Friday SOTU: the 6th

"GENTLEMEN. I LOVE THE NIGHT LIFE, I LOVE TO BOOGIE."

You just never know when a SOTU is going to sneak up on you. On this week's painting state of the union, I go into the sordid details of  First Sergeant Kallistus' cape, plus an almost finished Veteran Sergeant Daceus who has a penchant for fine cheeses. 

Is it even possible not to read on? Yeah, I didn't think so either. 

For when one Ultramarines symbol just doesn't cut it  

Wanting to do a snazzy looking cloak but possessing all the freehanding abilities of a crazed emu farmer with no hands, I once again turned to that great tool of cheaters and scoundrels: transfers. Picking out one of the two pattern lines from the Forgeworld sheet, I cut it up into small sections and carefully laid each section along the base of the cloak, with small gaps where it was unavoidable. 

I think the only part here that I brutally messed up was the last segment on the right. I should have cut it in two, since it goes over a dip without the proper appearance of bending inwards. Not a huge deal and after some further finicking about it came out okay looking anyway, but it's a lesson for next time.

This way... to the dry cleaners! 

And like all the great TV cooks say, here's one I prepared earlier. So after the decals dried I carefully joined up the missing segments with some white paint. It came out a teensy bit sloppy in places since it involved a bit more freehanding than I anticipated, but fear not! The next step was dry brushing on some dirt along the bottom of the cloak, and like the cunning weasel I am, I used this to cover up the worst of the blemishes. For the dirt I first used Calthan Brown, and then a very, very light brushing of Snakebite Leather.

Finally I gave the red highlights a bit of a boost, ran over everything with gloss varnish to seal it all in, and then gave it a last coat of matt. I think the end result is pretty decent.

Handshake?

Veteran Sergeant Daceus is also close to being finished now. Here he is looking resplendent in blue and gold with some of the same patterned trim along one of his shoulderpads. 

The sand is white because the glue is drying.
In case you were wondering. 

 And here is some more detail.


There you have it. I am actually hoping to develop some freehanding ability at some stage. Right now I'm still rocking the pain medication from a fairly extensive toe injury, so once I'm off that I imagine it'll be easier to get my hand in.

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Setting The Standard

Nothing beats a good leaf hat.

Company standard bearer is done and dusted. The rest of the Command Squad is progressing at a steady pace. Happy Monday!

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Obligatory Painting Blog Post 1: Desk Setup

I googled 'nerd police' and this is the best I could come up with...

Well, I've managed to resist doing this post so far but the Hobby Blog Police finally caught up with me today. I waited for them to stop wheezing and offered the sweatier members a sit down and sugary biscuit and eventually they told me that there's a certain number of blog posts that hobbyists have to do. It's written down in a charter or treaty or something.

So without further ado, I present the first in a completely random and sporadic series of Obligatory Painting Blog Posts: all about my painting area. With a handy pic and numbered list!

It's got tiny numbers on it! Click it like you mean it.

WORK STATION NUMBER KEY FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE

Also with occasional pointers and tips for your edification and to make you read through the whole thing.

