Baba Yaga

When I picked up this model from Abyssoul (https://www.abyssoul.com/products/baba-yaga-bust) at SMC last year, it was on the basis that I had a very rough idea for a witch coven but no plan beyond that. With SMC looming large this year, I started painting this last Monday as realisation dawned there were no projects on my desk that felt finished enough or suitable to take and display.

While it's Baba Yaga, I wanted to give the feeling of a more friendly, earthy grandmother; one with nature and just relaxed in doing what she does. At the beginning the palette for this was a little colder, but after feedback from a good friend and painting mentor I warmed it up with a few glazes of red, before re-establishing highlights. The difference is enormous.

It's a limited palette of Black Red, Magic Blue, Off White, Yellow and a touch of Vermillion for warmth and Black to desaturate. No pure white, and even the black is mixed with the other colours.

You know it must be a good project when I feel brave enough to take a close-up of the face.

I have put time and energy into this project and when it goes on display at SMC next weekend, and feel it's one of my best works. In a week, this project has had 40 hours put in, and finally focusing on a single piece has paid dividends. While there's always more you feel can be done with it, there's also a point where you have to step away from a project before you detract from your efforts or grow tired of a piece. I am content.

Snakeheart & Lava

This is not a serious painting project. I say this, because if you're looking at Snakeheart and think "but it isn't finished" you would be correct. This bust was painted in one hour as an example of how to paint a bust if you've never painted one before, as a good friend of mine visited over the weekend and wanted to learn how to paint skintones with more complexity than just "flesh tone" paint and a wash. We sat down and talked about atmosphere, mixing paints, understanding nuance in colour versus single flat colour, musculature and ambiance.

I had my copy of Patrick Jones' wonderful scifi & fantasy art book to hand (https://pjartworks.com/paperback-books), which influenced the greens in the skintone. I left the palette, book and another bust for my friend to paint while I took my son out for swimming, and here's the mermaid influenced result of her work alongside mine, after two hours.

Considering she's never mixed paints or painted a bust, the result is excellent. She's taken a second bust to try different tones on, and I'm excited to see the next result.

Alone

This week has been an exercise in painting models larger than 28mm scale. I have quite a few small busts from Mindworks which are a nice size to practice techniques without feeling like I've "wasted" a model trying something new. This range of busts are based on the work of Gerald Brom, a fabulous fantasy artist, and I wanted to create something that was undead, or at least not fully alive, but different to the pale grey tones of the original artwork.

The palette features no premixed green, it's all from the palette below with the darkest colour being the burnt umber on the right. 

I initially started with magenta underpainting and then ochre as the brightest colour, but felt it was too warm, and started to add some of the blue. From there it's a bit of freestyling and just playing with the colours to create contrast. A fun challenge considering the size of the piece.

 How small? Well, here's an English penny for size. comparison

 

 

Count Binface

Ah, Binface. For those unfamiliar, a quick primer here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Binface) of someone carrying on a fine British tradition of fringe political candidates.

But let's think of the character, the noble leader of the Recyclons from the planet Sigma IX. I'd like to imagine upon leaving our planet, this noble warrior's outfit reverts to true colours; the gentle waft of a galaxy's hues passing across the once dull costume and imbuing it with a luminosity hitherto unseen.

Or ... perhaps, just enjoy me painting with colour and fun when anyone else painting the miniature is painting it in black and silver.

For the metallics, I started with a grey mixed from Vallejo Off White, Monument Coal Black and Ice Vallejo Yellow. In the brighter areas there's Scale75 Caribbean Blue and more Ice Yellow, and in the darker areas some Scale75 African Shadow to bring in reddish tones, then blue and black to make it darker.

Crux Terminatus

My blogging has been sporadic over certain years, and a few of my favourite, older projects have been missed out entirely. As I try to keep this site as my reference point for completed work, I felt I should remedy that and this beauty is one of those.

I bought this back in 2020 and painted it during 2023. It's a lovely, resin Crux Terminatus based on the insignia put on a Space Marine's shoulder to indicate they've earned the right to wear Terminator armour. The image on the front of White Dwarf 112 by Wayne England is a favourite cover of mine and was a great reference piece. The insignias aren't a perfect match, but they're enough to give me plenty of references for my own, and I feel the finished version has a high contrast value as indicated in the greyscale photo.

It's a large piece, without a lot of texture, so I was generous on my stippling and drybrushing to create the effect of a stone surface. Undiluted paint, a big feathery brush and a lot of stabbing to make it pretty.

Dungeon Saga heroes: Rordin, Orlaf, Saulion & Svereg

Summer break is over, and it's back to the painting mines. We've been playing a lot of Dungeon Saga Origins recently. It's fun, well thought out and a good upgrade on the concept of HeroQuest, and worth checking out (https://www.manticgames.com/dice-board-games/dungeon-crawler-board-games/). For the current campaign we've settled on four models who are frankly ill-suited to work as a unit and it's proving embarassing but amusing as we're ineffectually waft our way through the missions, surviving by only a thread. It's tabletop adventures like this which enthuse me to paint the wayward adventurers.

Orlaf, Human Barbarian

Svereg, Dwarf Ranger

Rordin, Dwarf Fighter

Saulion, Human Paladin

 

As usual when painting a small group of models, it's the same palette across the four but evidently different application. I've tried to think about the impression it gives on the tabletop rather than being precise.

