Merry Christmas to one and all...

This masked freak has been spotted in the wastes outside my town... Which can mean only one thing....it's Christmas!  Happy Holidays to all you lead heads!

LAM Post-apoc "Santa"

Cheers,

Blue

The Rest of Averland...Part IV

Though illness and the Thanksgiving holiday have made my painting time somewhat scarce over the last week I have made some modest progress on the Averlanders.  I've highlighted up the the yellow to completion and started in on the white cloth....which will get just one more highlight before it is complete.  With the major areas of cloth being nearly complete the figures are starting to look pretty good...there is still plenty to do but its nice to see them coming along. 

Here are some pictures.

And just for fun...and to assure that the current figures will match with those that I painted early last spring...here is a picture with a mix of the finished figures and some of the WIP pieces...

It looks like they are going to fit right in!

Next I will be finishing up the white highlights then move on to choosing beard and hair colors and starting in on the leather and other brown pieces.

Cheers,

Blue

...Something a little different: Kevin Adams Zippo

Howdy all!

I'm still recovering from thanksgiving...

...but wanted to take a few minutes to post about something interesting that showed up on my doorstep this week.

When it comes to collecting Warhammer related items I try to limit myself to things that I will actually use in a game someday (theoretically...:) ) ...I'm not big on hoarding un-opened blisters... or artwork... or other items that are purely "collectable."

...but sometimes you have to make an exception.  A few months ago over on FrothersUK there was a discussion about a Zippo lighter that Kevin Adams had customized by covering it with GS sculptures.  Apparently a number of resin castings were made of this...though I believe the only functional lighter is the original.  Anyway...during this discussion I mentioned that I would love to get a copy of the casting.  Several weeks later I received a PM from another Frothers member who had seen my post and had a copy he was willing to part with....despite it's complete lack of "gameability" I jumped at the chance.

...now due to some mismanagement of the deal in my end and unexpected, but totally understandable, delays on the sellers end I have only now received my copy ...so I was quite excited when I unwrapped it from its tidy bubble wrap cacoon...it's much bigger than I expected!

...and the absolute density of amazingly detailed sculpting displayed on this piece is mind blowing!  

The Rest Of Averland III ...Black Cloth Walk through

While I was working through the process of highlighting the black cloth portions of the Averland Commission I thought I would document my process and share it with you.

First I must give credit where it is due.  I did a ton of online research looking for different techniques of highlighting Black...most of which are complete crap that at best give you a model that is more Grey than black.  Eventually I stumbled onto a youtube video that displayed a "technique" that I thought was worth giving a try.  While this video shows a painter working on a rather large figure ... the techniques he employs work very well on 28mm minis as well.  Take a look and see what you think... (warning the music is terrible (IMO) but you don't need to listen to see what he's doing)

The Rest of Averland ...Part II

Alright...lets carry on with thebinman's Averlanders.

Some of this batch of figures really require an additional color beyond the black, yellow, and white...figures that seem more like peasant that have "rough" cloth on as well as figures representing a Game keeper...and an archer that looks a lot like Robin Hood who pretty much demanded green clothing,  So this series of pictures shows the whole group with all the additional base colors in place.  I've also had time to highlight the flesh areas on all the figures up to near completion...I'll go back and do a final highlight as one of my last tasks.

Here are the group shots...

Temptation...the third...

After James's recent article about Combat Cards I stumbled onto this group if them on eBay and threw in a low ball snipe...I had owned the Dwarf and Goblinoid ones back in the day...but lost them over the years....anyway picked up four packs for about $3!  

But the aren't OPENED! The Goblinoids one is off its card so I might as well open that one.  The others....I'll hold off as long as possible but I'm sure they'll get cracked open before too long...

Cheers,

Blue

The Rest of Averland...:)

Howdy all,

As I mentioned once many moons ago while I was in the throes of the Lead Painters League...and before I shattered my ankle and ruined my summer...I was asked by LAF member thebinman to paint up a skirmish warband for him.  The figures he chose to send me include some of the all time great sculpts from the early years of Citadel and Marauder.  The start of this commission were the 5 figures I painted for the LPL seen here:

Warhammer Skirmish Homebrew fun game

Howdy all,

Last night I managed to convince a couple of my buddies to have a game of Oldhammer...and we opted to do something a little different....we played a total skirmish game.  I home brewed a set of rules using 3ed as the base with some input from Rogue Trader and Realms of Chaos as well as other ideas that randomly popped into my head.  The idea was to have a fairly fast flexible game with smallish units (8 max).  I think we succeeded...and most importantly we had a lot of fun doing it.

