Working in the Shade

As most of you already know, I like to use a version of my Shaded Basecoat technique with the airbrush, that that this is done with the Badger Stynlrez primers.

In this case, I will be doing this on some French infantry from Warlord Games, one of the last units for the army.  Since they will have to match all the other previously painted figures, the colors used would be very simple.  The idea is only to establish where the lights and darks would be. 

The first Stynlrez primer was the dark brown Ebony.  All I am doing is covering the entire surface, setting up the next primer color.

I really like how this deep brown color works.  It is relatively neutral as far as being a warmer or cooler, but still have more interesting tone than gray.

Some black primer was sprayed near the bottom of the base pointing upwards, so that it would also hit the bottoms of the figures too.  This would be the darkest areas of shading.

You can see that even with this one addition, there are already some nice value gradations established.

Since I will be using my normal glazing techniques once the priming is complete, I only need to provide a hint of greenish brown.  This is the next layer, which is mixed with a little bit of the brown primer.

The image on the right shows one figure with the green primer and a little yellow primer added. By spraying it from above the figure, you can immediately get a sense of how the overall figure should be shaded.

It must be remembered that I want these colors to be a few shades lighter, because I am doing many glazes over the top of this primer set.  That's going to darken everything down significantly.

The final layer is a mix of the yellow with some white.  Not only is it important for getting the last highlights on the upper surfaces of the figures, but highlighting the base as well.  

This can really be seen with the kneeling figure on the left.

At this point, the unit is basically ready for the rest of the painting process.  I may use acrylics or oils at this stage, depending on what else is being painted at the same time.

The view from above shows off the base too.  If you want to get some of these excellent primers (these are the some ones you have seen me using on vehicles and even terrain), you can get them at webairbrushes.  If you use the discount code "wappellious", you get a 42% discount:

http://webairbrushes.com/

King of the Jungle?

We've got another one of the 1/72 scale tanks from the Little Wars demos (done in the Badger Airbrush booth) which has been completed... even with leaves.  

Just like the previous "Chia Tank" experiment, I love the added dimension that the leaves create.  My next vehicle to have leaves with be the French Laffly W15C tank destroyer.

If you want to see the original posts where this tank was painted, here's a link to part one:

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2016/05/little-wars-part-one-new-arms-race.html

The view from above gave me a new perspective on how desperate the Axis forces were to hide their few remaining precious tanks from marauding P-47's!!  And be darned if that wouldn't be much tougher to spot from the air.

Here's part two of the painting of the toy tanks, courtesy of Badger Airbrush.  You will be seeing a LOT more Badger brushes on these pages very soon.

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2016/05/little-wars-part-two-more-than-toys.html

I will have a much finer airbrush to work with now, the Badger Extreme.  Up until this point, I have been getting myself re-acquainted with the airbrush using the standard Patriot:

http://www.badgerairbrush.com/Patriot_105.asp

What you have been seeing thus far is really the beginning of the beginning.  A lot of research, testing and experimentation has been going on behind the scenes.  I have tried to give you a few glimpses at this where possible.

A lot of things had to be tied together, and that has taken several months.  Starting the Flames of War and Bolt Action French armies has been the laboratory for all the testing... basing, terrain, special effects such as weathering, and so on.

For example, most of the weathering on this vehicle was done with regular paint and brushes while I was at Little Wars.  Some additional work was done with Secret Weapon weathering powders as well. 

The foundation was established back in May, where I got to try out the airbrush on miniatures for the very first time.  It truly has been a Blitzkrieg on this process!!

Heaven forbid... you will even see some decals!  Oh my!

There is a practical reason for this.  Some of the markings involve tiny lettering and symbols which are not practical to do with freehand.  I also want to have these be as correct as possible.  As you can see, there will be a LOT to learn.  

Hopefully I can make the journey interesting for you as well. :-)

Little Wars Part Two: More than toys!

The saga of Little Wars continues!

After working for a bit with the standard Badger Patriot airbrush (using mostly primer colors as paint), I shifted back to my more typical brush work after a desperate search for supplies.

At this point, I was trying to show how I had been setting up all of the weathering techniques while I had been putting on colors with the airbrush.

There was nothing different from what I usually do with my larger brushes, except most of the color was mixing in the airbrush cup as opposed to mixing on the figure itself.

I like to place my lighter camo colors on corners or edges where I want to do a lot of paint chipping.  Obviously, the lighter the color, the easier it is to get the darker chips to be visible.

