Basing

I have no less than three basing projects at the same time now. One for my Cygnar Hunter light warjack, another for my alternative journeyman warcaster, and lastly the first one for the Field Mechanic Goblin Bodger. I look forward to working more on them very very soon :)

I am building up a little greenstuff base for the Hunter. I want it to look like one of the feet has pushed up dirt into a little mound and you can see the brow dirt where it has pushed. The rest should get a good amount of dark green flock for a mossy / swampy feel. There will also be a stone (how the heck am I going to paint that?) in the form of a round piece of GS and a little stream in between. I am kinda torned about the stream as part of me wants to cut into the base to make it deeper, but cutting is so imprecise with a knife that I feel that I might just end up damaging something instead of doing good. I also dearly need to "borrow" some water effect from a certain pirate captain that sometimes shows up at my local gaming store. I hope his offer of borrowing some water effect still holds true. It would be awesome!

The alternative journeyman warcaster is getting the cork treatment to go well together with Haley and Haley's squire (Stryker's got his own, and quite frankly I should either get the alt. Styrker model and base that one or just rebase both him and the normal warcaster. My straight up static grass bases are quite boooring after all). I also like to use a little tin bitz color on it to get a quartz kind of feeling to the stone, and then I like to put some of that dark green flock I have on it, to give it a little mossy feel. Good times all around!

And then to the last one, the cool one. I have cut out a new slit for the model to be in, further to the edge of the base. This gives me more space to put the glass cylinder that is going to look like it has smoke and lightning in it, and generally rock and be cool. More to come on that one :) And tomorrow maybe I can prepare some pictures if I take them when it is light out. I want a gorilla pod + a *good* camera:)

Oh, and I want to work on those cool Eldar models I have as well. Gotta do that! Found this awesome Alaitoc paint scheme guide. But I will start out with a darker blue, sponge on a slightly lighter blue, and then an even more slightly lighter blue. But I want to keep it subtle.

Rhupert Carvolo - Piper of Ord

This is another Warmachine post. I will get by to the Falcon soon. I think it is that darn camo pattern that is making me hesitant to continue that project. Stippling is teh hard!

What I have done on the other hand is painted my first ever Mercenary, the very cool Rhupert Carvolo - Piper of Ord. Unfortunately it's not my mini. For no less than three reasons. First it's quite a useful solo in Warmachine, second it's a very nice model indeed, and lastly because it is the best mini I've ever painted! I am a little big pleased with myself :)

So here comes the pictures, I'll add little tidbits as it progresses from bare metal to model.

And we begin with just metal, and a good portion of green stuff. I wanted kind of a swampy / hilly kind of feeling and I just played around. The mini should be stuck in it pretty hard by now as it is logged into the green stuff.

Spray painted black, without complete success. It's quite hard to get an even coat that isn't too thick. I've obscured details far too often with thick paint and I am pushing myself hard to make sure I have less and less primer on. I don't think I need to prime it that hard really. And I've heard cool rumors that the Formula P3 paints actually covers so well that you can use it instead of primer. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Well, I actually would like to use an airbrush to coat with, I am plans to buy one in the future :)

Worth noting is that I for the first time when it comes to a metal mini decided to paint - assemble instead of the other way around. To get the glue to stick properly I painted on liquid mask in key places before I primed it. That way I just had to get rid of the mask when it was time to assemble :) If you don't own it, run down to your friendly local game store and buy a pot of liquid mask. Go now, the blog will be here when you return :)

Here you see my masonite board that I use for painting. It's quite good! Give it a go if you don't have a good painting "basis" or whatnot. You also see the pipers pipes being painted golden. I love painting stuff gold for some reason *cough* Cygnar *cought*.

And... rouges do it from behind!

I looked around the good old i-net for inspiration and I saw a range of different versions of the pipes. I opted for Vallejos London gray and then bone white, and finished off with some ogryn flesh wash. Here you see some bone!

Here's some bone from the front. I've laid down basic colors with a flesh color for the, eh, ehm, pig stomach thingie that the air goes into? Whatever it is, that's the color! Then green for the coat and dark brown for the pants. Our Piper is quite woodsy! And before I forget about it again, there is suppose to be a print from a warjack in the greenstuff, just that it is quite hard to make out :( Cool idea, epic fail. Maybe I'll get to incorporate it in some future model. I did use the foot of a hunter to press down though, so that part was at least authentic :)

And another rouge piccy..

Our piper is one serious rock star, look at all the light! Yeah yeah, that's just a crappy way of saying "bad photography dude!", but I can't be faulted for trying:) I have gently drybrushed the hair and beard with London Gray and I was really really pleased with the result. It looks far better IRL than on this picture. I was thinking of washing it with black, but nah, I decided against it. It would have made it too dark, not good.

Rouge! Should point on that since the last picture the old guy has gotten his skin painted. I used an unholy little mix as the flesh color I have is far too light. I have had problems with skin in the past and the quality is at least rising. Who knows, one day it might look like *gasp* skin!

