Really Crappy Pic Time!

Oh hey there interwebtubes! I still haven't got the batteries for the digital camera, but I DO have a macbook that can take super crappy photos! LETS ROCK IT OUT.

The mug poses important questions. DOES Dad know all the answers?

Soooo yeah here is the Juggernaut. He has an axe. The axe is blue. Contrary to how it appears here, it's not actually eye bleedingly bright neon blue but looks more icey. I started out with GW's old Enchanted Blue but that was way too dark so I used Ice Blue as the base and added white from there. The blend looks pretty decent. 

Posing with my plush red dressing gown because that's how I roll baby.

Here you can hopefully see some of the highlighting on the main body. It's more subtle than what I usually do, but I actually like this. It's nice to step away from the cartoony levels of highlights on occasion. Plus I'm learning about highlighting large plate areas. For starters I'm learning that it's a pain in the balls.

That's all for now, will post more piccies over the course of the long weekend. Yay for three days off work.

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Cha Cha Cha Chaaaaanges! Also: Warjacks.

As you may have noticed from my deliberately crude banner change (don't worry, it'll bug me after a few days and I'll do a proper redesign) this blog is undergoing some changes! Like for starters I'm posting an update OH SNAP SEE WHAT I DID THERE.

The long, dark tea time of my painting hobby is over as I have found new enthusiasm dear readers, and all because Vomkrieg basically got onto his hands and knees and with tears coursing down through his magnificently trimmed beard, begged me to take up Warmachine with him.*

And so here we are! Have some pictures.

This is Sorscha. Sorscha carries a huge hammer, wears a cool hat and is a hard bitten fantasy-Russian mage who can control giant steam powered death robots with her mind. Awesome huh? She also wears heels which is a bit dumb, but that's male game designers for you, sadly. 

This is the leader of my Manowar squad. They're huge hard-asses who walk around in steam powered armour, which can sometimes overheat and cook them alive. Of course they're too tough to worry about such trivial things! Swig back some more potato juice and tromp off through the snow to glory!

This is the Destroyer, one of my two heavy warjacks. I LOVE the redesigns of these models, which have a surprising amount of poseability. For this dude I wanted to give the impression of shuffling along, pausing to aim his canon to unleash ranged hell upon the enemy. To contrast with....

 ...this badass, the close combat Juggernaut. Arms outstretched in the classic 'come get some pain, you soon to be flattened bags of cat droppings', which sounds way cooler in Khadoran.

Aaaaand that's some of my starting force. Stay tuned for more Warmachine updates! There'll be painting! Custom transfers! Bad Russian accents! Death in the snow! For the Motherland!

PS: check out Gravitas' blog here. He got bored of waiting for me to get writing again and made his own place. It's so beautiful when they fly the nest.

*This may be a lie. More truthfully he snuck into my house in the witching hour each night and whispered things about steam powered death robots while hiding under my bed, his subliminal message slowly making its way into my waking thoughts. As one does.

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Guest Post: Quick Naffatun step-by-step

What do you do when you've spent more than 24 hours and whole forests worth of carbon to travel to literally the other side of the planet to visit old friends?

Fresh air? What's that?

That's right, you sit inside and you paint tiny space men* with them.

Fair warning, this is just another step-by-step painting work in progress, so if you're not terribly interested in that please click anyway as I am terribly lonely and I get beaten if these posts don't get hits.

I recently made one of my semi-regular trips back to my sheep-infested homeland, while also acting as The Megapope's mule for plastic crack. Games Workshop gouge the crap out of their antipodean customers, so I was happy to bring him a box of Devastators that wasn't being charged at 800% markup.

Look how happy he is!

Being a gigantic nerd, I had planned ahead and bought with me an Infinity figure (another Naffatun, like the ones in one of my earlier posts). So while lascannons and heavy bolters flew from their sprues like plastic rain, I got busy painting.

I don't think that ponytail is particularly safe.

Didn't have any primer on hand, so I picked up a can of Tamya white primer. It's actually really nice, had a good tooth, and didn't wear at all. As usual I started with citadel Desert Yellow for the uniform, then Dark Flesh for armor and detailing. It'll be mostly covered by subsequent orange coats, but enough will remain in recesses to add depth.