1. All important cup of tea. It's possible that some painters can operate without one of these, but such creatures are clearly alien heretics and should be dealt with accordingly. 
2. Water container! Keep it clean kids. Especially after using metallic paints. Also don't confuse with 1. and dip your paintbrush into your tea. Cough. 
3. Brush cleaning paper! Somewhat better than absent mindedly wiping your brush on your jeans.
4. Novelty cup for storing brushes and things. I keep my good brushes capped when not in use. Also present: clippers, craft knife, etc. The usual stuff. More importantly is your choice of novelty cup. Do you go for a ceramic skull? World's greatest dad? Captain Janeway? Choose wisely. 
5. Glue and things! For basing and sticking the cat to the ceiling. 
6. Apparently I was possibly high or concussed when plonking the numbers down, as I managed to miss both six and and fifteen. Lesser men would go back and shamefully hide their mistake, but not I! See my missing numbers! 
7. Finished dudes. I keep them close by for comparing looks, checking details and so on.
8. Painting stands! I use a bunch of old medicine containers from my recent convalescence, and to make them less likely to fall over I filled them with glass beads. Each one now has a nice heft to it and is very stable. Extra useful when living in an earthquake zone or a T Rex habitat. 
9. Watered down PVA glue! Also for basing! When I've dipped my marine in basing sand I then drip watered down glue through the glued on sand, to help cement it in place. I do the same thing with the flock that I use for grass, which makes it go nice and stiff (phwoar!) and prevents it from coming off. 
10. MEGATRON WILL CRUSH YOU PUNY FLESH CREATURES.
11. Paints! I don't have enough to put them on fancy stands or anything yet. 
12. Bits pile! Sometimes found in the bits jar when I feel especially tidy. But let's face it, most of the joy of having a bits collection is being able to go diving through it like Scrooge McDuck. 
13. Cutting mat! Very handy for cutting, spilling paint, spilling superglue and otherwise spilling things and acting like a total ham fisted clutz. Also lends an air of artistic cred during WIP photoshoots. 
14. The box of waiting. This is where assembled and undercoated models live. Sometimes they cry. I ignore them.
15. See point 6. 
16. Ziplock bag of transfers! I keep all my decals nice and safe in a sealable bag. The last thing you want is all your lovely transfers getting moist or licked by the cat or set on fire or stolen by aliens or accidentally placed all over your sleeping partner during a caffeine fuelled rampage at 3 am. 
17. Test models! Everybody needs test models. They are the Wretched Ones, the crappy old school marines who are made to suffer through the indignities of battle scars and highlighting experiments and occasionally being thrown across the room in anger and then retrieved from under the couch in a few weeks. So other people tell me.
18. A wet palette. For those of you who don't know... take a plastic container. Put a sponge in it. Pour in enough water so that the sponge pools around your finger when you poke it. Place some cut out baking paper on top and smooth it down. SUCCESS! You can now put paint onto it, and the palette keeps your paint nice and wet for many hours. 
19. Piece of plastic that I use for a dry palette. Says it all, really. 

And there you go! If you read through all that then I hope you were at least mildly entertained or possibly learned something new. If you managed neither then you at least learned not to read through my numbered lists in future. Your life is richer! 

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Guest post: It's not easy being orange (Part Two)

In part one, I went over in rather pointless detail about the reasoning behind my color scheme and the test models that I used to experiment on. In part 2, it's time to start painting the actual Infinity miniatures.

After all that mucking about with test figures, in the end I decided on a variant of the official scheme, but with more orange and red shades. You can see in the work in progress pictures that I've started with the metal areas and the desert-yellow cloth areas (these Naffatun are actually the second Infinity figures that I painted, but the only ones I took WIP pictures of).

There's a school of thought that says you should paint "from the inside out", starting with things like skin and cloth, then working your way through the outer layers. While there's definitely something to be said for this approach, I always paint anything that needs drybrushing first, so any overlap can be easily obscured without having to re-highlight surrounding areas. You can see how I've almost completely finished the gun, piping and exahausts before starting on the yellow cloth areas, since part of their highlighting involved a drybrush of Shadow Grey over their Adeptus Battlegrey/Badab Black basecoat.

I used the same Desert Yellow/Gryphonne Sepia/Bleached Bone that I used for the pouches/gun casing in the test models, but applied it to any cloth/unarmored areas. Instead of the super-bright Blazing Orange, any armored areas were basecoated with the more subdued Solar Macharius Orange then given a Devlan Mud wash.

The armor was then highlighted from orange to Elf Flesh on the edges. The pink of the Elf Flesh ensures the orange doesn't end up as chalky as it would with Skull White. It's still a bit washed out at the end though, so to add definition and depth I watered some Dark Flesh down until it's basically a wash, then paint it along the back edges of the armor plates and into recesses. A similar technique is used for the yellow, but with Snakebite Leather.