The forces engaged consisted of Dwarfs and Humans (my 5th ed Brets) on the side of light...commanded by Brian....and Chaos Dwarfs and Orcs and Goblins on the side of Chaos...commanded by Tom.

Here are a few pictures of the nights activities...sorry for the quality...they are all done with my iPhone and under the crappy florescent lights in my garage.

Here is an overview of the table with Tom starting to move his forces of Chaos (chaos dwarfs and O&Gs) onto the table...

No smart ass comments about the exercise bike in the background...

As you can see we had a fairly dense set of ruins in the center of the table representing a burned out village...this is composed of card building from Dave Graffam.

Temptation part deux...

So...what did I buy? Dreadnought confusion...

So...earlier this week I picked up a couple of 40k pieces from eBay at a great price....namely two dreadnoughts.  I was only really interested in one of them but now I'm intrigued by the other.  Here they both are...

Quite a difference in style!

The rogue trader one on the left is the one I was really after.  I just really dig this guy and have for many a year...every time I look at this guy...

...I think of this wonderful diorama from back in the day (the dread's down at the bottom).

The other dreadnought is obviously of a much newer vintage...but my knowledge of such things is quite limited...

...so what is this "goat skull" headed, Edward scissor hand having, walking shoebox of a dreadnought??  When was it produced?   It is quite a chunk of metal that's for sure!  I imagine I'll be passing him along...so is he worth much?

Any assistance is greatly appreciated...

Cheers!

Blue

**UPDATE!**

After reading the first comment I took a closer look at this dreads left arm and it has clearly been reshaped and filed down... Thanks for the tip Liam!

Modern crossbows for classic figures

While I have tremendous respect and admiration of many of the sculpts from the classic period of WFB I've have never been a fan of the plastic crossbows that some of them were armed with.  These plastic pieces were used by troops of many different armies including dwarfs, empire, orcs, bretonnian, and chaos dwarfs....and they looked terrible in all their hands...

Glam: My Oldhammer Day Golden Gobo Entry

Hello,

Time for a proper painting thread....it sure has been awhile!

As we are all now aware, the end of August saw the first of what I hope is many Oldhammer events...though this one will be hard to beat.  The Bring Out Your Lead event was held at the Foundry facility in Nottingham England...it featured all manner of Old School goodness....great games...displays of many epic figures and armies....discussions with some of the artists and games designers that made the games we all love so much unique... in short it sounded like a fabulous time.

Sadly it was in the UK...

....and I am not...sigh.

So in a desperate effort to participate on some level I painted up a figure and shipped it off to jolly old England so that it could compete in the Golden Gobo contest at the event in my stead.  Thankfully Thantsants was kind enough to act as caretaker and transporter of my figure to and from the event.  I received the figure back from his trip to the olde world a couple of weeks ago but have only now had the time to take quality pictures.

I chose to paint the, to my mind, iconic wood elf wardancer Glam who was sold as the Champion to the ubiquitous Skarloc's Wood Elf Archers RoR.  As you know my heart lies with the dwarfy species of the Warhammer world...both Chaos and otherwise.  So the choice of a Wood Elf for this contest was a bit of a stretch for me...in fact I don't know that I had EVER painted an elf before this one...but I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed painting this figure and can't wait for the excuse to paint a few more like him.  Jess Goodwin's talents as a sculptor are very well represented in this figure and have really captured my imagination.

...anyway...here is the final product.  Below you will find a discussion of how he got to this point.

Alright...lets step back to the beginning.  Here we have Glam in nothing more than his Dark Gray primer and with a base color of VMC Chocolate Brown (872) applied to areas that would end up being gold, wood or leather.

Here he is with most of the base colors in place.  For the skin I base coated with the old GW Foundation Paint Tallarn Flesh with a bit of brown mixed in.  The hair is Vallejo Panzer Aces Light Rust (301). Glam's Pants are another military color...VMC German Fieldgrey (830).

I highlighted the pants by adding Citadel Foundation Dheneb Stone to the Fieldgrey...I highlighted it up pretty far......too far in fact...

Glam was wearing a pair of faded out Dockers...sigh...(luckily I didn't take a picture of this travesty) So... in a bid to save this situation I quickly gave the pants a coat of heavily watered down Reaper Green Ink mixed with Delvan Mud.  This seemed to even the pants out a little and brought some green back into the cloth.  Crisis averted! 