Really, it's going to get caught on something.

My Ultramarine-obsessed host was lacking in Badab Black and Gryphonne Sepia washes**, so I had to make do with extremely watered down Snakebite Leather (for the yellow) and Chaos Black (for the grey). The brown worked better than the black, but both did their job. The highlighting on the yellow, however, is not at all up to my usual standards, and I blame the unfamiliar (and hook-ended) brush. I'll have to fix it later.

Or catch on fire.

The orange, on the other hand, turned out great. I decided not to overthink or over-blend things, and the bolder highlights coupled with the added depth from the dark flesh make it pop against the pale cloth areas. Sadly, I was missing the greys necessary for the gun and boots, as well as blue for the visor/details, so this is as far as I could get. I thought it was worth posting though, as I'm pleased with how much I could get done in just a couple of hours - it's always much more fun to paint with someone else.

Also SOMEONE has to post in this blog.




* Actually, in this case a tiny space woman. Unlike most tiny space women, she is wearing sensible clothing and no combat heels. Sadly she has not avoided Gigantic Boob Armor Syndrome, but I guess we can't have everything.

** I think they're too dirty for Ultramarines.

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Guest Post: Ragiks against the machine

I swear, Infinity miniatures exist purely to make me feel like a terrible painter. I consider myself a mid-range painter, not golden demon worthy but able to implement standard techniques to get a passable result. But something about the Infinity line makes me feel like I'm a 12-year-old learning to drybrush again. I think it's the dynamic posing and realistic* scale, they really make you step up your game.

Anyway, Ragiks! The drop-troops of the Hassassin Society, specialists in turning up unannounced to mess your stuff right up. I've used these guys successfully by luring the other player's forces into the mid-field with some Ghulam plebs, then having the Ragiks turn up in the opponent's own setup zone to gun down their lieutenant and other high-cost units from behind.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was a little unsatisfied with how the orange was turning out on my Naffatun, and after a bit of thought I decided that the problem was that the armor didn't have enough depth.

The solution was pretty simple, put down a base coat of Dark Flesh underneath the Solar Marcharius Orange. It makes the gaps between armor plates seem deeper, and gives an overall slightly richer shade.

The guns are a continuation of my experiments with non-metallic-metal. They're still a bit messy, and turned out much better on the rifle (above) than on the heavy machinegun, but I think I'm starting to get a handle on the technique. I'm especially pleased with how the rifle's clip turned out.

The sword is another experiment, painted in Necron Abyss with edging in Enchanted Blue, Ice Blue and Skull White. It's okay, but I think it's missing something.

These guys aren't actually finished, they need a final pass to clean up a few mistakes and add a little edge highlighting on the shoulder vents. Overall though, I'm much happier with how they turned out, and hopefully I can apply these lessons to the next couple of miniatures I'm painting - those unfortunate Ghulams that the Ragiks use for bait.


* Compare them to Games Workshop humans, who's fists are often bigger than their heads.

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Plans! Also Happy 2012!

All packed apart from several sharp bits I trod on

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a great holiday season and didn't empty your wallets buying overpriced plastic space characters for slapping pigment onto and moving around a table while making 'pew pew!' noises.

Unless that's your thing of course.

I myself got a few more additions to the collection but am currently gearing up to move house, which has already involved packing up the study and everything in it. This effectively means that I won't be doing much (if any) painting until the start of February, so in the meantime I'll make a few posts here and there about things that catch my eye and hopefully also pressgang Gravitas and some others into a guest post or five.

Also. Also! My project for this year that I would like to set myself is a modest diorama. Nothing huge or too fancy because frankly I'm going to be having a lot on my plate this year with work and postgrad studies, but I think something fun with the boys in blue and some orks is definitely doable. I already have some ideas about a small urban scene, possibly an ambush of some kind in an alley.

Sooo yeah. I shall be reading your posts, making the appropriate ooh and aaah noises at your pretty pictures, and soon enough will be adding my own once again. Happy painting.

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