My painting has been progressing slowly but steadily. Nowadays it seems like I can only spend so much time with the brush before I need a break. But I recently made progress on a handful of miniatures so I figured it was time to add to my (lacking as of late) collection of WIP shots.
Rhoven & Honor Guard
First up is Rhoven and the Honor Guard. I posted some initial WIPs of the Honor Guard a while back and since then I’ve made some pretty good progress. The Honor Guards have actually been sitting mostly done for a little while now while I worked on Rhoven himself.
I’m most happy with the lower portion of Rhoven’s robes so far, but there’s still some work that needs to be done. I’m going to repaint the stole for starters; the highlights were pretty borked when I did them the first time. That and some more general cleanup work should make him ready for sealing.
I’ve been less than satisfied with most of the pictures from my last few rounds of miniature photography. I’m not sure what the problem is, but my color balance has been all kinds of out of whack. Even the manual color balance option on my camera hasn’t been able to produce the results I’m after.
The miniatures that I’ve put in my last couple of site updates have each been photographed a few times now, and there are about half as many up as there should be, simply because they haven’t turned out any good. I’m using the same photography set up I’ve been using for a few years now, but suddenly it’s like I’ve forgotten what I was doing.
I’m just going to have to keep trying to fix my color balance and re-trying, but my goal of getting caught up by the end of the year is looking frustratingly less and less likely.
Looking over my painted miniature gallery, it looks like the last time it was updated was August 8th.
Of 2008.
It would be fair to call that significant slackage. It’s not that I haven’t painted anything since then, I just haven’t taken the time to photograph my miniatures and post. Yet. Time to shame myself into action.
When I sat down with my Bastions the other day to prep them for painting, I decided to knock out Rhoven’s Honor Guard at the same time. It’s been a couple years since I painted any exemplar models and I remembered I hated painting their armor, but I forgot just how time consuming it was.
I’ve been asked a few times how long it takes me to paint a model. Most of the time I don’t keep track of how much time I spend on a given model – I usually don’t want to know how many hours of my life I’ve spent on this hobby.
Usually I listen to podcasts, music, or DVD’s while I paint, and the length of one of the podcast episodes I was listening to happened to correspond to a painting step that shed a pale sickly light on how long I had been at work on my exemplars.
First, a little setup. Painting exemplar armor is a fairly complex process because I prime in gray. I tried priming in white on my Knights Exemplar Errant, but the time I saved on the armor plates was quickly lost in the recesses of the model. From prime to finish, my process goes something like this:
Base coat the armor Reaper Master Series Yellowed Bone (usually multiple coats).
Two light coats of Applebarrel Goosefeather.
Wash the white areas with a thinned 2:1 mix of Goosefeather and Territorial Beige.
Blackline the edge of each plate where it has a border that will be metallic.
Base coat the metallic areas in GW Boltgun Metal.
Paint the metallic areas in a 1:1 mix of Vallejo Game Color Glorious Gold and Vallejo Game Color Polished Gold.
Highlight the metallic areas with Vallejo Game Color Polished Gold.
Was the metallic areas with a mix of P3 Armor Wash and GW Brown Ink.
Touch-ups & final highlights (plates and edges).
The time I spent on step 6 for all 5 Bastions and the Honor Guard pretty much corresponded with the running time of the podcast I was listening to: about 1 hour. That got my models to this point:
Exemplar WIPs
Unfortunately, I’ve been able to estimate roughly an hour per coat to get this point; so roughly 8 hours so far. And there’s still plenty left to do, including all of the purple areas after I finish cleaning up the metallics.
Aren’t you a little short for an Exemplar?
As a side note, I’ve found working on the Bastions and Honor Guard at the same time to be mildly humorous. As medium based models, the Bastions are far and away the largest models in the exemplar ranks of the Protectorate of Menoth, far huskier than any of their compatriots.
On the other hand Juviah Rhoven’s supposed Honor Guard are vertically challenged even by Knights Exemplar standards. Yet as pewter miniatures, the two Honor Guardmen weigh far more than the five Bastions.
Once a miniature hits the table, it’s inevitably going to be subjected to the rigors of gaming. Even the most careful of gamers will have accidents. It’s painful to see hours of hard work spent painting a figure vanish in one quick tabletop accident, but that’s why most gamers seal their miniatures after painting them.
So how do you want it?
Sealants come in a variety of finishes, but for the most part they can be grouped as gloss, satin, and matte. Most people prefer a matte finish on their gaming miniatures but this brings with it a problem. Unfortunately the strength of a sealant is usually proportional with how glossy the finish is, meaning matte sealants tend to offer the least amount of protection to miniatures. This isn’t as much of an issue with a display pieces but with a model that will face the rigors of the game table it means being more susceptible to damage.
After the rush to get my army painted for Hardcore and the disappointment of not being able to play, I decided to take a break from painting Privateer Press miniatures. I’ll come back to them soon enough but I spent the past couple weeks finishing up a handful of models for our weekly roleplaying game.
