Ork Mob paint WIP

Yay for basecoats.  I haven't actually gotten much done this last week what with the holidays, I did manage to paint some more base colors on a (mostly) random selection of orks.  I've been working on them off and on for pretty much the entire time I've known about Special Operations Killzone.  There isn't really any theme unifying them into a single mob, but as they're a skirmish kinda gathered as they went, I feel that fits.  Their (as yet unchosen) bases will be their unifying feature.  A number of them are supposed to have additional armour plates that I've made, but not yet attached (or even primed yet).  I have 2 more of the looted weapon(?) orks similar to the one on the far right of the picture and another big shoota boy that were supposed to be part of the mob, but have no paint at all yet.  Painting random colors on 13 different orks is an interesting process and getting the red for that pair of pants was a pain.

They were (are?) for Special Operations: Killzone, but I haven't really thought about that system in a while now.  I don't know when I'll get around to working more on them, as I finally have all the parts for my Showgirls crew in Malifaux so I'll probably have some updates on assembly and painting ideas soon.


Oh, also does anyone have any experience with the Savage Worlds Showdown game engine?  It's a free miniatures ruleset available here.

Gun Gal

Woo, finally actually painted something.  Sadly I haven't been able to get any good pictures, they're all making her hair way to red and washing out all the shades and highlights (at least on the camera preview screen and my desktop's screens).  Not a great paint job, but I haven't painted anything in...  well, sense El'Larrun for the character competition back in June 2011.

She's as yet unbased and unnamed, but will hopefully be for a small skirmish scale campaign tentatively called Altered Realities some friends and I have planned.  We're still trying to decide on a ruleset to use for the campaign.

El'Larrun Painted

Well, she's painted and submitted to the Character Competition.   I could definitely tell I haven't painted anything in a while as I struggled through getting her painted.  For my fancy attempt I tried the camo-field (dis)engaging effect.  the Camo part turned out well, but I'm not super happy with the energy border.  Probably need to add a white core to it or something.  Oh well, next week should be on to something different, then a quick back to this post with the results from the CC (hopefully).  Then who knows.

The drones still make me giggle though.

Grr, forgot to 'publish' this post so it didn't appear on Thursday like it was supposed to.

Iron Corsairs SOG

I finally managed to paint my Iron Corsairs to playable...  About 5 weeks ago now (this post keeps getting pushed back as more pressing matters pop up).  I would've posted about it sooner, but I just couldn't get good enough pictures of them.  I'm still not quite happy with the pictures, but this last batch came out alright.  Everyone excepting the Leader (front and center in the picture above) has modular arms so it's relatively easy to change gear (important for my small collection of marines and with Killzone being a living manual with a campaign system in the works.  I couldn't get the crackle paint to work on a fine enough scale to do the weapon cowling, so I kinda tried to freehand the effect.  I need to get some gloss and go over the cowlings to make them shine.





The leader of the Team was a pain to remove the Dark Angels iconography.  He did pick up a large gear pendant as it was easier then completely trimming off the rope.  The sword is the Terminator Power Sword from the Dark Angels upgrade sprue and the arm had a mace originally, probably also from that sprue given it had a Dark Angels pendant.


The heat-stressed metal of the melta barrel looks much better in person.  I got the idea from someone's blog where they had done something similar to their dreadnought's assault cannon. (I can't remember or find it... if anyone knows what I'm talking about, please send me a link to the blog post so I can provide proper back link credit for the idea.)  I also noticed while I was taking this picture that I forgot to drill out the barrel. >.<


The rest of the team in no particular order.

edit: ok, so blogger is still acting up, this was supposed to be scheduled for tomorrow, not posted now with a date reading tomorrow >.<

Crackling Armour Cowling

So I've been pondering for a while on what to paint my Iron Corsairs weapon cowlings with when I ran across one of my sister's 'crackling nail polishes' in the bathroom sink.  This reminded me of an article I saw a while back about crackling paints (I can't find it now, which would be why I delayed this post >.>  ).

Anyway, Yesterday I picked up a bottle of Delta Ceramcoat 'Crackle' Effect.  I ran some trial paints on a piece of cardstock to see how it works.

