Tuesday 27 September 2016

Painting tutorial: Afterlife C-48 Warden Autonomous Mech




Here I'll go through the steps I take to achieve these rough and quick paint jobs!


1. Undercoat

I used Uniform Grey spray from the Army Painter



2. Colour Blocking

In this order based on layers and physical depths (to minimise mistakes):


  • Skavenblight Dinge for rings and washers.
  • Leadbelcher for metal areas, including features on the base
  • Ceramite White for the armour plating
  • Mechrite Red for the eye lenses







3. Wash

Nuln Oil over everything, even the base!



4. Highlight (the make it pop stage)

Fine edge highlights for this stage, I sometimes call this 'mechanical' painting - it's all straight lines.


  • Ceramite White for the armour plates, and a little dot at the top left of the eye lenses
  • Russ Grey for the main casing of the Mech
  • Evil Sunz Scarlet for the bottom right half of the eye lenses
  • Runefang Steel for all the exposed metal areas







5. Battle Damage - OPTIONAL STAGE

You can skip this if you want! I use this step to add character to miniatures, and to tidy up any mistakes I've made along the way.


  • Skavenblight Dinge - Paint some chips and scuffs. Pick out the edges and the corners: areas where the paint will get chipped off during a stumble in a concrete warzone, or where stray bullets make contact.
  • Runefang Steel - Paint thin streaks of silver on the Skavenblight Dinge, leaving the dark grey showing around the edges.






6. Finish it! (Base)

Before we do the base paint a tiny dot of Macharius Solar Orange in the bottom right of the lenses.

  • Drybrush the base texture with Adeptus Battlegrey.
  • Drybrush the metal base features with Snakebite Leather.
  • Do a final drybrush on the base texture with Ulthuan Grey (see the final note regarding line dynamics on this).
  • Chaos Black for the bevel edge of the base.

DONE!








Appendix. Line dynamics

If you look at the light grey drybrushed lines below you'll notice that they generally follow the direction of travel or attention of the miniature.


  • On the left one, less noticeable, the selective drybrushing conveys a forward movement - the light grey runs parallel on either side of the right foot touching the ground. 
  • On the miniature on the right, there's a very clear light grey line that runs parallel to the gun arm taking aim. This line is so pronounced it could be a pavement or road marking.

Either way, there's a method to the highlight - it's selective in such a way that complements the miniature and suggests action and direction!





The Crane Corporation. I'm pretty sure Anvil Industry are expanding this faction next year...





Sunday 25 September 2016

Fallen Dwarves - wave 2 paints




Quite pleased with how this little range is developing!

I'm itching to try another colour scheme and technique on them but alas I'm committed to doing the entire range like this fist (so that means I have 25 more to paint... before I sculpt the wave 3 miniatures).

Pick some up at the link below if you like them, huge thank you for the support!

http://anvilindustry.co.uk/Boutique/Miniatures-of-the-North/Fallen-Dwarves


On a personal note, these are for my own fantasy setting, but I also use them in the Lord of the Rings strategy battle game... they make great eastern dwarves of dubious loyalties. (...and I scaled the miniatures to match the LOTR range)

Saturday 24 September 2016

Afterlife - Unity Council C48 Warden Autonomous Mech




Another treat to paint from Anvil Industries Afterlife range - the C48 Warden Autonomous Mech.

I've omitted any markings for the time being, I might come back at a later date and add some detail. I have 3 more so will do a tutorial for them in the near future!

Pick up some for yourself here ; http://anvilindustry.co.uk/AFTERLIFE/Unity-Council/Warden-Mech





Tuesday 13 September 2016

The Eastern Earth




I made a logo for my fantasy setting, basic GIMP skills on display here! Read all about the Eastern Earth and the Fallen Dwarves here:

http://miniaturesofthenorth.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-eastern-earth.html



Monday 12 September 2016

I started another blog for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar...

Regular readers will notice my blog has gone back to basics!

After playing around with blogger for a while and flexing my Gimp muscles making some blog banners, I made a few alterations here. Goodbye black, hello white.