I find that the Reaper inks are quite glossy as you can see in places where it pooled like at his ankle cuff.  While this annoys me, and looks weird, I try to remember that the matte varnish at the end will even all that out.

Highlighting of the flesh continues by adding Dheneb Stone to the base coat color

And more Deneb Stone is added to the flesh.  The hair was highlighted by adding a rich yellow to the Light Rust base color...I would tell you what that yellow was called...but it was months ago and I don't remember...:)

 

Next I got some base colors on the metal portions (Bolt Gun Metal, ancient Armory Gold Paint) and finally added some off white to his teeth and eye balls... that helped him seem a bit more life like. I also started to pick out some of the finer detail like the fletchings on the arrows and the scabbard for his dagger. 

Note here that I painted the Oval decorations on his "belt" and wrist guards black.  I had originally thought to paint them metal but at this point I decided that they should look like gems...so I went with the black base color.

From that black base coat I highlighted the gems up through grey colors to bright white...remembering that that the shading of a gem is backwards from normal shading....the light actually collects at the bottom of gems instead of on the the top. 

(In hindsight I probably should have gone a little heavier with this highlighting to make the gems a bit brighter but I'm still happy with the result.)

....at this point you're saying  "Hey Blue....why are your gems grey scale?!?!"

...good question.

....this is where the Tamiya Clear Red (X-27) comes in....this is a neat product that is available in a  number of different colors and is great for getting realistic and quick gem effects with little effort.

A fairly heavy "drop" of this was applied to each of the "gems" making sure to cover the entire surface  Since this paint is clear, the greyscale shading shows through the glossy red coating and and provides for realistic gems with minimal hassle. 

Please keep in mind that this is a solvent based paint...this is not your friendly acrylic paint.  Use a throw away brush (I know you have some kicking around too...from the looks of my painting desk I think I have every brush I've ever owned since I starting painting in the 80's!)  Also...Don't try to clean your brush in your regular water mug....you'll just get your mug all gummy.  And for God's sake keep that paint brush out of your mouth! :)

After the gems all I did was add the pupils to his eyes...highlight and wash the Gold and Silver portions.... matte varnish everything (except the gems!) and then applied my normal basing technique.

There is one part of this model that seems "not finished" ...and I would like to have your thoughts on ...I need ideas on some sort of decoration for the scabbard of his dagger...right now its just yellow...and flat....and begging for some sort of freehand... 

I suck at freehand...particularly on something this small!

...I tried a few things and they just came out looking sloppy... but I'm willing to try again!

If anyone can suggest some examples of simple, elfish, looking designs (line art?) that might be appropriate here I would love to hear about them.

All in all its was great fun to paint this guy up and to have him represent me at the Oldhammer Day...I certainly look forward to painting up some more Goodwin Elves in the future...(those Mounted Personality figures are high on the list!)

Thanks for watching!

Cheers,

Blue

My Brushes...a changing of the guard part II

Howdy all!

As stated in an earlier blog post from more than a year ago I've been using a batch of Rosemary and Co. Sable/synthetic blend brushes for the bulk of my painting.  To my mind these brushes offer a lot and ask a little.  They hold their point fairly well and have decent longevity....longer than my Windson and Newton series 7 pure K. Sable ones ever had....and best of all the price is crazy low...particularly if you live in the UK where shipping is quite cheap.  When I ordered my first batch of brushes from R&Co I ended up paying as much for shipping to the US as I did for the brushes...and still felt it was a good deal...but this time I wanted to avoid that.  

So...as many of you know I sent a figure over to the Bring Out Your Lead Oldhammer event in Nottingham  at the end if August... that scholar and gentleman Thantsants agreed to receive and guide my figure to and from the event...as I knew he would be sending my figure back I thought I would take advantage of his kindness and also ask him to send along a new order of brushes for me as well...thereby saving the rather stiff shipping fees.   

....With the reduced costs of shipping I might have gone a little nutty...but rationalized that this way I wouldn't have to place another brush order for a couple of years.  I purchased no less than 13 brushes....

As you can see I got a range of sizes from 3 to 2/0...and then I got three flat brushes of two sizes as well.  I rarely need a brush smaller than 2/0...and if I do I still have a perfectly serviceable W&N 3/0 for that.  Of these the size 1 will probably get the most use (which is why I bought 3 of them!) with the size 2 and 3 being used for fast base coating and use on larger models and horses.  The flats are great for drybrushing...particularly on large areas of fur...I haven't tried these ones yet but as soon as I get around to working on some wolf and/or boar riders they will get a workout.