It's really neat, but I'm worried the cracks aren't quite fine enough to look good on bolt pistols and bolters (Sorry I neglected to think to put a bolter in the picture for size comparison, the top The upper left test block's brown undercoat is 1.5" wide, by 1.25" tall.)

Sadly due to a sneaky cold this is about all I've done in miniature related stuff this week.



Fingernail picture from www.trendincosmetics.com, used without permission.

Land Raider Crusader

I picked this guy up along with 2 techmarines and a servitor at a swap meet for $35 a while back.  I wish I'd thought to take some pictures of it before I started repairing it.  It's one of the older plastic + metal models.  After extensive green stuff work and replacement of the treads I gave it a quick basecoat to try out my blue and gray Space Marine scheme.  Sadly these are the best pictures I managed to take, and it leaves the blue and grey a lot lighter then it actually is and doesn't show the sparkle of the gunmetal paint >.<  Not sure having a dedicated photo box would help that any though.

High Humidity Priming

The Night Goblins have a new green skin companion!

Anyway,

Maybe it's just something from coming from a place where high humidity is 30% to someplace where the lowest is 30%-35%, but I can't get anything to prime right. So I still have a mostly unprimed goblin army. Which sadly will probably stay as such so I'll likely not get much (if any) mini painting done these next couple weeks. ><

Crisis suits

I have done some painting / construction on my crisis suits so I have basecoats on four more suits. I apologize for the low quality of a couple of the images, not sure why they're acting up. I'll try to get some better pictures tomorrow in the daylight.

I fails at the bloggosphere thing! I just noticed it's been over a month sense I posted anything here. Sadly it's a 2 fold problem. Firstly I haven't done much in the way of miniatures... Secondly I've been too lazy to post anything or take pictures.

This is the best picture of the crisis suits, and the suit is kneeling to take aim (I thought it was a good use of the nice rotatable ForgeWorld legs).


This is one I assembled earlier, not sure what it's up to... Looks kinda confused.


This one is so going to end up with a broken foot, he's my first attempt at a running pose, and as such there is only one foot in contact with the base... Kinda scary. this one hasn't had the OSH hand mod done as it had it's fingers retracted for running.


This one I like. Having just mashed a plague marine (visible on her base), she's beckoning toward her next target.


None of these crisis suits are glued to their final bases yet, as a few still need them painted, and they're not finished being painted themselves.

And last but not least the Newest Devilfish! (Well, maybe, it is only a devilfish compared to crisis suits, but eh)

Devilfish Chassis

As I'm leaving for the weekend to help repair the plumbing of my parent's old school house, I wanted to get this posted before I left. I'd been working on it off and on for weeks (I started it before the Fire Warriors). It's the hand painted chassis, not the airbrushed one. The nose gattling itself isn't painted as I completely forgot about it due to the modular nature of my fish.



All my devilfish chassis (except one, which I got used and would be too annoying to remove the nose-gun) are modular to be able to play the roll of Devilfish, Hammerhead, or Skyray.



Also, does anyone know what Blogger does with images uploaded to the blog, but then not used?

Airbrush, Airbrush!

Well, it's been almost 2 weeks sense my last post >.< Sadly RL issues have been plaguing my life and I hadn't come up with anything to post about. However, just recently (yesterday, I believe) I got an airbrush! They are beyond nice. I test painted the basecoat for a devilfish earlier today. Including setting up the air compressor, fiddling with the airbrush before trying to actually paint, and clean up, I painted it to a nicer, smoother coat in a quarter to an eight the time. It's amazing.

The airbrush is a Badger 150, Dual Action, Internal Mix Airbrush. Which is nice as I have a number of Badger brand paint pots which fit perfectly onto the nozzle attachment thingie. I should probably find another regulator as the ones on the compressor are higher then the airbrush's recommended. The compressor fills the tank to 100 psi. the outlet regulator can be set between about 60 psi to something higher then 100. The airbrush manual on the other hand says that regulated pressure should be set someplace between 15 and 50 psi with normal operating pressure at 30 psi. Now there are some pressure sources that it says are alright to use that are unregulated that are up in the 70 psi and 80 psi ranges when new, so I'm undecided as the airbrush will only be attached and under pressure while I'm using it. The compressor has a cute 2 gallon tank so if I get a regulator that provides 30-35 psi, then the 2 gallons at 70-100 psi should give me lots of painting time.