First up are a couple of Reaper figures that I picked up for two of the players. The first for a hammer-wielding fighter type. As our “knight in shining armor” I went with bright plate armor accentuated with a bright regal blue. The stock figure (Reaper 3324, Stern Kestrelmen) is armed with a sword but I swapped it out for a hammer from the Games Workshop Mordheim Mercenary Sprue.
I thought about accenting his armor with a brass or gold color but the character really isn’t one for embellishment. I’m pleased with him overall, thought he needs a little touch up before his final sealing. I also used Stern here to test the “Advanced Faces” painting guide in issue 23 of No Quarter Magazine. The technique turned out ok for a first attempt but I need to experiment some more before I’m comfortable with it.
Reaper 3324, Stern Kestrelmen
Next is our party arcanist. For this figure I went with a bright fantasy-esque fiery theme to match his flavor of magic and his temper. I had initially painted his inner robe yellow but it looked too much like a rain slicker. I repainted it in the gray you see here to try and evoke a little smoke to the robe’s fiery color.
Valdarynn probably needs the most work out of all of these models before getting “finished” – his hands need highlighting and I have to clean up his fire and smooth out his robe. I’ll probably also add a few highlights to his outer garment. The blond hair turned out fairly well though – I used Reaper Master Series Yellowed Bone (similar to GW Bleached Bone) as a base coat and washed with a thinned down mix of a yellow paint and GW Brown Ink, adding a little more ink in for successive washes to do the deeper shadows.
Reaper 2591, Valdarynn, Arch Mage
After Valdarynn we have the Mercenary Assassin from Confrontation. I picked this figure up a while ago and was holding on to him until I got inspired enough to paint him. When I dug him up while searching through my bare pewter collection for a good figure for my rouge/assassin type character I figured now was as good of a time as any.
I really wanted this figure to have an overall shadowy feel to him, hence the various grays that were used as the primary colors. Even the browns for the leather were done in a muted tone so as to not stand out. I realized that I needed something to make him pop, though and decided to paint the cloth mask a bright red as an accent. Once I clean up a few areas and paint the lantern on his back, the merc assassin will be ready for his final sealing.
Confrontation Mercenary Assassin
Even though I’m posting my merc sprue soldier last, he’s actually the first of the models I did for my game. We had a few of my older figs that stood in for everyone except the axe wielding hedge mage in our group. Before I knew I was going to be picking up a couple Reaper figs, I dug through my bits box for pieces from the Mordheim Mercenary Sprue to put together this model.
I did a quick 2-day speed painting job to get him finished and on the table as quick as possible. The result wasn’t as high of a quality as my other work. If I knew I was going to be painting new figures for most of the party I would have taken more time but he was already completed and sealed before I made that decision. Still, he’s a solid tabletop-quality piece and works well for us in our RPG campaign.
Merc Sprue Soldier
I’m including the last two characters of the group below, even though they’re not new paint jobs. I painted this first figure back in 2003 to use as a priest-type character, the same type of character it’s getting used for now. This was back before I started cutting the broccoli-bases off my Reaper figures – I hate those things.
Reaper 2720, Inquisitor of Malvernis
The archer is another GW Mercenary Sprue figure I put together for my friend’s archer in an Earthdawn game I ran back in 2004. That same player is playing another bow-wielding character in our current group so it seemed fitting to re-use the same figure. He’s from my pre-basing days, so he’s just on a plain black base. One of these days I’ll go back and add some basing to him.
Games Workshop Mercenary Sprue Archer
So that’s it for my current gaming group’s party of characters. We’re trying a few things different this time around with regards to the game itself which are working out for us. I want to talk about them some time in the near future but I’m going to wait until after we get a few more sessions in first.
When I just tried digging up a link to my write-ups on the color scheme for my Warmachine/Hordes armies, I found an article for The Vermillion Menofix but I didn’t see one for my Legion force. So to remedy that I snagged this off another forum and have copied it here to my blog.
Looking over my Legion of Everblight models, it didn’t take long for me to decide to go with a color scheme that matched their background in the frozen mountains to the north. I immediately decided to have a cool blue be a dominant color and worked from there, eventually coming up with a ‘bone-and-blue’ scheme shown below. I won this warpack in a drawing the day of release and I began assembling the models relatively soon thereafter. The paint job was chosen to be unique at the time, but it turned out that since I started a number of people have had the same idea and my models were by no means the first ones done with this scheme.
Many of the techniques I started using on my Legion models were relatively simple and there were a great deal of large expanses to do but still… for some reason I felt drained after painting these up and had to take a break for a bit before picking the brush back up. I don’t think I’ve ever painted a miniature (or group of miniatures) that took as much out of me as the Legion of Everblight Warpack did. Read More “Hordes: Frostfang Brood”
It’s been over half a year since I started my Protectorate of Menoth character warjacks. Working on them quickly degraded from fun to tedious but a couple weeks ago I finally forced myself to sit down and make some actual progress. I’ll finally have them – and Typhon – competed within the next couple days.
Fire of Salvation
First up is the Fire of Salvation. One of my biggest complaints of the Guardian warjack is the engraved metallic shoulder plates. When I saw the Fire of Salvation shared that design I was disappointed – I just don’t like the way it looks. I thought about greenstuffing over them and smoothing them out but decided against it at the last minute.