Anyway, I bought Age of Sigmar when it came out and had a stash of lots of plastic Warhammer frames I got cheap on ebay. The result is my new blog, with one post, Warhammer Age of Battle.

http://warhammerageofbattle.blogspot.co.uk/

Check it out and bookmark for future reading! Lots of content ready to post, well over 200 images waiting in my photobucket, the first post is about my Skaven cavalry conversions: Fangrat Outriders.

Thanks! More sculpts coming here soon, Black Praetorians and Occult forces in time for Halloween...




Monday 5 September 2016

Black Praetorians - WIP sculpts



I sculpted a few of these a couple of years ago now I'm finally getting round to finishing a full squad!



The idea and design for these goes all the way back to 2008! At that time I was just getting into sculpting, and Troll Forged miniatures were casting and selling some of my stuff (I think some of my sculpts are still on sale there to this day).

This will be the second time I've sculpted the mini's! The first lot were more pulp sci-fi. I think they're probably stored away in a box somewhere at Troll Forged, never having made it to production. In fairness they were quite rubbish as sculpts go!

I've even got a full on mythology drafted for them, sci-fi based. This incarnation of the Black Praetorians are however clockpunk styled! So I'll need to edit the text and bring into line with the tech and setting.

In my last post I mentioned I really loved the Victrix ancient plastics. I also like their Napoleonic stuff...so it should be no surprise these are scaled to match that range!

More to follow on these in the near future.


Oh and while were talking Napoleonics, here's a little test I'm doing for some 10mm stuff!






### EDIT - oh shit look I found some really old stuff in my photobucket! Black Praetorians and Redcoats! This takes me back... my "House Crowmantia" stuff with Anvil Industry is also from this mythology. Very gothic horror, originally Sci-Fi, now transplanted to the 19th century!






























All that should give you a rough idea of what I want to do with this range! 











Sunday 4 September 2016

Mythology test sculpts



These are all test sculpts, they will not go to production!





I have lots of dollies, heads and shields cast up for this project so these were some quick experiments - I also have some fauns and other bits and pieces kicking around related to this.

Overall these sculpts were useful explorations on how I could integrate the shield, left arm, main torso and head into a single piece cast, with only the right arm being a separate part (where required by the miniatures pose). It was also a good chance to practice sculpting bare arms and work out what style I like, and how much detail I wanted to show - I'm not a fan of completely ripped musculature that makes the mini look like it has no skin! I eventually got a quick and simple routine down for doing arms so feel quite confident about future sculpts.

With tests like this you learn what works and what doesn't... so what doesn't work is trying to sculpt arms after I've attached the shield! For the next proper round of sculpting I'll be sculpting the arms in full before adding the shield. Also, some of the arms are a bit wonky, and long, so I'll be knocking off a mm or two on the production sculpts.

Speaking of the production sculpts, and the project... I'm still trying to decide how to proceed! Here are my ideas.

Design ethos - make these scale and compatible with the Victrix plastic range of ancients.. I love the Victrix stuff!

Idea's...

1. Full range
Simply do a couple of factions with spearmen, swordsmen, archers, honor guard and the odd myth unit here or there, like faun skirmishers, cyclops warriors or harpies.

2. Limited myth range
Stick to doing the elite and mythological themed units - we can all use existing plastic sets for the rank and file and just make some god aligned elite units, like honor guard or myth units.

3. Band of heroes
Themed heroes and small retinues, aligned to certain gods or situations - Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and the Argonauts.

4. Dungeon Crawl - Descend the underworld/Brave the Labyrinth
Different styled heroes and a selection of myth units: infernal hoplites, shades, troglodytes, snake men and some monsters.


There's no reason I can't make a load of minis and tick some boxes across all 4 ideas of course!

Help me out and let me know your thoughts!! All going to plan the first production casts will land in early 2017.

I'm off to prepare a couple of these for painting - test sculpts are one thing, I also need to see how the heads, shields and torsos's take the paint too!