

I am going to show off another one of my paint schemes, but first I want to talk briefly about another aspect of the hobby. Modifying miniatures. I am not much of a sculptor. However, I love to build things out of random bits. A while back a friend and I stumbled on a great deal. A sizable force of Cryx from Warmachine for sale a a really great price. We decided to go in on it together. One of the pieces we picked up was even cheaper than a good deal. Asphixious was missing the bottom part of his spear. I knew right away how I would fix it, and you can see the unpainted repair here.

The picture is kind of rough but you can still see the repair. I made this from a spare piece of copper pipe, a bead and one of my SO's earings which had lost its small stone. I think the result is pretty nice. Painted up you can hardly tell its a replacement build.

The other nice thing about going together with a friend on an army is that I have step by step instructions for all the colors and effects for the entire model written up. It requires a somewhat eclectic mix of paints, but unlike with most of my older stuff I can tell you exactly how I did this model if anyone is interested.

Showing my colors

OK, so last post I promised you something with paint on it. The other day while shooting pictures for an upcoming post I needed a test model for the lighting and camera settings. I grabbed something off the of the shelf and just happened to get this guy. This is one of my better and more recent War Machine solos. Its also the blog's first look at the color scheme for my Protectorate of Menoth army, which is my largest by model count.

Unfortunately this guy doesn't see a lot of table time because of his in game stats. Which is why he was on the shelf in the first place.

The jacks and more heavily armored troops in this color scheme feature the tan color you can see here on his shoulder plate, you will see more of that as I post more pictures.

Project Scythe continues

OK, so that was a lot of mold lines.

Project Scythe continues an is now in the building phase. Most of the time in this part is spent pinning things. I use a pin vice and paper clips to add a pin to each part to help it stay together.

The tricky part is making sure that your pins line up straight. You can see the same leg here with the pin in it as it fits into the lower body. To get this right I pretty much always start my holes by hand with the pin vice. Once I am sure that I have a good start I finish the job quickly with my Dremel. 

For big models like this I like to put a pin in every join. However, our Scythean here poses a unique problem because the upper body is hollow. There is plenty of area for glue, and I might have left it the way it was but I decided to use putty and put one in anyway. Here are the two halves of the upper body with the pin in them. 

The putty has to dry overnight, but it makes me feel better about the join. Here you can see the complete upper body with the long pin that will hold it on to the lower body. There are lots of things to attach to that upper body and I wanted to make sure it was staying put. Nothing ruins a good paint job like breaking a model in half. 

Thats a lot of boring pictures with no paint in them. Still I will be able pick this monster up off the board and plop it down next to its victim confident that it will not fall apart. 

Project Scythe has a ways to go before it gets to a point were I can prime and paint it. Next post I am going to break things up a bit and do something with some actual painting. I am working on the launch post for Project 60, I have plenty of Project Archive pictures ready to go and I have a unit approaching completeness. 

Project Circuit Lizards

Project Circuit Lizards is the painting of my first ever fleet for Spartan Game's Firestorm Armada. In the game's rather limited storyline the Sorylians are a reptilian race, hence lizards. The paint scheme that I am working on is based off the colors one sees when working with computer, especially on the mother board and memory chips, hence circuit.

The ship below is one of the three Cruisers from my starter box. It is still very much a work in progress, however it gets the basic color scheme across and has served me well in choosing the scheme.

Project Scythe

Project Scythe is a detailed step by step tour through the process of getting a complex model ready for Combat. I am going to be working on Privateer Press's Scythean. A model that will eventually tower over its 50mm base. Today however we are starting at the very beginning, laying out all 16 parts. I've loose fit them all and made sure they are all there.

The next step is to hunt down all the mold line on the model and get rid of them. These can be subtle especially before painting, but leaving them is the sort of rookie mistake I made on the goblin on speed. Here you can see the Scythean's head resting on the hobby knife and needle file it has a date with. Its hard to get mold line to photograph well, so I have highlighted it in red.

The next part of this project is to remove all of the mold lines carefully with the knife and files. Be careful not to cut yourself or wreck detail on the model. Also be careful not to miss any, it can be a real paint to have to fix them later. Generally when you find one its a good idea to follow it all the way around the part. Though Privateer likes to hide them so even this can be tricky, the line here largely disappears between its teeth before reemerging on the chin.

The Beginning and the Middle...

Welcome to my blog. Part of the idea behind this blog is to show the process or painting miniatures, not just the final results. This post also launches Project Archive which will be a photo log of my miniatures. Keeping both of those themes in one post is a little challenging.

I figured the best place to start was at the beginning. The plastic goblin below was the first miniature that I ever painted. I didn't understand too much about shading or highlighting at the time, so it is pretty crude. However, it has earned a special place in my collection for being first and for being lovingly called the goblin on speed by my S.O. 

Now to show the progress the most recent miniatures I finished.  I have made since the next picture is the Blighted Swordsmen Abbot and Champion from Privateer Press' Hordes line. These were done fairly quickly as I work through a backlog of unpainted miniatures.