On the flip side, I made sure to have some areas which were darker and cooler in color so that lighter rust streaks would show up just as easily.

At a certain point, I tried to do what I could for markings given the extremely limited colors and magnification at hand.

I still had to resist the urge to put rust onto the Centurion tank. :-)  You can see how the shapes of the vehicles emerge further with the darker glazes and washes applied in addition to all the weathering effects.

I could not resist getting more of the toy tanks, especially since I had not taken any "before" images.  This was really unexpected, so all of this was very seat of your pants flying!

Just a wee bit of difference from the original die cast toy!  Not bad for a $2 tank and perhaps 50 minutes on that particular vehicle.

Needless to say, I want to get all of these back under the magnifier and do much more precise work.

I want to add more 'dimensional' effects as well, such as mud, leaves, dust, and so on.  I have a few other extras, and I think one of them will have to be winter theme!

I wish that I had snagged a few more of the Tiger 1's, because I could have tried a few colors there.  Still, that one seemed the best candidate for an earlier gray color.

Just like I did with the camo pattern tanks, I tried to play off the lights and darks which I had set up during the airbrushing stage.

I'm not sure how well you can see it in the chaos of the palette, but I mixed some green, black primer and white primer to make some additional gray colors for the hull and top of the turret.

This was a nice contrast to the rusty tones that had been originally applied with the airbrush.

Again, this was also supposed to be a demonstration on how you can use the same airbrush paints with a regular brush, and how both tools can work very well with each other.

I continued to press on... you can see the potential winter scheme tank killer off to the left...

This image shoes the difference between the more developed drive wheels from the previous shot.  I went in with the regular brush and accentuated the shadow areas, especially on the wheels further back.  I used the green/white/black mix to get some difference on the gray tones here as well.

The view from above.  I was demonstrating finger painting at this stage!  No, it was not exhaustion and fatigue... it was all part of the lesson plan.

I simply applied a few dots of color to the vehicle, and then took my finger and stippled them around, creating some nice random effects.  This is a decent substitute for a number of specialized products... especially when it's all you've got available. :-)

I hope you enjoyed this journey!  There's another post coming to wrap up the Little Wars experience, and then you will see the completion of each vehicle in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

Little Wars Part One: A new arms race begins!

After many years of attempted persuasion, we finally made it to Little Wars!  I had no idea what to expect, aside from seeing lots of historical minis. :-)

It was held at the old Adepticon hotel, the Westin in Lombard.  There were lots of huge tables set up in the main ballroom where epic games of Flames of War and Bolt Action were taking place, along with many other historical wargaming systems.  There were some 1/700 scale naval combat games in progress that certainly seemed interesting!

I never got to see that much closer than a cursory glance, since a quick walk through the vendor's hall revealed a set of tables with Gorgon Studios figures (of Hank Edley fame) and Ken from Badger Air Brush!

Moments later, I was able to get some plastic and die cast metal toy tanks, and an airbrush was in my hand!  How did that happen?

I had a Bolt Action Panther tank as well, so I thought that I had a nice variety of things to play with.  Also, several of these already had paint on them, so this would be a very interesting experiment!

I was going to be able to see how the airbrush worked on "pristine" tanks, and even a die cast Centurion British tank!

Since I hadn't touched any of my airbrushes for over a dozen years, Ken had no idea what kind of madness might take place...

Straight away, I had to "undo" some of the painting that had been done on the toy tanks.  Take note: these toy tanks were just a few dollars each, so they will not be to scale or completely accurate from a historical standpoint!

Once I had done a lot of structural work on the undersides of the vehicles, as well as the treads, drive wheels and such, I could get a solid base on which to start painting camo patterns or even the gray on the Tiger 1 (I'll have to make a new barrel for that guy!)

There was no way to show this in a photo, but I was having a lot of fun "layering" the paint in the airbrush.  That is, I would pour in some orange rust color primer, followed by a layer of black, followed by a layer of yellow.

When I started spraying, the first color to come out was orange, of course.  However, as I kept spraying, that color automatically transitioned to brown, then to black!  Once the black started to run out, the color changed to green, as the yellow started to assert itself.

Eventually, the color became mostly yellow, which made a very nice base for those late war German camo patterns!

From there, all I had to do was inject a little of the orange color back into the mix to complete that late war color scheme.

On the Centurion, I didn't use much of the orange, but stuck with the black/yellow "layer cake" approach.