The pouches and fuel tank were basecoated Dark Flesh, then highlighted with Red Gore and Blood Red. The boot laces were picked out with Ultramarines Blue and highlighted with Ice Blue, as I thought the lower half of the model needed a spot of cool color.

The visors I did last, though I am not sure why. Perhaps because I didn't want to get orange paint on the nice gradient? The base color is Necron Abyss, highlighted through Ultramarines Blue to Ice Blue and Skull white at the bottom, with a small speck of white at the top for a specular reflection. The little nodules on the gauntlets are painted the same way.

To my irritation, half way through painting I noticed that the white primer I used wasn't doing its job well at all - paint was constantly rubbing off the gun barrel and outstreched fingers of the figures. The problem was compounded when I dropped the female trooper just before taking these photos - you can see how chips of paint have come off her hand and just below her knee, as well as the hose disconnecting from her backpack. I'll fix it before I varnish them, but right now I am too annoyed.

The plan was originally to do the bases in the same way I did the one on my test model, maybe with some more variations like scattered dark stones. That changed after I saw the amazing Urban Fight Bases from MicroArt Studios in my local game store. They were perfect! Plus, hexagons! Hexagons are futuristic.

I wanted to suggest that the figures had bought the Martian landscape with them, that the conflict had destroyed the barrier between the city and the wilds and that the dusty regolith was pushing up between cracked cobblestones and asphault.

The cobbles got a basecoat of Adeptus Battle Grey, a wash of Badab Black, a heavy drybrush of Codex Grey, then further, lighter drybrushes of Codex Grey mixed with increasing amounts of Skull White, paying particular attention to the edges of each individual stone. The discarded rifle on one base was painted the same way as the miniature's own weapon.

I then went over the base with an extremely watered down wash of Dark Flesh, concentrating on the cracks between paving stones, gutters, and the areas around the piles of debris. While this was still wet, I gave the rubble piles a basecoat of less-diluted Dark Flesh. When this was dry, I drybrushed more dark flesh in any places that I felt needed it, usually around the areas of wash that had not quite blended properly. These areas were then drybrushed heavily with Blazing Orange, then a light final drybrush of Elf Flesh. I didn't bother to avoid the feet of the miniatures so they would have a natural layer of dirt and dust on their boots.

Right at the start I mentioned that the two Naffatun weren't actually the first Infinity models I painted - that was this chap here, a Hassassin Lasiq. In my opinion I did a better job on him than the other two. I'm very tempted to re-base him on one of the Urban Fight bases, but he is pretty solidly in place. The only real difference between his scheme and the Naffatun is that to avoid using too much yellow I gave him a black under-armor bodysuit. I also made the armor nodules on his legs into blue gems - he's got a form of optic camo so I figure they're blur projectors. The holster and knife sheath should have been red rather than "metallic" but OH WELL.

The interior of the cloak is Bleached Bone highlighted to white rather than the normal desert yellow as a vague nod to countershading. I thought he looked a little clean for someone sneaking around the Martian desert, so I added some Dark Flesh to the hem with a torn piece of sponge. It's good, but a little regular in places.

Overall, I am not entirely happy with the Naffatun, but they look acceptable. I think I did a better job on the bases than the models themselves. I may try a Ogryn Flesh wash on the orange rather than a Devlan Mud, I think it will make the overall color a little richer. I should also push the edge higlights on the metallic surfaces more, and maybe do the same on the orange as well.

Or maybe I should just stop overthinking this crap and paint more.

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Guest Post: It's not easy being orange (Part One)

The excellent Ghost In The Shell meets Necromunda cyberpunk skirmish game Infinity really needs its own write up, and maybe I will do that one day when I'm bored. For now it's enough to say that I've enjoying playing the game with proxy models while slowly purchasing and painting the actual figures.

Painting them ORANGE.

