nerodine

Probably the best of the NMM steel examples, and I tried a darker armour colour here with harder contrast. Funnily enough, this was the first model finished too.

For a model with so little face, he's so malevolent. I enjoyed playing with the lighting on the rear of his armour with this one, and just wish I'd done better with the shoulder pads.

My placement of highlights improved but still lots that can be done better next time.

I'm very happy with how the face and cloak turned out here, less so with the steel of the axe.

I've been fiddling with my lightbox to get better photos - something closer to the colours I see when looking at the model. Below is the journey I took with my Ork to get to a good place. The default option with lightsource above lightbox, diffused. Changed to increase exposure. Changed the camera's elevation to be a little higher. Increased the exposure again, without moving the light source. Increased f-value to f11 but felt it was leaving the background in sharp focus as well now. Pushed the light source back to be over the camera instead of over the lightbox. Getting close now. Realised I'd overcomplicated life a little. Moved the light back to almost overhead the miniature again, and downstepped the exposure. There will be further adjustments over time, but for the moment this feels pretty good - and gives an accurate representation of what the model looks like in real life. Here's how the camera setup looks in reality.

First attempt at the steel axe and now we're heading in the right direction ... With the test model coming together well, it's time to bring the other three up to the same standard. I want to try a few different approaches with the armour, so they won't all be identical in brightness or painting style. It took a little time to reconcile this with my usual approach of having everything the same, but painting NMM is new to me and I'm keen to try things to find what works best for me. At this point that's most of the copper armour done, all the skin and leather so it's onto the weaponry. Lots of interesting shapes to deal with here, so plenty of opportunity to try and understand where the light catches. Here we go ...

"Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day" - Mark Twain It's simple really, you should pick the biggest, ugliest task that needs doing and that's the first thing you do. Almost inevitably it's the task you want to avoid or forget about. You swap to other activities because they're quick wins, and give you a little dopamine hit because you did A Thing, but often you're just left treading water. We can agree procrastination and social media are time killers, right? They destroys efficiency. It's the junk food of time. Initially satisfying, but 30 minutes later you're left back where you started. 1 In a work environment I heavily encourage the frog concept for better time management and meaningful achievements. But, the notion of eating a frog is awful ... so I have mine with tomato so it's easier to swallow. Here's my approach. I was supposed to be tidying a room when I

Happy Friday! I should start by saying I love Warploque Alex's approach to building a brand new world, how he runs Kickstarters, and interacts with the community in general. But I haven't backed any of the projects or bought any of the figures in the Arcworlde because it was complicated by one huge point - I don't actually like most of his sculpts. Everything's quite craggy, not the big clean surfaces I'm used to, and prefer - they have a rustic quality that didn't appeal to me. But, when he released the Bayourk models, the Witchdokta was a mandatory purchase as it's perfect for this approach - so I picked this up at Salute 2016 and then ... completely forgot about it. So he had a few minor  major changes in the last day and while he's painted in roughly similar leather colours to how my Shadespire Orruks are coming together, there's been a lot of change to the skin. The mushrooms were the starting point and allowed me to think on how t

Not big on resolutions, but setting targets for the year is just dandy. General Quality I want to lift the standards of my individual figure painting to the next level, again. The goal is still better use of colour theory, smoother layering and glazing and even improving simple accuracy on the basics. At most I will attend two painting courses in 2018 - one's already booked with Banshee ( https://www.instagram.com/alfonso_giraldes_banshee/ ) and we'll see what the second will be. Speed Still hitting the #90MMC challenge. Can I produce a full figure in 90 minutes of painting? Combined with the pursuit of quality, I want to push my tabletop standard up and up. Focus Starting projects and seeing them through to completion, rather than adding more to-do piles onto the workbench. I want need projects ticked off the WIP list. Armies on Parade I plan to build a comically complex board for AoP this year for my Space Wolves. All the major parts are already ordered and

Happy New Year! Here's to a fantastic year of hobby. Squeezing this in before the end of year. A figure completed way back in November has sat languishing on my desk, waiting to be photographed. This is the first time I've had the chance to do the honours with my new photo setup. Picked this up as a freebie from Mantic's stand at Salute 2017. Lots of lovely detail in here, and was good fun to paint. It was one of my 90-minute challenge figures and I completed it inside of two episodes of The Punisher - so it was roughly on schedule. Most things are pretty quick for the time limit, but I tried to add a little texture for the jeans and some writing on the cap. How people produce entire battle scenes ( https://www.instagram.com/p/BVc-eA1BVBv/?taken-by=karolrudyk ) is beyond my comprehension. I can barely scribble a few letters on a hat. This is being donated to the Massive Voodoo zombie project ( http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/mv-zombie-community-pro