Monday, October 31, 2011

Lamenters

 Today I'm just posting some pictures of my lamenters.  I may at some point go into some painting details about them.
 It's a Rhino

 Sanguinary Guard
 Tactical Squad

 Captain


Death Company

 Another captain (I'm gonna repaint that power weapon, if anybody's got any suggestions for how, let me know).


Sunday, October 30, 2011

I told you I'd tell you how I made a deff rolla

Unfortunately I didn't get any 'before' pics of the deff rolla because my wife had her camera (the nerve). But here's a pic of it finished and attached.
And I'll explain how that was made. You can use any cylinder of the appropriate size (I used two empty citade wash pots glued together). I wrapped some plasticard (in my case harvested from a hard card protector) around the cylinder after scoring and folding it so it would have those hard corners. The spikes are made by cutting a chunk of empty sprue into a squat pyramid. I cut a ton of said pyramids, glued them onto the rolla, and then glued a bit of sand around each one. The mounting for the rolla was made by cutting some more plasticard into the appropriate shape. I also glued some ancient rhino hatches on the sides to give it some depth. Overall, pretty easy.
I used a lot of plasticard in making this piece, but I'm too poor to afford plasticard at the moment and I improvised a lot. Here's a list of places from which to harvest plasticard:

Used gift cards/membership cards/credit card offers
Hard card protectors
Empty milk cartons
Medicine containers
Over-packaged toys

Also, cardboard will work for a lot of the same things as plasticard. The core of my battlewagon is thin corrugated cardboard. Here's some more pics of my mostly finished battlewagon cuz that's how I roll.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Battlewagon

So I got busy with school and forgot to post last week, but here's what I've been working on lately.
So what I've done here is take the current Ork Battlewagon kit and place it on top of a land raider chassis. The Land Raider had already been modified by its previous owner (and was in pretty bad condition, the spots where you can see plastic on the land raider are mostly covered in glue or carved up pretty badly... but it was free, so). The Land Raider chassis is not actually wide enough to house a Battlewagon, so I ripped the treads apart from the hull and made a new hull by cutting out a rectangle of cardboard to the correct width to support the battlewagon and wrapping it around the places where the hull would have been.
To cover the areas that were sick with glue or carved up, I spread some superglue thinly across the afflicted areas and then stuck some sand to them (as you'll see later).
You can see where that streak of superglue was dribbled down the side, now it's grime and grit!
Ah, and since I'm here anyways, I thought I'd talk about the new weathering pattern I tried on this tank. What I did was use an old frayed paintbrush to apply chaos black in a ragged pattern along the worn edges of the vehicle, and then used to same to a lesser extent to put on boltgun metal and or mithril silver.
I also want to show off my magnetized big shootas (so I can change the weaponry later if need be) but my wife apparently has her camera today, so I'll do that next week. Also, I'll show at some point how I'm making the deff-rolla for this thing.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Weathering Orks

So I started an Orks army. It's been coming together nicely so far. I just wanted to talk for a minute about weathering. I've tried a couple of different weathering techniques with these guys so far and I'll tell you which one I like best.

First:
For this one, I made some battle damage on the front plate with a modelling knife, then basecoated with scab red. Then I brought all of the non damaged parts up with blood red leaving scab red around the bullet holes. Then I just painted the bullet holes with boltgun metal. The mud on the front was done by super gluing sand all over the front of the buggy.

Second:
This time, after painting the whole tank with mechrite followed by blood red, I applied chaos black to the hard edges using a torn up piece of blister foam. Then I applied boltgun metal via the same method. I like this method better than the first and it is reeeally easy to do, but I think it looks a bit sloppy, so while it's not a bad method, I don't think I'll be using it again (although maybe I'll decide otherwise).

Third:
This time, after painting the wheel well with fancy flames, I simply painted on some chipped looking boltgun metal. This doesn't look very good at first, but after washing the model (I use devlan mud or gryphon sepia, I like to change it up from model to model) the boltgun metal kind of pops and looks nice. I like this method of weathering best of the ones I've tried so far. I've been using it on boyz shoulderpads, here's a nob I used it on.
Anyhow, the third method is pretty easy and I think looks pretty good, just make sure to give the model the wash as it improves the look greatly.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Erasing Paint

I though I'd explain something I have found to be exceptionally useful. Since I've been painting a lot of bright colors lately, I've stumbled upon a way to erase painting mistakes.
Step 1: Make a mistake when painting. This is really a problem when you get black on your yellow for example.
Step 2: Quickly rinse your brush and leave it a little bit wet.
Step 3: Apply water to the spot where you want the paint gone. The principle here is that you're going to water down the paint in that spot and then suck it up with a dry brush.
Step 4: Dry your brush (or grab a dry brush) and use it to mop up the painty water.
Step 5: If you've done this all quickly and carefully, you should no longer have paint in the affected area!

Friday, September 30, 2011

Tyranids



Hey folks,

First post for my blog here. I'm mostly going to be discussing modelling and painting war-games miniatures. I do a lot with Warhammer Fantasy and 40K, but have been known to occasionally dabble in other games (painting if not necessarily playing) Malifaux, WarMachine, etc. Who knows what I might do in the future.

Here are pictures of my Tyranid army. I've been playing tyranids for several years now when I returned to the hive mind after finally accepting that the new codex was here to stay, I decided to update my color scheme. As you can see, the hormagaunt in the back is painted using Dark Angels Green, Snot Green, and Scorpion Green for the flesh with Scorched Brown, Bestial Brown, and Bleached Bone for the carapace. My new color scheme (front) is Scorpion Green followed by Thraka Green wash for the flesh, and Bleached Bone followed by Gryphon Sepia for the carapace.

One thing I noticed when beginning work with my new scheme was that the carapace was a bit too light with only Gryphon Sepia on the carapace and the bleached bone details on the carapace didn't stand out enough. To rectify this I ended up using Devlan Mud first on the carapace in the deep recesses between armour plates on the back and head. Then

The eyes (not that they are visible) are yellow with black stripes down the middle (cat-like). And as a highlight color for the flesh I use Rotting Flesh. This is mainly for the vents on the arms and any sinuous muscle (like the jaws), but I also used it for the cords on the devourers and will surely use it for other highlights in the future.I did two washes of Sepia to get it darker so that the Bleached Bone streaks stand out better against the dark carapace.
Here are some pictures of my whole army, they're not very good though, so I'll probably try to get some better ones later.