Its Sunday....Bad luck and Tabling

Well, its sunday again and i rolled out the chaos hordes for a game with Olly against his Dark Elves. There's a video to be uploaded soon and published here. One day i will have to do the tests myself but i'm convinced that i'm the unluckiest gamer going. terrible roll after terrible roll dogged me the entire game. Olly played well, being uncharacteristically aggressive and it paid dividends. He broke my skullcrushers for the loss of next to nothing then poor rolling saw me loose both the chaos warriors and the knights. The troll horde was kept at bay by the Warlocks, which may be a little broken (and by a little i felt in this game they were MASSIVELY broken!). They arent really but my poor rolling made them seem amazing. Even at then end of turn four when i had the chance to break his Witch Elves.... he had no BSB reroll and had done few wounds to me. I just needed throgg and his boys to do well and i was in with a chance of a draw, maybe even a win. Well, the whiffed harder than an unwashed Nurgle Herald and were chased down and slaughtered by the Warlocks leaving a lone wizard to be peppered with bolthrower shots until the end of the game! I got whupped hard. It was funny at times but the bad luck really hurt. Still, there's always next week!

During the week i was finishing off a project of mine. It was a little skeleton warrior painted to display standard with a nice base to warm up my painting skills for my next grand display model. I rushed him in some places but i thought he came out nicely.

I wish i hadnt got frustrated and drybrushed the bones. I should have persevered and layered them with dheneb stone rather than a quick drybrush of rakarth flesh. That would have given me a better base to shade and highlight the bone work. It would have also shown off the shading of the gaps in between the bone.

I undercoated the mini black and then painted the whole mini in varying shades of brown - dark at the bottom and light at the top to get zenithal shading in the gaps between the bones. You cant see it very well but it was useful to think about zenithal shading and highlighting. Its the first time i've painted a mini this way. It also got me used to blending again. I have been pretty rusty so getting dilution ratios correct was good practice. The most important thing i learned though is how good the old GW metallic paints are. The new paints look really nice but leave a grainy metallic finish that just doesnt look right. I have also found that the P3 metallic paint pig iron isnt much better - disappointing as their non metallic paints are an excellent replacement to the old GW paint line. However, my dispair lightened as Volomir posted the answer on his excellent blog here (check out his blog, the guy is a fabulous mini painter and one of my favourites!). Scale 75 seem to have produced a great range of metallics, even producing blue, green and purple metallic paint. Old timers should remember those paints in the Citadel range way back when! They also sell a gold and bronze set aswell so i'm soughted when my precious citadel metallics finally run out.

Scale 75 produce a pretty wide range of paints. They sell them in sets of about 8 dropper bottles with all the colours needed for specific painting tasks. They currently have Greens, Blues and Reds (and all the colours ever needed to shade and highlight them), a monochrome set (kind of a little pointless if you arent afraid of mixing black and white!) the silver and gold metallic sets, NMM silver and gold sets, a leather set (browns...lots of browns) and a flesh set. The flesh set interests me greatly as i have a pretty cool bust i picked up from Figone - John "Digger" by Wonderlands Project. He was a xmas present from my sister and has been prepped for painting.

So monday i'll be placing an order for the paint set and i can start on him. Looking forward to painting this guy. I've always struggled to get any decent highlighting and shading to my flesh. My space marines tended to look like they were all suffering from gout or hypertension (very red faces) or very washed out with no contrast.

Suddenly, scenary....

I'm ill. Part of what made me start this blog was boredom as i should have been playing warhammer today. Instead my thumping head and aching body just didnt feel up for it. Colds suck.... I can't focus enough to paint detail but i can drybrush....

I had two pieces of scenery i painted fast for the table top a few years back, one was a 40K Battlescape and one was a ruined Wizard's Tower. I always meant to finish them but never did, until now.

Battlescape

Most of it was painted to a good tabletop standard. The trees and craters looked good. I painted in some details - skulls, dead bodies, weapons then worked on the tank. It was previously just painted boltgun metal then covered in nuln oil. I finished it off with some random patches of blues that i blended into the metallic colour with stippled black to look like burnt wreckage. I then broke out the new technical paints Riza Rust and Typhus Corrosion. This was more an experiment than anything else but i'm happy as to how it looked and worked out.

Dreadstone Blight

Again i painted this quickly to get it on the tabletop. Over the last few weeks i took the walls off the base, repainted the whole base to get a better stone colouring and repainted the centre piece to resemble the picture on the GW site. I painted a few more details on the wallls, re-drybrushed the stones and painted the brickwork. I added some Nihlakh Oxide colouring to the bronze work and glued it all back together. Much better!

Realm of Battle Game Board

Little bit of WIP in the first picture for the battlescape. I bought a game board off of ebay and four of the six pieces were painted. I have undercoated, basecoated and drybrushed the last two pieces today aswell. I need to glue a TON of static grass to the pieces now and they can be considered finished. Then i can start on the other fours pieces and strip and paint as i go along. At least i have a fully painted gaming board to play on.

