Lowri Lowrisson - Statuesque Miniatures

Just look at this adorable little bastard.

I threw this little guy into an order from Wampstore a little while ago, just on a whim, and I'm glad I did. It's a simple figure but cleanly sculpted and packed with character. So much so that I was inspired to push myself a little and try some new things.

Thing number one was the approach to bright colours. I wanted a bold look, like an Uderzo illustration. By which I mean Albert Uderzo. By which I mean Asterix.

Look at this as well! It's SO GOOD.

At first I tried just flat colours with strong black-lining, but it just looked unfinished, so I worked up the highlights a little to give the surfaces a bit more shape, but stayed away from strong highlights. I think it worked okay.

It was also my first try at non-metallic metals. I'd been too afraid to give the technique a real shot, but I don't think I completely messed it up!

The shield is carrying the axe a bit, I admit.

The place where I had a little breakthrough. Previously I had only very cautiously chanced little bits of freehand. On this model the flattish colours meant there was a lot of blank space waiting to be filled.

So

I

Did!

The shield is okay, and the lining on the cap is neat, but I'm mostly pleased with the cape. Both for the neatness of the little trim line, and for the goofiness of his cape design being an exact copy of his hair.

Oh, and the tiling on the base is made from milliput rolled into a sheet then clipped up. It's nothing special, but I like it.

Oh, and I'm bad at painting eyes, but that one looks fine, I think.

Things I Have Learned: How to Load a Brush

Not like this, in case you were wondering.

This is the way I loaded my brush when I started painting miniatures. I think it's the way most people do. It's horrible, but you don't know that at the time.

The advantages of the big glob of undiluted paint on the end of the brush method are few. You've essentially removed the point from your brush, so precise work is impossible. The paint is so thick it won't just flood off despite the grotesque overloading, but the downside of the thick paint is that you have to more or less scrub the paint off the brush onto the miniature. It will cover reasonably well, but it will do so in thick, uneven coats that will potentially show brush marks or obscure details.

Over time I learned about not overloading the brush - so that it's the same shape loaded and unloaded - and thinning paint - so it flows well and covers smoothly. In my case that ended up looking like this.

Doesn't that look better?

That's how I've been loading my brush for... maybe years? Recently I bought Angel Giraldez's Masterclass book, and it blew my mind with the advice to only load the tip of the brush, because that's the bit you paint with.

I imagined the paint below the part of the brush I was using somehow stopped the tip drying, but I've been experimenting, and it doesn't. I think I may have been overloading my brushes, and that might explain why my nice sables don't keep their points as long as they're supposed to.

I've commemorated my enlightenment by making my very first animated gif. Enjoy, everyone!

Does seem kind of obvious, now I think about it.

Age of Sigmar - Stormcast Eternals

We claim this table, for SIGMAR!

As you might expect, these are some of the Sigmarite (Sigmarish? Sigmarian?) folks from the Age of Sigmar box. I painted them for sale on ebay, so links are at the end.

There's not a lot to say about the painting process. Again I mostly followed the guides on the Warhammer TV channel.

Loving careful blending versus clumsy drybrushing. But which is which?

I did paint the gold a little differently. For the Retributors I used the GW method to paint the armour: base, wash, re-base, highlight. The result is nice, but it required a lot of careful blending to avoid a stepped effect, which took bloody ages. To save time on the Prosecutors I went for base, wash, drybrush, selective drybrush; and I'm convinced it looks at least as good. The Lord Celestant got two layers of drybrushing then painted in highlights, because he's special, and it was still faster.

Cloaked in a cloak so he won't croak.

I worked up the cloak from this article a little more. It occured to me that the twin tail is a fundamental enough Sigmar thing that I probably shouldn't leave it out.

I also broke up the shapes of the silver space station a bit with some black wash, and highlighted with some little bits of silver. It's not much, but it makes quite a simple freehand pop a little more.

Links to ebay auctions with more detailed pics, below.

Celestant

Prosecutors

Retributors

How I Painted: Space Cloak

Today I will be trying to recreate this...

Which is a painting.

On this...

Which is a very small surface.

Wish me luck, gentle reader.

After airbrushing a nice blend from navy blue at the top (to key the cape into the rest of the model's eventual colour scheme) to black on the rest of the cape, I splodged on a mix of browns, reds and oranges to create the surface of Sigmar's pet comet.

Crudely mixing on the surface of the model like this gives you a varied, dappled pattern that gives the impression of a rough surface. Plus it's fun to do!

If I'd done this before painting the cloak black the effect would have been stronger, but c'est la vie.