Gretchin

Two one-hour speedpaints from the weekend when a friend visited and wanted to dust off the brushes after eight months of inactivity. We had fun with these and it's another two models completed to move my Ork army forward. Thinking about how to achieve table-ready models without overthinking is another tool in my kit that needs practice.

Tales From The Sump Docks

There we go, a project completed to an acceptable standard. It isn't finished, as I have more models to add to bring the scene alive, but by happy chance there was a competition running on Instagram and the deadline was Sunday so it presented a perfect opportunity to creach the "good enough" stage with a time pressure.

There's three characters. A dodgy salesman trying to sell goods to a noble, and in the background a fat food vendor just merrily chopping away.  

Painting the weathered detail is probably my favourite aspect of the whole project. Rusty pipes, water tanks, barrels etc. is a lot of fun.

You want disgusting looking water? I have you covered. Gross green slime, covered in a second layer of transparent gel with random splotches of blue ink to make it look like the pipe is leaking, or there's something heinous below the water's surface.

Still on weathering, but the crates are a joy to make horrible. The newer GW plastic terrain pieces are fantastic, with lots of crisp detail that accepts thinned down paint for weathering.

An overhead view of a project isn't something I'd bother with usually, but there's a lot of easy-to-miss detail that isn't immediately apparent from traditional angles.

A closer shot of the two main protagonists. Painting the upper hive gentleman in a different palette to everything else in the scene was deliberate, so he feels out of place.

Here's the underside of one of the floor panels. It's fun to have lighting and moss growth in a wetter area of the scene, even if it's only me who'll ever see it!

For completeness, here's the scene from a couple of other angles.

Dogma48

This weekend I attended my first #Dogma48 weekender at Rising Ape's nerd space (https://www.instagram.com/risingapeminis/). A rather splendid way to (sneakily) celebrate hitting 50 today. It may help to explain what Dogma48 is for the uninitiated.

For 48 hours you focus on a single project, alongside other painters doing the same, but that's where the similarity ends. There's no instructor running demos, no limitation on what you bring or how you approach it; it's more the mindset to create something, and support others around you doing the same thing.

I bit off more than I could chew, and wouldn't say it's close to finished so technically I failed my goal, but I started with a primed model and feel happy to get the overall scene ambiance and two characters finished in the time available. Happy with what I achieved in the time, and excited to continue the work to see it to completion, as this is an idea that's bounced around in my head for the last six years! Hopefully I'll complete it this week and share a final version next week.

As an event, the enthusiasm was infectious, the talent was inspiring, and the company was delightful. Everyone chipped in on each other's projects in a constructive, uplifting way, and the sheer breath of ideas was wonderful. Thanks to everyone who attended for being a joy to spend time with.

If you don't follow these people, I would heartily suggest checking them out ...

https://www.instagram.com/a.man.painting.miniatures/
https://www.instagram.com/makominiatures/
https://www.instagram.com/colinpaintsbusts/
https://www.instagram.com/lucas_miniatureart/
https://www.instagram.com/light_ghost_minis/
https://www.instagram.com/drew_paints/
https://www.instagram.com/sb_minipainting/
https://www.instagram.com/mikejbs/
https://www.instagram.com/tomatominiatures/

Hypno, Frog Shaman

This is one of Ouroboros' first models, from back in 2018 and only available on their Kickstarter at the time. I had the pleasure of meeting Tim, the brains behind the company, at World Model Expo in 2022 over beers and he was delighted to discover someone in person who'd backed the project. I came back from that, excited about painting it, started and procrastinated as I wasn't happy with the colour choices.

Fast forward to this year, where I sat down and realised what needed to be done, and then it just fell into place, and it's nice to see such a handsome fellow finished.

Chaos Lord on Demonic Steed

Finally we're back over to an army project. Sure, we both know I'll change direction tomorrow, but let's enjoy this for today. While we're on honest admissions, I'm an overthinker and wasn't sure how to paint him as the symbols indicate he's Chaos Undivided, or at least not overly committed at this point. The current Games Workshop schemes are very "on rails" for the Chaos ranges, and it's pink and purple if you're Slaanesh, blues for Tzeentch, red for Khorne and green for Nurgle. Reading back through my Slaves to Darkness and Realm of Chaos, Chaos should be a cacophony of colours; perhaps a single colour to the fore, but shouldn't be limiting you to just one or two colours.

Colours aren't tracked as I've chipped away at parts of it over the past few months whenever the mood took me. But there's magenta, purple, green, blue ... you get the idea, there's a lot of everything on here. 

A challenge of metal models is the handling to avoid rubbing off paint. This fellow was a particular pain because of the size, as I couldn't put it on a painting handle. I feel this will be a recurring theme on my metal cavalry, and need to think about sub assemblies to make it easier in future.

This was the miniature where I realised if I ever want to field a painted Warriors of Chaos army, I have to make a few compromises on the way in terms of quality, as painting everything to this level is unsustainable for seeing a finished army in the next decade. I'm at peace with this now, and feel it should be easier to finish more models faster.

If I had a penny for every time I'd swear I'd scheduled a post to publish on time, but actually hadn't, I think I'd be £1 to the good by now. For someone with 40 years playing and working with computers, I should be better at this basic level nonsense!