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.