This whole batch of brushes cost me £20!  Not bad at all....you couldn't get 3 W&N Series 7 brushes for that much.

...now I just need to find the time to use them!

Cheers,

Blue

Something Special up for Trade MM66 Reiksguard Knight

All right....it's time to get serious about moving one of my precious MM66 knights along.....these guys are very rare and fairly valuable particularly since it comes with a horse as well....it has taken me several years to collect 3 of the 5 sculpts but now it's time to focus on closing out some of my other needs..... so I'm looking for trade offers for this guy

Here is a link to my wants album...anyone want to make a deal?

http://photobucket.com/albums/k285/csabick/Miniatures Wants List

Cheers,

Blue

Simple green...that's purple!?!?

Hello all!

Another long delay between posts...I've been away on field work for the last week and haven't had any time for posts...sorry about that.  So, I just got home and wanted to put something up real quick....here goes...

A couple of weeks ago I was picking up some supplies for my kids sandbox at Home Depot...I was paying with a gift card and it was going to have like $15 left on it so to use up the remaining balance I went in search of some Simple Green ...my preferred paint stopper.  In the Simple Green display I also found this:

And I thought to myself..."could this possibly be better than Simple Green...well....it does say heavy duty and pro....so it has to be better!"  So in the cart it went...

....and you know what?   It is better.  When I got home I dropped a few eBay wins in this new cleaner and in less than 24 hours the old paint brushed off easier and more cleanly than they would have if soaked in Simple Green for the same amount of time.  In fact I would go so far as to say I have a favorite new stripping solution....it works well...it's biodegradable, virtually odorless,  easy on the hands, and it comes in a big jug!  What's not to like?

If you can find some around you ...give it a try!

Cheers,

Blue

Bret Knight update 1

Howdy all,

I just wanted to post a couple of WIP pictures of the unit of Brettonian knights that I've had sitting on my desk for many weeks.  I've been having trouble deciding what colors I should use on them and how involved I wanted the heraldry to be.  In the end I opted to go for fairly basic designs using all the colors that were employed in my other units.  This will give the whole force a bit of coherency but still allow the knights to stand out a bit from the peasant rabble.

As you will recall with the other units of this army I used a Dark Green and a Dark Blue as the unifying colors...and then each unit had a tertiary color to make them unique.  So added to the blue and the green are: gray, salmon orange, brick red, golden yellow and to brighten things up I will also employ some white. 

So this weekend I managed to get the base colors on all the knights (except the general)...just breaking the inertia and getting moving on these feels really good and I think they will look very nice in a big unit.

Here is where I am at this point

Cheers,

Blue

Bret Warband Group Shots

Hello all!

This weekend I was feeling pretty low about the number of painted figures I've been able to add to the "completed pile" over the last few months....so I decided to finally get a few decent group shots of Bretonnian warband.  These are rather hasty photos...no fancy background and you can see my hobby surface as their battlefield....but I think they still make an impressive looking force.

...plus getting them all set up and pretty looking made me feel a bit better about my output for the year.

Anyway....here they are

I need a bigger backdrop!!!

This ones more of an "enemies POV"

Close up 1

Close up 2

Thats all for now...I hope to have new material to post soon!

Cheers,

Blue

Never leave a man behind!

As I mentioned on my recent post about the Retained Knights from Alternate Armies I used to have a fairly sizable force of RT space marines....I got them way back in the foggy times of the late 80s.

Ah those were the days....I remember putting together an order with some friends when the US mail order arm if GW was selling off over stock...for about $40 we got more than a hundred metal 40 k figures.  They weren't packaged or anything...just loose in a box.  Anyway my share was several squads if marines.

Sadly I made the stupid decision to sell these on more than a year ago when I had no interest in RT and needed the money for other shiny bits...sigh 

So today I'm digging thru some boxes and came across the one left behind...and one of the few I ever painted...

I guess the rest if the squad didn't feel that going back for the gene seed of novice Smyth was worth the risk...

Everyone told him to wear a helmet!  Damn noob wouldn't listen...

Cheers,

Blue

Temptation!

Should I ? .....or should I not?!

He would look great with my Oldhammer Day Golden Gobo entry....

Simple Green to the Rescue!

Just a quick update....