It'll take some practice before I can start airbrushing designs on things, but as a vehicle basecoat painter, it's amazing. I'll have to try it on my crisis suits too.

Sorry the picture is a stock instead of an actual of my brush, but eh.
Image pulled off the Badger website, used without permission.
And woo, finally figured out there was a built in image uploader thing for images >.>

Crisis Suits Painted

First XV8 suit from the paint shop is the infamous R'myr pattern which became popular after the success of the T'ros campaign. This suit is painted in the scheme of Larron's Uash'O hailing from the forest moon Da'ya, and has yet to earn any distinguishing decorations.



Incidentally, the R'myr suit and the 'standard' XV8 below are not glued to their bases yet. The R'myr suit stands on it's base without support (proving that the models can balance! O.o twas an accident, but neat anyway). The R'myr above is a completely stock model. I'm tempted to add a big knife to it to truly tie it into the rest of my suits. Below is the other suit I'm working on. It has most of it's basecoat done painting wise. It's built with the right hand, shoulder pads and head of an XV84. I believe the legs are for a XV89 as they have kneepads, but I'm not positive. The left arm is a vanilla suit arm with a chaos terminator's fingers glued in. (A nod to Old Shatter Hands for the idea!) The large knife on this model's left jump engine is originally from a friend's Khorne Berzerker sprue, I filed down the face-like decoration and added it as I thought it looked neat as a representative of their bonding knife, the painted on ones just felt like a cop-out. I'm planning all my suits to have one, even though only the leader can take the upgrade. I haven't decided how to mount one to the right side as half my suits will have left handed gun arms, meaning the right arm is going to have the fingers.



Anyway, enjoy. Hopefully I'll have more progress on the Firewarrior torso soon.

Fire Warriors Painted

Woo, a squad of 9 done! I like how the bases came out, I kinda grabbed colors at random... The stone tablet parts were painted 'Mushroom Champignon' by Anita's Craft Paint, while the rocky filler was painted 'Mississippi Mud' by DecoArt. The whole thing was given a wash of 'Devlan Mud' by Citadel. And lastly they were given a drybrush of 'Quaker Grey' by Ceramcoat. They were delayed to completion as I had to make molds of the bases and make casts of them before I could base them. (Ok, so I didn't have to, but I didn't want to make every single individual base.)

Anyway, here's the group of them standing in a firing line.

They were a selection in my first armylist, however I don't think they're the right size in my current armylist, though I haven't looked at it in so long it'll probably be revised again anyway.

Firewarrior Painting and Bases

Sorry for not posting as often as I probably should. I've been painting Fire Warriors! I've finally decided on my scheme as can be seen above. Yes, I'm aware his backpack is on upside down, stupid used model. I have 9 to about that step, they still need to cleanup, shading, and highlighting. The base colors are Anita's Hunter Green (11040) for the main armour, Apple Barrel Country Tan (20778) for the soft suit, Apple Barrel Burnt Umber (20512) for the boots, and black for the back of the rifle. I'm planning on using a silver for the little sphere things on the rifle, and either bright red or bright purple for the lenses.


Also, I've started working on bases for them following in the footsteps of a friend. It involves taking a piece of Super Sculpey (any clay that becomes firm works,) and rolling it into a sheet. Then using the stamps I made earlier, I stamp tau symbols into the clay (any pattern works, I chose to just line them up in rows). Then after curing/letting dry/etc the clay, I smash it into fragments. These fragments are then glued to bases along with other standard flocks. The ones in the picture are 25mm and 40mm bases. I'm planning on making a few more 25mm ones and casting the lot of 'em. (Well, maybe not the one using a piece from the Chaos Terminator Lord kit.)


Lastly, it's not much of an update, but I've decided the O'larren model I've been working on is just the pilot, so I've thrown together a pistol for her:

The pistol on the Firewarrior with the sniper drones just looks too weedy for me. So I've taken one of the many spare rifles from the FW sprue and cut one down to be her pistol.