Then I masked off a neat circle with tape, re-sprayed the flat black basecoat, and very, very gently sprayed in some white stripes and swooshes. It's important only to let these be opaque in very small areas. I'm something of an airbrush novice, so I was mostly focused on just not spoiling the whole thing.

Not spoiled, I think.

Still using the airbrush I glazed these areas with a mix of 3:1 blue:green ink to tone them more interestingly, then gently airbrushed some more white within the existing shapes. I also tried spattering some dots of white with the airbrush, but stopped that when I realised it was inevitably going to go wrong and RUIN EVERYTHING.

Also: Look! Comet!

To paint the outline of Sigmar's celestial city/space station/whatever that thing is, I made a circle of masking tape, squished it on, then traced the outline with metallic paint.

I could have just freehanded the circle, but that's difficult enough at the best of times.

Look how neatly it follows the folds!

From there it's just a matter of adding some little stars, painting in the shapes of the space citystationthing, and selectively using black wash to create some depth to all the folds and hollows.

TADA!

All in all I think it's a pretty nice effect, especially considering how quick it was. There's more I could do, but I'll hold off on that until I see how it looks with the rest of the model complete. For now, it's dinner time.

(Credit to Nadya at Hoperiver's Valley for the inspiration from her much better work along the same lines.)

Assault on Black Reach - Ultramarines

As a hobbyist's painting career grows longer, the probability of painting an army of Ultramarines approaches 1.

"army" might have been over-egging it a bit

These are the Space marine figures from the Assault on Black Reach 40k starter set, It made quite an impression at the time, both because of the quantity of models included and the quality. And now, a mere seven years after release, I can report that I can see why. These are pretty good!

There are some compromises to fit so many models onto so few sprues, and to make them easy to assemble. At points detail is soft or missing, but with considerate painting you'd never know unless you were looking for it very closely.

I had dreams of doing a full walkthrough of the painting process, but the progress photos from my phone were pretty wretched. In fact the only picture that reads well is this one.

I am a fool.

Which I took to remind me that if I have a primer actually called Ultramarine, and I'm painting Ultramarines, I should probably remember that before I've primed a whole squad in white.

I'll pop some pictures of the completed squads in the gallery section of this site, as soon as I've figured out how to make a gallery section on this site. For now: recipes and ebay links.

Rough citadel equivalents are in brackets. I mostly use airbrush metals because they're better.

Blue:
airbrush layers VGA imperial blue/ultramarine/ultramarine + white (approx. kantor blue/ altdorf guard in new Citadel), gloss varnish then line panels with mix of blue and black ink, matte varnish. Line highlights with ultramarine+white mix, more white for a smaller highlight

Black:
base black, highlight with VGC stonewall Grey (administratum grey), glints with white. black wash to tidy

Gold:
base VGA glorious gold (gehenna's gold?), sepia ink wash, highlight with glorious gold then polished gold (auric armour?)

Steel:
VMA steel, black wash, highlight with steel

Bone & Parchment:
P3 trollblood highlight (no idea!), sepia wash, re-highlight with tbh, then with added white. Parchment highlighted more generously especially at last stage.

Seals:
P3 skorne red (mephiston red), sepia wash, re-highlight skorne red then khador red base (evil sunz scarlet)

Leather:
P3 beast hide (no idea!), sepia wash, highlight beast hide, repeat shade and highlight until satisfied

Eyes:
khador red base, blend trollslayer orange to inner corners, white dots outer corner

satin varnish to finish, because it's sturdy for tabletop use

eBay links:
Captain
Tactical Squad
Terminator Squad
Dreadnought

Age of Sigmar - Chaos Models

Otherwise known as The Crimson Slaughter! Subtlety is not among their merits.

Raaar! We're tough!

These are some Blood Warriors. If I understand correctly they like war, blood, skulls, and more war, blood and skulls. If you offered them a Tunnocks tea cake they wouldn't even know what to do with it.

These were a little outside my comfort zone, and all the more interesting to paint because of it. Since I was intending to ebay the result, I followed GW's video guide. They came out fine, but a little murky for my liking.

Roar! I am tough also!

Skuldrak the Khorgorath! He's a sort of blood monster stuffed with skulls, but I'm sure he's a nice chap underneath it all.

I was more relaxed painting this guy. I still used the official GW colours (a few substitute paints, admittedly), but I relaxed a little and painted more my way. The result's a sort of hybrid of how I normally paint and the 'Eavy Metal style, and I rather like it. I'll be bearing it in mind when I paint gaming models in future.

Wpssssh!