Witch-Fate Tor

I got the excellent boxset from GW for xmas - The Sigmar's Blood scenery pack. Its a great bargain as you essentially get a Garden of Morr for free - awesome! I'll show off the other pieces at another time when i'm working on them but they're mostly done, the Witch-Fate Tor hasnt been properly assembled yet. Now is the time!

This going to need a lot of greenstuff work. Its an old kit and took ages to get to the above state. It took a ton over carving and superglue. Gaps were inevitable so i'll fill them and ready it all for. It needs a few more pieces added to it but nothing major. Next will be painting time!

Hey there! I've set this blog up to chart my adventures in gaming and miniature painting. I first started playing many years ago around 1993 when a good friend of mine at school was reading White Dwarf in the library. From there my curiosity took over and i was soon planning the purchase of my first army - Undead. They were pretty terrible back in the day but good fun to play, especially when you could field Nagash himself! I ventured into a Dark Elf army soon after i realised that Undead did'nt cut it. I also discovered Warhammer 40,000, then Necromunda playing Blood Angels and Van Saar. Come 1998 i was due to head off to university and i shelved my models to concentrate on Chemistry. Fast forward around ten years and i had finished university obtaining a degree and PhD in the process. Coming home to work I got back into the hobby by chance as an old school friend was painting and playing again. He eventually drifted from the hobby but left me with an insatiable urge to play and to paint!

I have always wanted to be able to paint like the 'Eavy Metal guys i used to idolise. I got to reasonable standard back in the 90's considering I didnt have access to forums, online tutorials or even other painters to aid me. When i got back into the hobby, i had all the information i needed to begin my path to painting glory!

These days i'm not bad though I still lack the finesse and artistic talent to bring home awards but i'll always be practicing. A stint playing MMO's has dulled my skills a little but i'm working on bringing this back. One day i hope to win a few trophys at the Golden Demon awards at Gamesday.

Here's a few examples of my first attempts at "high" quality painting and blending

This guy was my first attempt at blending. I was following a White Dwarf tutorial and an online tutorial for watering down paints.

This guy was a converted black reach terminator that i used to experiment with painting reds, blending and power weapon crackle effects. This was based off of the White Dwarf tutorial for painting Space Hulk terminators by Anja Wettergrom. Not great, but a start!

My good friend Scott got me into a painter called Jérémie Bonamant Teboul and lent me his tutorial DVD. I made leaps in my painting as i absorbed the techniques shown in the DVD and painted my first display piece - an Aurlok warrior from Figone.

Here i had learned how to get smooth transitions in shades and colours, though my execution was at times a little off and my basing skills a little lack luster. I felt this was a good start and worthy of my display cabinet.

While learning display painting, i was working on a Blood Angels army. I soon went away from painting all of the models to display standards and began to adapt my new skills to painting many minis relatively quickly while still maintaining detail and a good standard of brush work. This further enhanced my abilities as i learned brush control - IMO the most important thing for a painter to have.

These guys were just a few of my minis i painted. Neat line highlights, layering and even a little bit of Object Source Lighting (OSL) were used. I then attempted my next project, a terminator chaplain painted to display standard with NMM!

Alas i never finished this guy and he sits in a jar in a box destined to never be finished. It taught me a lot (mostly that NMM was HARD!!!!!) but i lost interest in finishing him.

I began to drift away from 40K when 6th edition came out. I had painted so much power armour i was sick of it! My flat mate Olly and I then decided that we should try Warhammer Fantasy so we threw ourselves full force into painting armies. I chose Skaven from the Island of Blood set and my flat mate chose Warriors of Chaos. Here both our painting skills flourished (mostly mine since he is already and artist and bloody good painter!). I eventually went from Skaven to Orgres, then to Empire and High Elves and then to Warriors of Chaos while Olly decided on all the Armies in Warhammer! About this time we also started to film our battles and put them on Youtube. You can find Olly's channel on Youtube and its called Any Given Sunday. It features me mostly getting soundly thrashed but i get my own back occasionally!

With Fantasy being my favourite genre I painted a display piece - a present from my sister's boyfriend, a Nurgle Chaos Lord. This was the first on the new plastic characters and in my opinion some of Games Workshop's finest innovations. He was unconverted and painted using the 'Eavy Metal Masterclass book for armour painting tutorials and Darren Latham's excellent rendition of the same model as inspiration.

I got heavily into playing the Star Wars MMO and my painting dried up but i still managed to complete a model swap for a guy on the 40K forums. Not my best work as my mind was elsewhere but i was pleased with my work. I also learned about wet blending and using pigments.

I have many painting projects on the go and intend to post up WIP's and finished articles. I'm also happy to share any hints and tips if anyone wants them. Just met me know. I tend to drift in and out of things so it will likely be an eclectic mix of mini's as and when i see fit.