My other issue was with the fire that was sculpted on the top of the mace. I’m not a big fan of painted fire, so I got rid of it, but that left the mace looking like it was missing something. After digging through my bits box I decided that since the Fire was Kreoss’ jack I’d take a cue from that warcaster’s epic form. I found an old Temple Flameguard spear and clipped the head to attach to the top of the Fire’s mace, making it look like it was designed to share aesthetics with its master’s weapon.
I still need to do a little work on the Fire. On top of a little cleanup, his rivets and the Menofixes on his shoulder need painting. I also have to decide what to do with the “orbs” attached to his collar above his head. Then it’ll be time for sealing.
Blessing of Vengeance
I’ve also made a lot of progress on the Blessing of Vengeance, who is closer to completion than the Fire is. The only real change I made to Blessing was to leave off the banners which affix to the bolts on his shoulders. I’m not a big banner fan, so I tossed them in my bits box with the banners for my Seneschals, Avatar, Guardian, Harbinger, and Epic Kreoss. Sense any trends there?
I’m not completely happy with the posing on this model. His spear doesn’t hang below his base but I can see it potentially being obnoxious on the table. I’m not sure how much I can reposition it without breaking the small pistons that attach his wrist to his forearm though.
Last up is Typhon, who I took a little break from for a while. He’s mostly complete now but I’m not happy with him yet. His mouths just don’t look right and I’m contemplating repainting the stretched skin areas around the bone circle at his cheeks blue like his flesh as opposed to red like his gums.
Typhon
I’m looking into a new photography set up so I can get caught up on documenting my finished works, so hopefully I’ll have some better lit shots of these models soon.
For many people tabletop war games can be a very visual hobby. I’m not a proponent of having to paint to play but there’s no denying that painted models and nice terrain can really dress up a table. Sometimes, though, well crafted terrain can add difficulties to play, or worse yet be damaging to models!
My most recent run-in with good terrain gone bad was after DieCon when I discovered a few of my models with decent sized chips in them. Most of them only came out for the four rounds of Hardcore, so they hadn’t seen much play. The likely culprit is the play surfaces themselves – 4×4 foam table tops with sand glued down for texture. While the sand drybrushed well to make the table look nicer, it also had the tendency to turn the tabletop into sand paper and damage models that happened to topple in play.
I like a nicely terrained table but sometimes I’d just rather have something that’s more playable. Hills that are both steep and tall make placing models along their edges difficult. Forest templates that are warped – no matter how nicely flocked – are unstable surfaces for figures. There are actually a number of potential pitfalls for forests in particular… for example trees that are permanently affixed to the template base can interfere with placing miniatures.
Is a finely built yet potentially damaging piece of terrain simply analogous to the fantastically converted model that for whatever reason suffers when it comes to playability on the table? There are a number of Warmachine and Hordes models that suffer similarly. A prime example is the Seraph, which hangs over its base so far that it can be difficult to maneuver models around it on the tabletop. Should gameplay suffer for art? Should art suffer for gameplay?
I enjoy fielding painted miniatures whenever I can but I find myself unfazed whether I’m playing on particleboard, cloth, or a flocked tabletop… whether I’m using a fantastically painted and sculpted piece of terrain or felt cut to size. Does this mean I have a double standard when it comes to tabletop aesthetics?
After I finished Epic Thagrosh I took a bit of break from miniature painting. I’m not sure if it was the culmination of the burnout I had been feeling or the stomach virus I had caught but I pretty much put down the brush about a month or so ago. It wasn’t until just a couple nights ago that I finally sat back down with Typhon to try and get back into the swing of things.
Last time I worked on Typhon I had applied the initial wash to his skin but I hadn’t gotten any further. But when I sat down to try to smooth out the base coat, before I knew it I had flown through a majority of the layering and the clock was telling me it was an hour past when I should have gone to bed.
The following night I did some initial work on all of the carapace areas. I still have a lot of detailing and more highlighting to do on the skin though. The mouths also need a ton of work but overall things are progressing rapidly. Before long I should be able to seal and base this multi-headed monstrosity.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to paint after Typhon. Neither the Fire of Salvation nor the Blessing of Vengeance have been touched in nearly six months. I just haven’t been able to bring myself back to painting warjacks since then. Half of me really wants to get them finished and off my workbench but the other half remembers how un-fun jacks are to paint. Painting beasts is so much more fun.
Fire of Salvation and Blessing of Vengeance
I’m also considering switching to Rorsch & Brine. I basecoated Brine’s skin a while ago but he he’s virtually unstarted. Rorsch is just primed but if I paint him I’ll probably paint my Bone Grinders at the same time just to make sure that all of my Farrow have a consistently colored hide. There’s also a Stannis Brocker that has been in-progress for a while now that I wouldn’t mind working on either.
Stannis Brocker WIP
That’s just my models that are in progress, too. One of these days I should make a list of my unstarted models to try and prioritize them. Damn figmentia!
