NNM Part 3

The saga continues! Rather than go back in with the base colour, I decided to use the 1st highlight colour instead. I found this smoothed out the transitions a great deal and cleaned things up a fair bit. You might also notice that not only am I thinning more (due to what I learned from my last 2 highlights), but I've also introduced some Liquitex Slow Dry, just to ensure I get a bit more time to smooth transitions with a damp brush if I need to.

5) Re-highlight: 2SG:2MB:2T:1SD




6) 1st Shade: 2DG:1MB:1IB:2T:1SD




I'm starting to try to keep the photos consistent as it's easier to see the progress. All in all I'm very happy so far, the shading is really starting to pull everything together. I may actually go back in before I continue though, as I think the large chest piece on the right could do with darkening at the bottom.

All paint is VGA. Colour codes are:
Dark Green = DG
Sick Green = SG
Escorpena Green = EG
Imperial Blue = IB
Magic Blue = MB
Electric Blue = EB
T = Vallejo Airbrush Thinner
SD = Liquitex Slow Dry

~ Darchangel

NNM Part 2

Sorry for the sporadic posts - I save stuff up for a bigger post, then get to work and think "it's gonna be a while before I paint again, I may as well post what I have", and it always seems to be that night I get some more time to paint. Oh well.

So, I feel like I'm having a bit more success with smooth blends, and I'm at least seeing some results. I'm using a two-brush blending technique - essentially I hold a damp clean brush in my mouth, use the colour brush to apply some paint, then quickly feather it with the clean brush. Rinse, repeat.

While experimenting with this technique (which I'm preferring over wet-blending at the moment at it seems more suited to the tiny areas I'm working on), I'm refining as a I go.

I've found that increasing my thinner amount to the point that the paint is basically like skim milk is helping immensely with the blend, almost to the point of not even needing to feather with the second brush. I load up the brush with paint, draw the stroke from where I want the least amount of colour to where I want the most, and lift off. Where I start the stroke gets so little colour it's invisible, and where I end the stroke gets a pure new colour, with a smooth transition in between.

It's not perfect, and there's areas I want to go back over with the base coat, but I'm finding it terribly effective - you can mainly see it on the chest plate.

Anyway, I've applied the last two highlight layers for now, let me know what you think.

3) 2nd Highlight: 1SG:1MB:1EG:1EB:2T






4) 3rd Highlight: 2EG:2EB:3T







Next up is to clean up the transitions by reapplying the base colour, then the three layers of shading and defining the lines between the armour segments. Then another highlight, wash/glazes if necessary, and finally edge highlighting and hot-spots. Phew!

All paint is VGA. Colour codes are:
Dark Green = DG
Magic Blue = MB
T = Vallejo Airbrush Thinner
Sick Green = SG
Escorpena Green = EG
Electric Blue = EB

~ Darchangel

NNMAAARGH!

Ok, so I'm off and started with the aqua armour for Belthir!

From the gate I've realised just how low coverage these colours are, and even applying a thin coat of the basecoat started to show brushstrokes on the model. Instead of cake things on, I've gone for several thin layers and have added a drop of Vallejo Airbrush Thinner to ensure I don't get too much paint build up. Even so, after 4 coats I started to see some surface deposits so I stopped there - I'm hoping subsequent layers smooth out any colour inconsistencies still present.

My results so far are as follows:
1) Basecoat = 2DG:2MB:1T x 3



2) 1st Highlight: 2SG:2MB:1T




As you can see, I haven't made much progress :( The first highlight is surprisingly subtle and I'm actually a bit worried I'm going to run out of space for the next layers, but we'll have to see.

That hasn't been all my hobby work lately though (to be honest, the painting has been disappointingly slow).

In the background I've started working on a foam-core insert for the Descent 2E core game box. I'm up to 6 expansions, 17 lieutenant packs and 3 Hero & Monster packs, and while that all comes with a metric shitload of tokens and cards and tiles, FFG give you absolutely no way to organise any of it. I've been keeping the tokens in a fishing tackle box, cards in card boxes (a total of 4 at present), miniatures in my glass display cabinet and map tiles in the original 5 game boxes. Completely impractical!