All the while, I was preparing and planning for the time where 'regular' brushes would be brought into the mix.  Meaning that I was doing all the usual tricks for creating ideal areas to show off rust, paint chips, streaks and so on.  If you have seen my previous tank weathering articles, you know what I like to do there.

This is also where things got interesting.  I had not brought ANY of my painting tools!  No brushes, no paint, no nothing.

So, I bought a few brushes, grabbed a piece of paper that seemed somewhat water resistant, and realized that I had no paint colors!  All that was available was a few of the primer colors still on the table.

You all know that I like "primer painting", so it was not a total loss.

You can see how mixing up some of the primer with the one or two airbrush colors made some very nice shades to use for the next phase.  I focused primarily on the shading of deep recesses and paint chipping.

This small amount of additional painting, done without my magnifier light, made an instant impact!  I was trying to do these as a demo for folks gathered around the table as well.

Because, when you haven't touched the airbrush in 12 years, and never painted a tank with it before, that's the perfect time to demonstrate it!!

I only had white primer available, but it still made a nice base for some of the insignia.  Hard to do without my magnifier light, but it was necessary to continue the demo.

You can see those yellowish green colors that I was using to shade some of the more detailed recess areas on the various tanks.  I worked around hatches, rivets, gaps between armor plates, and more.

Once I had the paint chips established, I could do some streaks running down the sides of the turrets and hulls from those "starting points".

Stay tuned for much more from the Little Wars Airbrush Escapade!!

Demos at Draxtar

As time moves along, and we make more and more trips to Draxtar Games in Batavia, I have started to figure out ways to conduct the sort of "spot demos" that I love so much.

These are literally spontaneous hobby combustion, where all of a sudden there is a group of folks watching a quick demo that I am holding on some aspect of painting.

With each trip we have made out to Draxtar, I have been able to figure out the best way to transport what I need for the kind of space in which I have to work.

These rapid fire scratch builds were done for a podcast which is being recorded later today.  I needed a few types of Laffly French trucks for a test game of Bolt Action.

The actual miniatures have not arrived yet, so I thought I would open up the laboratory again for a few hours and see if I could create something that looked like this out of a pile of pink foam pieces and plasticard.

Again, only a few hours was spent on these vehicles, which are more terrain than anything else.  They will probably be used as some kind of objective once we get going with the games and scenario construction.

The red oxide paste is normally used for basing and terrain, but I have also used it for corrosion texture on vehicles.  It also serves to strengthen the soft foam, and fill gaps.  There was little time spent on measuring anything... just cutting and gluing in rapid succession!

I wanted to demonstrate primer painting for all the Flames of War and Bolt Action players at Draxtar.  Sure enough, Rich, Rob, Paul, and a host of others were all there playing Flames of War!  

Here's the "Big Three", the primer colors from Badger.  Think of the concept in this way... if you have a red, a yellow, and a blue, you can make any color.  As odd as this sounds, the Black is my Blue, the Green is my Yellow, and the Orange primer is my Red.

I brought out a few beat up larger brushes, and set down to work.  In a matter of 17 minutes, I had all the surfaces not simply primed, but with plenty of rust and corrosion and even a little shading!

While that larger vehicle was drying, I did some more "primer painting" on a Flames of War Tiger and Char B Bis.  Again, all of these layers of 'paint' you are seeing are actually primer.  This means that it is very unlikely for paint to slough off the surfaces of these figures.

I often like to do these demos in "halves", so that the person can have a go at it themselves, but with one side as a template.  It's a little less daunting to try and translate that information to your own muscle memory. :-)

While those vehicles dried, I went back to my scratch built Bolt Action scale Laffly to demonstrate those same colors in a much larger size.  The principles are the same, but there are more elements that you can add in when it's twice the size... or more.

It was also gratifying to see those scratch built pink vehicles looking a lot like real miniatures!

I brought out some of the new Secret Weapon paints to do the camo patterns and even a touch of weathering.

This picture is probably worth a few words... if not 1000!  

It is these types of projects that I am trying to have on hand for the google hangouts.  I think that people could get quite a bit out of watching 30-45 minute spot demos such as these.

Obviously, I want to do more intensive class structured events in the hangouts, but to practice and perfect the platform, I'd like to begin with lower impact, more informal sessions like these.

Many more elements are to be added to the vehicles.  A great deal of freehand, foliage and weathering are yet to come.  I have not been able to experiment with leaves or even tree branches placed on vehicles as camo, so yet another experiment is in progress!

Another series of step by step articles will be done on the Laffly W15T tank hunter over the next few days, so stay tuned!!