nerodine

I picked up the Necron half of the Indomitus box for a decent price, and plan to use them for trying out different approaches. The models are fantastic and a firm favourite with my kids - Necrons have a real unpleasant, sinister character emerging with these sculpts. These three were started as a paint-along with Craftworld Studio on how to paint metallics better, and a little quicker. I've hardly painted anything with true metallic metals (TMM) this calendar year, so this was a nice change of pace. The most time was taken on creating a satisfactory effect for the blades to stand out, but not adding too many colours. All I was focused on was not doing the standard blue or green often seen on Necrons. The bases are just thrown together, and very matt with heavy pigment dusting to offset the shine across the Necrons. They're lost under the models and I My advice for anyone painting the Plasmancer would be to paint as much as you're comfortable painting BEFORE final as

I did two bases for my Chaos Spawn project, and both were scratch built, and thought it would be fun to share the process. Start with an idea of what you want to do before anything is glued down! Here, my thinking was a destroyed science facility. Interestingly, it was only after completing these that I realised I'd used a similar theme with similar monsters last year (https://nerodine.blogspot.com/2019/07/roman-lappat-beginner-course.html) and pretty confident I was subconsciously influenced by this. Blue cylinders are pieces of plastic straw, with some old cables from discarded PC parts glued inside. After that, it's a combination of leftover items from my bits box. So there's pop-out pieces from MDF terrain kits, some cork tiles I ripped up, Necromunda belt kits, basing paste, little cut offs of balsa wood. Anything to add to the feeling of a building that's been utterly destroyed.  When the larger items were firmly in position, I generously applied superglue over

 An experiment in moving faster to finish tabletop, but keep my learnings from Craftworld Studio coaching. Loading with colours and having fun, fun, fun. Also, having now picked up the Chaos Spawn kit, I feel it's badly represented by many builds online. So many options to drive a narrative with the parts available. You can take your time to think what you want from the build, don't just add everything immediately!  Again, narrative is something I'm still working on. Here, it's a creepy monster looking through the ruins of a research facility. Looking for people, a specific object? Who knows.    

I haven't done much with my Space Wolves since our group stopped playing 8th edition. But this model was too nice to pass up. It's not the best example of my painting, but I'm happy with it for practice on colours, and completing a chunky vehicle in a few hours. Things I would improve: Spending more time on the OSL effect. I tried a couple of times before settling on this. It's not very accurate, but it conveys the effect. My attempts to make the light brighter just washed out on the surface, with lack of contrast and I couldn't find a satisfactory way of doing it. Something to practice. Freehanding the runes. These are transfers, carefully applied, but I wasn't brave enough to try it on a gradiented surface. If I got it wrong, I'd pull my (metaphorical) hair out trying to correct the mistake. More careful assembly. Couple of wonky donkey edges on this tank if you're looking hard enough. Definitely not a fault of the kit, but of the assembler.

Wonderful monkey sculpt from Big Child Creative. Enormous fun to paint and trying to learn more on texture, and narrative. I wanted to create a story for the figure, rather than just putting it on a boring base. So here's a very excited pirate monkey with his treasure, escaping the bounty on his head by taking over a ship. But little does he know what lurks beneath decks. There's WIP shots below and a little background for how I created it, so read through for more detail. So that's the finished model, but there's more to tell! Here's a few WIP shots to explain my thinking. Testing, testing, testing. After the initial colours are on the base and star of the scene, does it still make sense to the eye? Are two treasure chests too much? Should there be one? Or something else? What does the story need? There isn't really NMM, or TMM here, but the idea of this being treasure, and a little glow underneath onto the fabric of the lid. True metallic