Weekend painting wrap-up

Despite a full weekend of gaming (both Friday night and Saturday, all day) I managed to make a good push on the painting front. Finished off my first set of praetorians and also hit the 50% completion mark on the Titan Cannoner. Finally I managed to get my entire Paingiver beast handler unit assembled and cleaned as well as the final assembly for my Cataphract Arcuarii. I’ve got a round of priming to go and then another huge push on painting. Now I just need to wait for some decent weather to get the priming done.

The Guardian.... It's Done

Over the weekend I sent a good amount of time working on miniatures. I Finished off a good number of bases for my Skorne force and get some of the painting done as well, finished up the Ancestral Guardian in about 30 minutes. Really I spent more time trying to get him assembled and get the Halberd shaft swapped out with a length of steel rod. Primed him in black, gave two coats of dry brushing then picked out the sacral stones and some trim. Photos should be up later this week or possibly into the weekend. Worked on some Praetorians and I expect them to be finished off some time this week.

I also started working up some Hordes tokens as the ones from Privatter don;t look that hot. Spent some time with printable shrinky dinks and got more frustration that a castrati singer at a brothel. Now I'm looking to Plexiglass. I'll let you know how these pan out.

Inspiration

So there I was, trying to figure out how to paint up my APAC for my Rezolutio demo team. So I started thinking of armies with really distinctive colors. And then I remembered how awesome the L5R colors were, very clean and obvious.

Inspiration! Why copy, when I can *steal*? My Arashi was painted in the Dragon's yellow and green. My Enforcers, in Crab's gray and blue. Clan colors follow function.

I'm like a criminal mastermind. Pictures (yes, pictures) to come sooner or later.

In the same night, I came up with a paint scheme for my Gun Mages as well. I'm like a thinking machine.

Thursday updates

I have started working on a Dire Troll Mauler.

I'm staying with the blue for the trolls but going with the light belly to help get the contrast. I also changed the spikes from green to more stone color.

I also primed the Standing stones for the circle.

Photo's!

All have some work to be done on them but figured I would post an update on how they are moving along.

I am doing metallics on the Argus (rob's stuff) and NMM on my trolls.

Monday Progress Update

Well I’m maintaining hours at the desk after the first week, actually I’m near damn certain I exceeded it. Lately I have been focusing creating basing for my Skorne as well some miniature cleaning and assembly both for table top and art projects, so not a whole lot to show just yet. I did start up on another task that I need to get back into, finding reference material. Both miniature painting examples from Cool mini or not (Search the gallery for a specific company at ratings of 8+ and kiss the evening goodbye) as well as actual photographic images from the web. I find that the really help in refining highlight gradients as well as highlight placements.

Here are the current projects I’m looking at. It is a given the focuses will change but honestly I expect that

Table top projects
To meet the desire for a fully painted Magnus/Skorne invasion there are a few things I need to finish off. Actually just about everything needs to be finished off, So I’m pretty much looking at my Entire Skorne Force that needs painting, 750 points worth in roughly 6 weeks. This should be interesting I did 500 about 350 points of trolls in 6 weeks, and most of that was warbeast.

Art Projects
There are a few miniatures that I’d picked up purely to paint. A few reaper sculpts as well as sculpts from Spyglass, Hasslefree, Heresy, etc. Now I know from experience I cannot dive right into high art after leaving it for several months, and the last figure I started doing up right was over a year ago. So I’m starting with a few Rackham and reaper sculpts I’ve got lying around to warm up and get practice on. These are sculpts I may or may not finish and I know this staring out. These are sculpts that offer up large swatches of sections that I need re-master. Techniques such as: Skin tones, highlighting techniques for linen, leather, polished leather, as well as the whole breadth of Non Metallic Metal painting. And I’ll be doing these while doing table top quality miniatures.

Monday Update

Both Argus have been brought up to a base coat level.

When I say a base coat level, I mean all the base colors that I play to use for the model are on the model. No highlights, shades, hand drawn patterns, etc etc. If I touched up the base they would be table-top ready for pretty much most average gamers.