Well look at Carvolo now! He's got a bunch of highlights and washes and is starting to look a whole lot better. The little armor piece on his right arm now has a metal color with some rusty looking stuff on there as well. I also did a london gray + light bluegrey highlight + mithril metal scheme on his arm and washed it aplenty with black wash. Turned one super! And yes, he is standing on three pots of paint :) Also note the little blue thing hanging from his belt. I *had* to have something blue on there didn't I? *cough* Cygnar again *cough*

I come back to this angle, I am now starting to wish that I was painting a female mini. Hmm. I do have Epic Haley that is primed white, maybe I should paint her soon :)

And now Carvolo's got a sword! I was quite pleased with the sword, I went for a kind of rusty, used look. Reading the fluff and everything I got an image of an old man, that doesn't take good care of himself. I just wonder what awful thing that has happened to him. Maybe it's somewhere in the fluff!

And now with not one but *two* arms! Looks a whole lot better put together. And the green flock adds to it as well. I wanted to go with a swampy look, but I also wanted to have fake water in the little *puddle*. That did not happen. Maybe it will in the future! If someone tries it, I recommend trying to get a little brown or green or blue or something in the fake water, when it is completely transparent it looks a big gel like. I will have to experiment in the future!

More blurry pics!

And a Rogue :)

The guy just looooves the lime light!

The hair, the toes, etc. I like the details. Got nice details but not the insane orgy of details as I am used to from Cygnar minis.

And to finish it all off, we go Rouge!

That's all folks! If you want to see the mini in real life it can be seen at my (!) friendly local game store. It's not *my* store, I just go there and spend far far faaar to much money. Oh which store you ask? It's Game Maniacs in Katrineholm, Södermanland, Sweden. If you can, come on in and take a peek at it. Yeah yeah, I am proud of it, I will admit that much :)

You don't know where it is you say? Well, try http://www.gamemaniacs.se and then I am sure you can find your way:)

Oh, and it took my about 10 hours or so to clean, base, paint, assemble, spray purity seal, and be done with it. I am *not* a speed painter for sure, but it still goes much faster than before :)

Eldar Falcon Grav-Tank Pilot

I've painted more of my Falcon now. This time I went for another of the "inside" pieces, i.e. the pilot. I want to go with the open clear canopy look as it looks more "natural" to me, and thus I had to paint the pilot.

I don't know how most people do it, but I glued the little piece behind the head of the pilot to the chair-like piece and then I painted the three separate pieces before I glued all of it together. I did notice exactly how little paint do like glue. Not much room for error there! Had to do a little touch up even.

I went with a pretty basic paint job. First I used a dark blue for the cabin, a medium one for the suit, light blue for some of the nifty details, and a blue was over all of that. The hands and forehead got a good mix of red leather, tan skin, and white which ended up being maybe the best skin color I've produced thus far. Maybe I'll use that on epic Haley and epic Stryker :)

And here are the pictorial evidence of my madness:

And again:

The pictures turned out way better than the poor Gobber (to my defense I did try using my parents camera instead of my piece of junk and that might have made the different, still really hard to photograph minis!) and I really do have to take a new pic of him. Maybe I'll try to make that really nifty base I am thinking of and then I got a great reason to shoot the guy!

But back to the Falcon. I might just do the gunner as well now as long as I remember how I did this dude. I guess I am trying to focus on everything but the stippling of the outer hull. My tests did go, well, bad, awful, painfully bad. Totally sub par! Not at all the look I wanted. I really wish I could get a very detailed intro to stippling. I get it that you are suppose to use a brush and push it down and twist, but it honestly don't get that good when I do it.

I wanted to try to use some kind of sponge instead, and I tried it, but without any good results. I will give it some more goes soon though. I want to get a really smooth several shades of blue look. What I don't want is to make it look like a bunch of color blobs with too much color difference between. The Eldar doesn't strike me as a bunch of guys that would botch the paint job:)

Good thing I have some Orks now to try painting some insane stuff:)

Until next time, signing off...

Magnetic attraction

I've decided that magnetizing my models is a good idea, so I found some helpful stuff on the web that I thought that I could share for the heck of it:

http://awakeningynnead.blogspot.com/2009/02/tutorial-magnetic-eldar-weapons.html
http://saimhann.blogspot.com/2009/05/magnetize-your-miniatures-with-mini.html
http://saimhann.blogspot.com/2008/12/warhammer-40000-building-magnetic.html
http://www.arhicks.co.uk/gallery/gw/gw_image_falcons.php
http://www.librarium-online.com/modeling/a-guide-to-swappable-weapons-on-eldar-vehicles-271.html

So if you stumbled upon this page by mistake, google search, or whatnot, you might just find some useful info via those links. Enjoy :)

Field Mechanic Bodger

My Falcon project has been standing still for a few days, but my next piece will definitely be pilot who I plan on completing before I take the next step. Lots of stuff to paint and a really cool model. But what I have painted on the other hand is one green bodger. It ended up quite different from PP's own version and it sure looks different to say the least. After looking at the PP pix though I thought that maybe I should change the color of his pants to blue. Also damn I can't paint cool leather at all! Maybe I will be able to do so in the future:)