So, after searching the web and forums I decided to steal the brilliant idea from Esoteric Order of Gamers (Link) but design my own inserts to support an ever-growing collection of tokens and cards. Here's my Work in Progress of the first layer - it fits snugly in the original game box and stores all the cards from all expansions with room for growth as well as some of the less-used tokens. Next up will be a sub-layer to fill the gap on top of the Hero Cards, to store the rest of the tokens, dice and doors/portcullises/shrubberies. Finally, there will hopefully be room for a second whole layer above that to store the map tiles, but I may just build a multi-layer map storage insert for one of the larger expansion boxes so I can store all map tiles together.



Note the custom card dividers - they took longer to make than the insert has so far!

I'm also working on a storage solution for all the miniatures but that's a post for another day.

More updates coming soon.

Note:
All paint is VGA. Colour codes are: Dark Green = DG
Magic Blue = MB
T = Vallejo Airbrush Thinner
Sick Green = SG
Escorpena Green = EG
Electric Blue = EB

The brown covers the pink, sink the red?

I'm kinda pushing it with the titles, I know, but that's what comes from excitement.

After thinking about it and generally procrastinating most of the day, I spent about half an hour this afternoon fixing my pink issue with what ended up being quite a simple solution. I mixed up what I was planning to be a red/brown glaze and stopped at just a single drop of Scarlet Red and changed my mind. After watching some YouTube videos from Studio McVey on the two-brush blending technique recently, I thought I'd see if I could smooth the transitions out a bit using this method.

Boy did it work! Inspired, I then mixed up a dark brown glaze and went over the whole miniature to tone it all back down a bit, and I'm so pleased with the result. Using a second damp brush to take the fresh layer of paint away from the areas I wanted to keep highlighted, and to feather out the edge of the colour I was applying, the transitions were miles ahead in terms of smoothness.

I'm now ready to declare the hide finished. I'll do the horns and eyes later, but the actual hide is done. Here's where I'm at:













On to the armour, finally! Now originally I was planning on ignoring the box art (which depicts aqua armour), and just paint it blue instead. Beyond the fact that there's not a single aqua paint in the VGA lineup, I've got an awesome colour app on my phone that calculates complimentary colours and it tells me a soft mid-blue is a perfect match for the scarlet I've been using.

But meh, I love the box art and it's primarily because the aqua strikes such a balance with the scarlet. So I spent some time messing with my paints in the palette; the VGA line has three primary blues (dark, mid and light) and three primary greens (again, three tones), so I figured what the hell - maybe that'll give me three aquas to use. I wasn't quite right, but they certainly gave me some awesome tones to use.

Below is a picture of my palettes. The lighting really doesn't do the colours justice as they are more saturated and bright in real life, but you can see I've noted the mix for each.






So based on this, my plan is as follows:
1) Basecoat with a 1:1 mix of Dark Green (DG) to Magic Blue (MB)
2) Highlight with 1:1 Sick Green (SG) to MB
3) Highlight with 1:1 Escorpena Green (EG) to Electric Blue (EB)
4) Glaze with the basecoat mix to tone it back if I need to
5) Shade with 2:1:1 DG+MB+ Imperial Blue (IB)
6) Shade with 2:1:2 DG+MB+IB
7) Shade with 1:1 DG+IB
8) Final edge highlighting and hotspots with a lightened version of the EG+EB mix

I'll adjust as necessary throughout the process and I'm actually planning on doing mid-step mixes between highlighting and shading tones, so all up it should be 13 discreet paint mixes. If it makes sense at the time, I'll also add some very subtle red glazes to represent reflected colour from his arms and neck, but we'll have to see.

But before all that, I need to paint the glowing rune in his belt buckle. It's a really bright glowing rune in the box art, but it's a very fine embossed depression in the miniature so it's not going to be fun. Oh well, the means justify the end in this case :)

Until next time.

Red's doing in my head!

And Pink stinks!

I've posted a couple of "completed" blog entries recetnly, but I'm going to start adding WIP blogs as and when I think there's a point. As in the old days on my blog, it'll be as much about formulating and documenting my process and experiments for myself as much as for anyone else to view (cuz hey, who's reading this but me anyway?!).

For the first WIP post, I'm currently working on Belthir, one of the lieutenants from Descent 2nd Edition. Nicely detailed model, reasonable scale (though a bit smaller than my usual GW space marines), and once I removed his wings he's reasonably easy to access with a paintbrush.