My next step will be to do the wash on the figures to darken them down and create the shades. I have moved away from washes in most of my figures because I like the extra detail that painting shades by hand can bring but for moving figures quickly, washes come out well.

I'll try to get some pics up soon but I just don't have a good camera set up going yet.

Weekend Update

FellCaller 80% done. Need to finish up the base and fine detail work but is table-top finished.

Argus x2 45% done. Almost done with the basic base coating. Doing a redish brown for the fur, dark green for the leather with gold/bronze for the patterns. Going to do a dark brown wash over the general model to darken the fur and metal before doing highlights to the fur.

Unified Skorne Color Theory

Well with the notional thought of a fully painted Skorne / Magnus Assault on a Cygnar outpost I’ve had to review the state of my Skorne painting. Previous blog installments show my difficulties in solidifying a Skorne color scheme. My original plan for a Blue Violet scheme encountered difficulties with in consistent color mixing, and difficulty in highlighting my custom color base. Morghoul and the first Cyclops came out cherry! By the time I got to the Titan I was painting blue and my red violet contrast went to the crapper. In the end the miniatures looked like they belonged in a Tzeentch Warhammer army. Unlike the official paint scheme which make it look like they belong in a Khorne Warhammer army. So I switched to a deep rich regal purple and painted up 6 Praetorians. I was pleased they were completed as I continued to look at them they were still off. Originally I really liked the though of Vinter equipping all of the Skorne in True Cygnar Blue as they were sent back to reclaim Cygnar and eventually all of the Iron Kingdoms for Vinter. I still love this fluff reasoning and need to make it happen.

So last night I decided to finally establish a unified color that can easily be painted over black primer. Pulled out a black primed Mangler and experimented with about 6 different color combinations. After the evening I’ve got a patchwork painted Mangler and a solid attack plan for the rest of the Skorne, and eventually my Magnus Agenda army. I’ve also started a paint work journal. A few months ago I picked up a Bristol sketch book (journal size) and I’m starting to write down paint recipes, along with painting in blocks of the color next to the recipe. This should hopefully make it easier for me to return to previous paint work much more easily after taking breaks.

Warmachine Winter Painting challenge

http://forums.privateerpress.com/index.php?showtopic=102214&st=0

My post to the forums:

Ok, I'm in. Will try for a few since I am bad on time.

FellCaller
2x Argus
3x Man'o'War shocktroopers
1x Troll Impaler
1x Troll Axer
5x Trollblood champions
Swamp Gobbo's

State of painting January 2007

Since it is the first workday of 2007 it is clearly time to start laying out all those new years’ resolutions. Well I’m not actually into the whole resolutions idea so I’m going to lay out some notional plans on what I would like to see accomplished with my own painting work. For the past several years I have had difficulty in separating High quality painting from tabletop quality. I have made gains and losses in establishing the distinctions for these purposes. Luckily I have thrown off the shackles of evening classes and can now reclaim time for gaming and painting. Unfortunately it looks as though my business travel will be increasing quite a bit this year.

First I’m not going to do anything silly and lay out specific miniatures that I want done by a certain time. My interest in different figure lines is far too fickle to stick to that. Instead I’m going to lay out three generalities that I will be looking to accomplish through out this year. My overall purpose is to have tabletop quality minature to field but also to further develop my skill with high end painting.

1) 7 hours per week on tabletop quality miniatures.
These will be miniatures for myself, or others but a minimum of 7 hours week for tabletop quality figures.

2) 4 hours a week on “art” projects
I’m going to define art projects as anything towards mastering a painting technique or time spent towards top notch high end painting. This may very well resort in even less figures finished but I think this is an important step in mastering the art of painting figures. Also included in this is learning to use an airbrush properly as an artistic tool, not only as a spray bomb methodology. Additionally I’ve been considering taking up drawing to get a better handle on perspective and light sourcing. I think this is something that will aid me in placing the highlights in the correct positions

3) Submit more figure into online painting competition as well as post every high end paint job onto Cool Mini or Not.

4) As support for #3 I intend to further develop my miniature photography capabilities.