It is no secret that I have a huge nerd-boner for space, in particular the exploration of Mars - probably due to being bitten by a radioactive copy of Kim Stanley Robinson's excellent Mars Trilogy when I was but a wee lad*. So a Mars-based color scheme seemed like an obvious choice, striking enough to stand out but still a logical choice for a combat unit.

However, I had a problem. I had no idea how I wanted to paint martian camo. Did I want to attempt a DPM pattern? How red is the red planet? How do I avoid everything becoming a blur of warm colors? Clearly I needed to experiment.

So I did. Because I give precisely zero damns for the secondary market, I used as my test models figures from the slightly-rare Schaeffer's Last Chancers. Partly because I had them lying around, but mostly because the ridiculously sculpted model named "Shiv" had become some sort of unstoppable force in the games I used him in.

Proxied for a lowly mechanised infantry trooper, he would wade through incoming fire to murder models many times his worth with a shotgun. Clearly a model who deserved to be rewarded.

Rewarded with a MANLY BEARD sculpted from the most MACHO OF GREENSTUFF

The scheme I used on the model I affectionately call Stabby McStabberton was based on pictures from the martian surface, a deep red/brown tending to orange and pink. After a coat of white primer, his uniform was base-coated in Dark Flesh, then highlighted towards Blazing Orange. I think I gave it a Thrakka Green wash too, because why not?

Secondary colors were a desert yellow and a neutral grey/black. The yellow was Desert Yellow with a Gryphonne Sepia wash, then highlighted to Bleached Bone. The black was Chaos Black with simple Codex Grey/Skull White highlights.



I knew that I needed a cool color to make the whole thing come together, so any metal surfaces were hightlighted with Shadow Grey and Astronomicon Grey. I had decided not to use any metallic paints on these guys both as a stylistic choice and as a way of experimenting with non-metallic-metal techniques. I spent a bit more time on the knife than I did on the gun, and while I don't think I really nailed the effect, it was an interesting experiment.

The skin tone was another experiment, as I had never painted non-caucasian skin before. I didn't want to use Dark Flesh as a base, as it was already the base of the uniform, and also I thought it was a bit too red. So I eyeballed it, starting with a base of Beastial Brown and a wash of Leviathan Purple, highlighting towards Tallarn Flesh, then changing halfway through to Elf Flesh. Think there might have been a bit of bleached bone in there as well.


The result is good, though I probably should have aimed for a lighter shade to contrast more with the uniform. It's more Indian Subcontinent than the Middle Eastern tone I was aiming for, but I quite like it. Finally, the hair has a slightly blue shade to help it stand out against the skin.

Overall, the colors on the miniature are okay, but not quite what I was after. It's too much a mass of red, and ironically it blends too much into the base (Dark flesh, heavy drybrush Blazing Orange, light drybrush Elf Flesh). The yellow, and the blue-metal were promising. Time to try something a little brighter.

AUGH TOO BRIGHT

I never did finish this guy, firstly because the figure itself never inspired me (he's no McStabberton that's for sure), and secondly because by the time I'd got half finished, I had a pretty good idea of how I was going to go about painting the actual figures. His jumpsuit is a stylish Blazing Orange with a Devlan Mud wash, highlighted towards Elf Flesh, and blah blah blah, I'm already sick of this guy. The darker skin (only basecoated and washed) looks much better against the orange than it does against the red though.

So the orange contrasted nicely while still being in an acceptable Martian color range, though it was a bit bright (and too much of it made it look like a prison jumpsuit). The yellow was just about right, and in fact could probably be used more liberally. The red would be okay for an accent color for pouches and the like, but not suitable for anything larger. The metal was good, but there needed to be a bit more blue to make the whole scheme pop.

Now I had a workable plan, a little experience with some of the more unfamiliar colors and techniques, it was time to paint the actual models I bought for the task.


Next: I finally get around to painting the damn things.




* This is not actually true, I didn't read Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars until I was in my mid 20s, and they were only slightly irridated at the time.

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