...my pile of painted eBay purchases was getting quite large so I had put it into a beaker of Simple Green a couple of weeks ago before heading out on holiday.  Today I scarfed down my lunch and used the rest of my break to do the work with the tooth brush.  Many of these will be making it into my various forces...others will be coming to a sale thread near you soon!

The Whole lot

The new Core of my Renegades Force (BTW stripping those back packs is Pain in the ass!)

Some Fire power and odds and ends for my Brets

A whole mess of Marauder Longbeards

This last picture shows the begining of a unit that I will be adding to my Brettonians...I've always felt that these longbeard models didn't really fit with the Puff and Slash style "empire" dearfs that most of the Marauder range represents...in fact I sold a whole unit of these more than a year ago for just that reason.  But as I was looking at them again the other day I thought they would fit nicely with the Brets I've been working on lately.  These will represent the warriors supplied by the dwarven minning interests to their local noble...the Brettonian general.  Luckily I found a good BIN sale on eBay and got more than I need for the R&F troops....now I just need to track down the standard and find a leader for this unit...

...oh yeah...and paint them...:)

Cheers for now!

Blue

Blue Drifts into Sci-Fi....eBay strikes again

Yikes! Nearly a month since my last post! I could bore you with a bunch of excuses as to why...but lets just say RL has been cramping my hobby time in a big way.

So since I've gotten very little done in the way of painting...Lets look at the ever expanding lead pile instead!!

As some of you who haunt similar forums as me know I've been selling off a lot of extra figures from my collection...this leads to money in the PayPal ...which leads to obsessive eBay trawling.... which leads to more small boxes and padded envelops randomly appearing in the mailbox...  which leads to exasperated looks from the wife...:)

One of my latest "successes" on eBay was the acquisition of some excellent Sci-fi models...both from the Rogue Trader Era Citadel range and from slightly further afield.  A gentleman from the States was selling a number of Chaos Renegades individually along with a Chaos Dreadnought.  I put some low ball snipes in on the whole lot of them and promptly left for a short holiday with my family.  Half way through my trip a received a flurry of emails from my eBay account letting me know that not only had I won a few of them...but I had won them all!  They weren't a tremendous bargain but at just north of $5 ($15 for the Dreadnought) each I was pretty happy.

The Dreadnought has been avoiding me for months!

A nice mix of Renegades here.

One duplicate...and the guy in the right is from 1993...but close enough for me!

These twisted disciples of evil will join the other 8 or 9 Renegades in my collection allowing me to field almost two complete squads...a squad of Chaos Terminators...and a dread...Nice!

As you may have noticed the two Plague Marines have different...non-RT backpacks...which I have to say I really like!  Can anyone tell me from what edition they are from?

I had also noticed that this same seller had a fairly large lot of non-Citadel Sci-fi figures and when I went to see what they had sold for I found that no one had bid on them...so I dropped him a message and offered to include some money for those in my payment as well...he agreed and added this lot to my box for only $10!

Thats a lot of metal for $10!

 These are all figures from Alternative Armies Ion Age Series of 28mm figures.  I first became aware of this through the amazing work of Pil....a regular contributor on LAF who painted up a bunch for a client.  I was pretty impressed with the figures then (and Pil's amazing brush work) and felt that they had a very RT feel to them so the chance to get my hands on a fairly large batch at a bargain price was a no brainier.

This lot includes a number of Retained Knights...which I will use as alternative Space Marines.  I think they are at least as cool as many of the old Citadel sculpts.

Perhaps its my fondness for Sallet helmets that makes me like them?

The rest are a batch of more lightly armed infantry...and to be honest I will have to do some thinking about what to play them as in RT...but the sculpts are still quite good IMO.

To Give you an idea what these guys can look like painted...here are a couple of Pil's Pictures (which I hope he doesn't mind if I use)

Of Course Pil's excellent scenery helps make them really look great!

This last shot is of more lightly armored human figures not included in my lot called "muster troops" which I think could equate to Imperial Guard...I see myself hunting them down soon...

Back in the foggy distance of time I had several squads worth of Citadel Space Marines...but stupidly sold them off a couple of years ago when I was focusing my attention on my dwarf collection...but with the discovery of these figures from Alternative Armies I don't see myself trying to rebuild that collection...These seem to be a fun alternative and one that is still in production and can occasionally be found for a pittance on eBay....unlike the classic Space Marines.

Thats all for now...if my painting mojo continues to elude me I'll let you in on a few more of my recent impulse buys.

Cheers for now!

Blue