I don't think this guy has a name. He's just a bloodstoker. Not even the bloodstoker. It's a thankless task, stoking blood.

More relaxed again! I worked without much reference to the GW scheme and.... it pretty much just looks like the GW scheme except with darker trousers. So much for the individual vision of the artiste!

As of now, all these models are up on ebay.

Blood Warriors
Khorgorath
Bloodstoker

Eldar Wraithlord - Project Log - Part 2 - Painting Green & Gallery

As of part 1, my treasured Wraithlord looked like this:

Not good enough.

I enjoyed painting this one, so didn't stop much for photos. I'll show you how I did the green though. It's a clever way of getting a bold colour with a lot of depth with an airbrush.

First thing was to do a first highlight on the area to be painted green with a light grey - I used Game Air Stonewall grey (equivalent to old GW Fortress Grey, or new GW Astronomicon Grey, I think) - but any fairly light, reasonably neutral grey will do.

Excuse the spottiness of the gradients. I'm still very much an airbrush novice.

Then, here comes the clever bit, glaze it all over with a green ink.

An ink-ink, mind, not a pre-mixed shading wash. The term is used for both by some people.

The ink tints everything in your desired colour, while retaining the shading you've just created. It also dulls the bright highlight down a little.

Then you highlight again, this time with a lighter colour with a tone that works with the colour you're creating, but adds some depth and interest to the colour. In the Lester Bursley video I stole this technique from (https://youtu.be/waUqGovvO_4) he uses a warm orangey flesh tone to paint red. I used Game Air dead flesh (old Citadel Rotting Flesh, new Citadel Nurgling green), a very pale olive tone.

Pale, but striking, I think.

Then green ink again.

You could leave this as it is, but I was in a perfectionist mood, so I worked the highlights and shades by brush a little more.

Each successive layer adds depth to the colour, while the ink pulls it all together.

You can work back and forth adding highlight layers, then unifying the colour with ink again and again until you're happy. I, unwisely, decided I was done here, masked the green and painted the bone colour - a simple earth base, shading up with bone white, to a light highlight of pure white.

I was so very proud of this.

Apart from some freehand I definitely should have planned in advance, and which necessitated careful repainting of selected areas of the model, nothing very much interesting happened. So here's some nice piccies of the finished job.

3D Printed K-9 K-Ring

Chum Alex (Alex, should I link your blog or 3D printing services here?) has a 3D printing hobby/addiction, and made this on his terribly impressive high detail resin printer.

Finger for scale

Not bad, eh? There's slight banding between the print layers, but apparently Alex has switched to a different resin that doesn't have that problem.

But it's the wrong colour, so I fixed it.

Outside world for scale

Eldar Wraithlord - Project Log - Part 1 - Building

A handsome fellow. Or possibly lady.

Before I start shilling my ebay wares, I thought it would be nice to share some figures I painted pre-blog.

I was lucky enough to get this model very cheaply from ebay. It had been assembled very clumsily and there were some damaged parts, but I thought "how bad can it be".

It was very bad.

So bad that I clipped it to bits, stripped all the paints, and ordered a few spares off bitzbox for the unsalvageable parts.

Genuinely an improvement.

Now, I like the Wraithlord model very much. It's probably the best expression of the Eldar aesthetic of clean, swoopy lines and minimal greebliness. Unfortunately there's not a lot of choice in how you pose them out of the box, and they tend to look rather static.

"Do you mind if I come in? I'd like to talk to you about my sword."

By the background Wraithlords are gigantic constructs animated by the spirit of a departed space-elf. I wanted a pose where it was moving like a person, rather than a whirring robo-man.

So I could re-pose the limbs I sliced through them at the joints and pinned them back together. This had the handy side effect of removing all the weirdly low-tech ribbed material between the joints. I also pinned the right wrist to allow for a more relaxed angle.

The only clever piece of conversion work - well, clever by my standards - was building the left hand grip for the gun. Unfortunately the kit only includes a right handed pistol grip. So I bodged a left handed one together by butchering the closed left fist and adding parts of the right-handed grip.

The trigger and finger are the original flipped upside down and filed to the right shape. Quite proud of that.

I'll spare you the pictures of all the filling I had to do to make it look approximately complete. But here's what it looked like assembled and primed.

None more Grimdark.

Part 2, concerning painting, is here.

Hello World

Hello world! I'm Dave, I live in Edinburgh, and this is a blog for my miniatures hobby.

If all goes to plan things will happen here:

Then pictures and self-indulgent prose will happen here.

For now I'm just checking that Blogger works, really.