So the box art for Belthir has a frustrating amount of shadow over it, but it's pretty clear that he has a deep red hide and complimentary-coloured blue\green armour. I decided heading into painting him that I wanted to try my hand at NMM for the armour, so I figured I'd quickly paint the red hide so I didn't have to try to access his neck with a paintbrush later and get red paint on my finished armour. I also assumed the red would be relatively quick, and I'd spend most of my time on the armour. Boy was I wrong!

Painting a deep red and highlighting up without it appearing way too pink has proven to be a nightmare! I started with a VGA Scarlet Red basecoat, and a thin mix of Scarlet Red and Charred Brown for shading, then moved onto highlights. After experimenting with Bonewhite and finding it too pink, I settled on a Scarlet Red + Dwarf Flesh mix as it seemed to increase brightness without too much pinkness to it (on my test paper at least).

So, I've applied progressively smaller treatments of 2:1, 1:1 and 1:2 Scarlet Red to Dwarf Flesh, and as you can see from the pics below, there's quite a bit of not-cool going on:

Firstly, I'm struggling to get smooth transitions. If I add a single drop of water to thin the mixed pain, I end up with something more like a wash - it fills recesses and pools on flat surfaces. If I don't add water, I'm finding it goes on way too thick to show the underlying layer and I don't get the blend I'm looking for.

Secondly, each successive colour is vastly different from the last, meaning I need to use much better blending techniques than I have so far.

Finally, it's freaking pink!!!

My plan at this stage is to bring the tone back down with several thin layers of a very dark brown (Black + Charred Brown + Glaze Medium) - this should restore the shadows and smooth out some of the layering. I may also apply a glaze of Scarlet Red if I find it ends up too desaturated. From there, I'll have to reassess next steps. 

The figure only costs $10, so if I have to start again from basecoat I will, but I could just re-buy the whole miniature if I have to (though obviously I'd prefer not to). Hopefully I won't end up wet-blending the hide as well, as it's just further delaying this mini, and I have literally 160-odd left to do for Descent. Grrr....

Anyway, onwards and upwards :) Until next time - Darchangel

Arachnophobia!

Continuing on my Descent painting journey, my next finished paint job is these Cave Spiders.

I actually finished these a few weeks ago but kept forgetting to take some pics to post.

I took this rather arbitrary opportunity to play around with wet-blending on their legs. This is one technique I've never tried before and while it didn't come out perfect (I've had better transitions from layered dry blending in the past), I learnt a lot and it's something I'll be refining do I can add it to my toolkit. 

On with the pics!

Here's the original source image. 

And my painted rendition:

The next finished mini is a while away, unfortunately. In the expanded rules for Descent 2nd Edition the evil Overlord gets to choose a lieutenant that he can occasionally bring into play through cards. Our Overlord chose Belthir, so he's next up. 

Descent

I'm not even going to address the length of time since my last post. Let's just pretend that gap never happened, shall we?

On with the show!

New paints

I've recently bought the full range of Vallejo Game Air as I've found the consistency of Model Air to be equally awesome for airbrushing or brush-painting, but the range was always pretty dull for fantasy miniatures. My initial thoughts are they are exactly what I was hoping they were - pre-thinned for airbrushing, and perfect for brush painting without loads of thinning. Nuff said.

New Miniatures

So I suppose it's possible I kept getting bored of painting because it was always the same dark green color scheme. Who knows? Life tends to be hectic for me and there was always something else to gobble up my time, but let's give something different a shot - Descent 2E.

Descent 2nd Edition is a board game in playing with 3 of my best friends, and is focused around a modular board and loads of miniatures. 3 of us play heroes and face off against the Evil Overlord who has primarily monsters to smash us up but also the occasional but powerful Lieutenant. These minis are smaller than 40k, but they are characterful and the cards describing them all are bright and vivid and look like a blast to paint. 

So let's get started shall we?

Tomble Burrowell

Tomble is the Hero I happen to be playing in our current Descent campaign, so I thought he'd be as good a place as any to start. Here's the official drawing of him, care of Fantasy Flight Games:

 And here's my painted version:

Not my best work, but hey, I'm rusty!

That's it for now - short and sharp. Next up, spiders!!!