Here are some very very blurry pics:

On the last image you can see my painting "plate" or whatever it's called. It's a piece of "masonit" (whatever that is in English, masonite or something perhaps?) that is hard and has proven to be quite useful. I use it for a small variety of purposes, the most important one keeping my parents tables safe(r) :) And what you can't see is that I forgot to paint his teeth, I so gotta do that tomorrow! Upon closer RL inspection I also see that I need to touch up a few minor problems. But all in all it looks pretty neat, for being me who painted it, and the pants actually looks OK, so no bluification. This is the first of the bodgers I've painted so now I have my little "bodger prime" to use as a refence. We'll see how that turns out :)

The little bugger is also very unbased. Something I might change in a way I haven't done before. I got really inspired a few weeks ago and decided that I wanted to make the bases look like they were in a warjack factory. Or possibly just have some extra 'jack parts that they had dropped. And I did have some luck as No Quarter #22 features pictures of 'jack factories! One idea I have is to use a glass fuse (5mm x 20mm) and cut a whole in the base so I can get it lower in as I can't cut it easily and I want it to sit at an angle.

To get that effect I have decided that I need to use some green stuff to make the base slightly higher so it doesn't look so out of place. I have also thought of removing the metal part on one side and simply put some different colored cotton in there to make it kind of smoke/electricity looking. I also have some cog wheels in the pipeline to add to another base. Maybe some wiring on another. I hope to have some cool looking bodgers with a field mechanic that I can field in the future. I do need to take a long *hard* look at those trenchers though, as I'd like to see if I can't make some good use of them! So much painting, so little time :)

Next time I hope to have some Eldar Falcon progress to show, but there should be regular Warmachine updates too, and hopefully I can get some better picture quality even with my unly bad camera!

Embarking on an adventure

I started out painting minis sometime during February 2009. I have painted 806 out of 1385 points worth of Mark 1 WARMACHINE Cygnar. It takes a little time but I can whip them up to table top standard and play with them. I do enjoy painting them a lot though, even more than playing most of the time. I tend to loose more often than win when I play, but when I paint I always win :)

That being said I have embarked on a new journey. I have bought my first plastic model, my first model purely intended to be assembled and painted for fun and not for gaming (even if it might end up in games in the future). This lot fell on the Eldar Falcon Anti-grav Tank. I chose it because my local game store had it, it's a plastic model, and I enjoy the Eldar models. I wanted something very different from the very detailed Cygnar models.

Next I got the parts off the sprues and dry assembled the whole thing to get a feel for the model. I also got terribly confused about the possible additional weapons. I do have the Eldar Codex, but it doesn't really feature good pictures of what different weapons looks like for the Falcon. I do feel a general confusion that lies over Games Workshops products. I look forward to Privateer Press new "Forces of..." books to see what they might come up to. I also feel a frustration to the point of wanting to write me own ultimate "Codex: Eldar" that is clearer and more logical. Go figure :)

So I decided that I wanted to paint my Eldars in some kind of official colors, or rather base it on official colors since not all of the models are represented in official colors. I settled for Alaitoc. It's a deep blue with yellow details. I haven't fully decided on everything yet, but that is the basic theme. It is pretty close to what I have for Cygnar, plus it reminds me of my home country a bit. I did decide to go with a few metal parts though, so they will get done in gold instead of yellow.

I will keep the canopies clear and paint the pilot and gunner. I just find that niftier and while they do have details they are far from the most detailed I've painted so I want to do a good job and make them look as cool as I can. I will also keep the back door operational and paint some of the interior. Not yet sure if I should keep most of it black, or go with painting it yellow inside. Not many will ever look at the inside of my Falcon, but that's not the point. I will know which makes all the difference.

Having cleaned off all the plastic pieces with a knife, which took me several hours, I put the pieces into three different plastic bags to keep them separated a bit better. I realize that I have to be very thoughtful when I do start to actually glue things together, as otherwise I might do things in the wrong order and really screw up. So slow moving is the key here. I am starting with the main fuselage and the three big pieces which looks like this:

So pretty much just plastic there. I decided to quickly paint at least something today, so I chose the inside part that I wanted gold colors on. I realized that I probably need to paint a few more areas before I am done with it, since it will be hard to reach parts, but either way it turned out quite neat. I was happy with the result, which is something like this:

The metallic golden should go well together with the dark blue patchy pattern. I do have to think about how I want to paint the details as well. Some seem to just paint it as if it was a big area, while others pick the details out and paint them in a different color. Saim Hann goes all red for instance. But I kind of want to make some of the details pop a bit more. We will just have to see where I take this :)

I am also thinking long and hard about the blue pattern. I've read two ways of doing it, one where I mutilate a brush and kind of drab the color onto the surface, and the other I take a drybrush brush and push it down on the surface and then rotate the brush. Both seems to work, neither seems to quite make the pattern I want. I don't want the color patterns be that distinct so I think that I will use colors closer to each other, no really bright blues for the pattern, and I might just try some kind of sponge for it. I realize that I need parts to try this out on before I pain the actual plastic :)

The future will have to tell what happens!