This was painted across two evenings after coming back from SMC. It's not a coincidence that my enthusiasm for painting waxed after three invigorating days with thousands of fellow hobby enthusiasts.
The interesting part of this is probably the shoulder pad. After a friend showed me an old ork artwork, I added some hieroglpyhs. The surface isn't big, and my painting isn't that precise, but it was fun to add and has given me ideas for other models in the future.
This was a Secret Santa on our hobby Discord. Trying to match the recipient's scheme was incredibly difficult. I only had two blurry pictures of models in a transport case to work from. Are they Biel Tan? Mymeara? Damnit.
Educated guess took me toward Bien Tan, but I noticed my recipient had used more teal colour on cloaks, so I leaned into that, added some gold and yellow details and there we go.
Recent quietness is simply that. Quiet. Work has been time consuming, as have a number of real life activities. While I've been working on projects, there isn't anything finished to share yet. But in the spirit of posting something so I don't forget ... I've started a dwarf army for Kings of War. The system appealed to me for a few reasons:
This is the progress to-date of the unit bases (and spares) and the scenic bases they'll all sit on when not in play. It's going to be a ruined dwarf town. Here's my work in progress in reverse order and you may wish to scroll to the bottom and walk up to the latest.
Bottom left corner is my test piece that's usally a step or two ahead of the rest to try out ideas before committing them to the rest of the pieces.
Browns on the earth. There'll be a lot of static grass added later, but it still needs colour underneath that.
Zenithal priming just to help with tonal variation.
I love the Rubble City basing from Fenris Games, but wanted to add a little more detail on steps and around bases to make it feel integrated. Lot of cork, gravel and sand thrown on over PVA and superglue.
With the display bases done, onto the unit bases. Also a few spares made up.
There's a simply joy to priming everything and unifying the materials. Also helps to bind the finer textures together.
Keep adding PVA and sand until happy. With hindsight I went a little OTT here, so a lesson for future display boards.
Can't have too much PVA!
More texture with cork and gravel to hide the flagstone edges.
Texture and different surfaces is important, so I used a patterned roller to add flagstones.
Found some nice civilian fantasy village terrain pieces which will make an appearance on the board when everything's finished.
Balsa wood edging around the tiles to keep them in one piece. 123 blocks just to get nice neat edges. You can see me testing a couple of the unit base sizes to ensure they'll fit properly.
PVA the whole surface then glue the resin scenery on top and leave overnight to stick properly.
Basic foam squares of 24x24cm contstructed. Three will fit in a nice row on a double-width bookshelf.
Well, they won't win beauty competitions any time soon but I really like these models. Another project that's been sat on the desk for months in a state of half-completion, and it was nice to see them finished. It's a slimmed down version of how I approached the Ogryn from my Golden Demon entry last year, and a much more tabletop level as a result - but it was fun.
I painted this as a secret Santa present and was quite pleased with the results. In particular, the textures were great fun, especially considering how flat and smooth the stone and wood surfaces started. The one major error I made was getting lost between deciding if it should be a centrepiece for a gaming table or a display piece, and it ended up as a compromise. If it were a display piece, the edges would have been much darker to draw the eye in, and if it were a gaming piece, the edging should have been better defined.
This was a figure I picked up way back in 2016 at Salute when coming back to the hobby. It's from the (now defunct?) JoeK range, which had some very cool ideas.
It's not a big model, but I just wanted to try and create fast shiny effects, and play around with skin tones on a dragon.
Below are the reverse WIP shots through the process.
