Part of clearing my backlog is building out the Space Wolves army that's languished on my shelves. There's a nice mix of older and newer models in there. Here's two of the characters, a finecast Iron Priest who is missing the robot claw as I couldn't find it, and a Primaris Librarian.
Trying to paint quick NMM-ish on both models was good fun, and for a few hours work over two evenings I'm happy with the outcome and have a few more army options.
In my horrifyingly large backlog, I have a lot of Space Wolves. This year I've resolved to paint a lot of them in preparation for playing 9th Edition when we're allowed to socialise with other humans. For this squad, I was playing with bringing the "Craftworld-style"to the tabletop units, trying to balance quality vs speed vs visual impact. They're far from my neatest work but I like the look of them and how the colour comes through.
Last year I ran a small competition on Twitter. Funniest name for my Orks would receive a miniature painted by me. The excellent EvilKipper won with Zardoz ArzSplitta. If you get the reference, you'll appreciate why it gave me a good laugh.
Rob chose one of his Sisters of Battle to be painted, so after much procrastination on both our parts, I finally finished her up in March. The detail on these sculpts is really tasty, and I tried to find a balance on keeping the feel I wanted and not lapsing into 'Eavy Metal style and painting every edge.
Good fun, but I couldn't put myself through painting a whole army of these.
This has sat in my drawer of shame since 2015. The release, painted by Matteo Di Diomede, was such a beautiful piece, I wanted to buy it and try for myself. It stands as a lesson in folly for me, being lured in by high-quality painting and realising when presented with the resin that you're out your depth.
I left it, until now and thought about how I wanted to remedy this. So it's a really a study in trying to create leather fabric like old chairs in fancy libraries, practising my freehand text, over pencil writing, and playing with where to use colour to draw the eye.
Am I happy with this piece? No, not as a finished piece. But it was good to turn it into a positive learning experience.
Often Orcs are portrayed as grimy, ne'er do well creatures, so this one gets shiny, colourful armour and SO much colour. The sword and shield were a real challenge to paint, as the surfaces are completely flat, so I created the illusion of a shield boss and central ridge to cram in more colour.
January's been a hard month. Stressful, in fact. A number of different factors, but as always I try to focus on the light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime I've taken comfort is trying to paint things as my happy place to push through it.
It turns out I've completed more models this month than I initially thought! This blog doesn't get a huge amount of traffic, but honestly it's more for me than it is for you. It's a good place for me to put things I've completed and want to share.
Little bonus model I picked up as part of a Kickstarter a couple of years ago. Based to fit with my sci-fi spaceport plan, and good fun to paint.
The sculpt is remarkably detailed, and I'm pleased I could get anything close to the original artwork. Best image I could find of the Somewhere In Time art this stemmed from.
I had a lot of fun with the colours here. It all started mixing from primaries as I wasn't sure how to paint it initially.
Okay so it's meant to be a definitely not Death Guard model, but I wanted to paint him in shiny purple armour, without using metallics. Bringing that 80s retro feel to the colours.
The sculpt is slightly frustrating, as there's lots of detail but just not quite as well executed as other sculptors. The face is hard to define nicely so I opted for giving the whole eye socket a greenish glow.
Another addition to my Chaos Warband. I like the half-skeletal pirate with axes aesthetic he brings.
20 minute how-to for painting check patterns. I've picked an old goblin from the Avatar of War range to demonstrate it works reasonably well on a very small area. Plus I really need to start painting this guy ...
Prime the figure white.
I want to do a black and white effect on the sword and hat, so I'm going to start with a nearly black basecoat - mine's black with a little brown and purple added. It may seem wrong, but it's easier to tidy up my messy painting at the end using black instead of lots of white over black.
Stripes next. Using an off-white, I've painted these a little thicker for visibility than I would if pushing for a higher quality model. But hopefully you can see I've taken time to draw reasonably neat lines.
This is also the point where you can check your paint consistency. You want less water in the mix than you may think. It needs to be controllable, without running away from you - but not so thick you see marks in the paint. Practice your control.
I don't paint a full checkerboard pattern, because then you're left filling in tiny, unequal spaces. Bear with me again here!
Think of the stripes as creating rows. Let's create our first square. Top left corner of row one. To do this you should paint downward strokes from the top of the first row to the bottom of the first row. Don't try painting sideways, just turn your miniature round!
Now repeat the process across the whole row. Move to the second row and paint in the spaces you left behind. This gives you a clean edge on each square as you move down the rows.
Final touch of pure white along what will be the upper edge, just to add an edge highlight. It won't be very noticable, but it'll help.
It's a little scruffy and I need to tidy up. So now this is where the almost-black mix from the beginning comes back in. Same process again, but on black squares this time. As the final touch, add a line of pure black along the upper edge of each black square.
And that's it. You're done. Now I just need to complete the rest of the model ...
Cute character from Golem Miniatures that I picked up at Salute a few years ago. Wanted to play with lighting and the idea he's moving from an unlit area to somewhere better illuminated.
