Supreme Generalissimo Guardsman!

Hi folks, quick one for you today, the conversion from back here has now been finished.

Client asked for blue jacket and red trousers with a gold stripe. The longer this combination went on for, the more it looked to me like the sort of thing dictators in South America (or a Gaddafi/Idi Amin type) would wear. So in my head he became the Supreme Generalissimo for the duration of the painting.

The camera - or more likely, me - struggled to get both the blue and the red saturated at the same time so you'll have to use a little imagination. Getting this scheme to balance was something of a challenge. There's three saturated primary colours here. Mercifully he'd asked for the gold stripe on the trouser leg which helped a lot. Played with a number of options for things like the cuff colours - seriously, nothing else but blue with a thin gold stripe worked there - and the shirt. The shirt was a real problem. Tried white - way too bright and called attention to the wrong part of the model; grey - looked unpainted; and a pastel blue - nope; before realising I was going the wrong way and tried a military khaki. Perfect. It disappears into the busy scheme and reinforces the soldier-inside-the-dandy look that we have going on.

Another thing that I found fun was making his very, very strange haircut work. Largely through making sure that I treated the shorn back of his head in the same way you would stubble. That is: thin washes of a skin-black-brown-grey mix and then rehighlighting with very thin skin tone. Seemed to work nicely. Happy with how he turned out and he's wildly different to his more, shall we say Hugo Boss German looking counterpart. Fun project. More shinies soon.

TTFN

Flektarn Assault Unit

Hi folks, bit of a blast from the past today, the very last of the Flecktarn guardsmen for a long term client, and these guys are getting up close and personal.

Unlike most of the other Flecktarn lads (they have a real name but I've forgotten it, plus, I tend to identify by paint job) these chaps are toting shotguns and some additional armour here and there. As they are something of a hodgepodge of different parts it gives them that "veterans who have scavved gear here, there and everywhere" look. Finish it off with a sergeant toting a plasma pistol and chainsword and you've got a squad designed to work almost on top of the enemy.

I've talked about painting the flektarn camo before but it's worth mentioning again how nicely it turns out for a "simple" but laborious scheme. It's just layers of blobs and dots in four different shades given a brown wash for shading. It is true that it represents nine stages to do it, but none of those stages are terribly onerous. It just takes a lot of time.

The olive drab webbing and German grey armour plates/equipment take care of almost all the rest of the models. Any tiny details (the occasional cuff, the sergeant's stripes) got picked out in German fieldgrey to keep the theme rolling. With these, I believe the long running on-and-off project Flektarn is done and done. Been fun in a "just keep swimming" sort of way :)

More shinies soon.

TTFN

Hail Hydrant!

Greetings one and all, please forgive my absence, it's been one of Those Septembers. The planets aligned and everything in RealWorld^(tm) seemed to happen all at once. But I am back now and with a totally-not-a Hugo Weaving to show for it!

As is usual for subtle blacks... the camera hated it but I've done my best in post! This is the painted version of the chap we were converting a little while ago. He's quite clearly supposed to be a pre-Red Skull "Johann Schmidt" of Captain America fame. Hence the:

...in the title. Client wanted him to fit in with some previous Imperial chappies so that's how he got painted. Speaking of which:

He was fairly straightforward to complete. The black is my usual German Grey, highlighted, washed with black and rehighlighted. The leather was Flat Brown mixed with a little black and washed at the same time as the rest of him. Again, go back to the original mix and lighten it for highlights. A couple of dark green accents and a teeny, tiny suggestion of an aquilla in a white disc on the arm and all is good. His face gave me some trouble as the sculptor had gotten a bit excited on the expression and it was anything but nuanced. I had to go back and forth with shades making the flesh feel less "lumpy". But still, he's done! His friend is still on the painting table - and is getting a significantly more Generalissimo vibe - and will be with us soon. Oh, and the long slow assembly/conversion project is still being long and slow. Soon!

All the best folks.

TTFN

Stiff backs and shiny sabres

Greetings shipmates, back again with another quick visit to my "out" tray. This time a rather lovely Death Korps/Cadian kitbash that just oozes "officer":

The donor model was the sadly long-OOP Cadian officer with the monocle and the sneer. Wonderful figure, but the client already had one and he's waaaay too distinctive to have twins of. So with a shiny-hatted Death Korps head in hand I went about decapitating the original and replacing it with the new resin head. Razor saws are the absolute win for that job. I've managed to save the head entirely so that's going back to the client for future projects.

dayum that one in the right caught the light!

As for painting? Well, I've painted so many of these brown DKK over the years that there really isn't much to natter about. Except that the brass was a bit of an experiment. I painted it as I normally do, brassy brass, highlighted with silver. For some reason the tone was just all wrong. Just way too brown this time. No idea why. I knew I needed to get that warm brass tone back so broke out the Casadora Yellow. One clean pass of the wash - acting more as a glaze as all GW washes do - was enough to warm that up nicely and give the shiny brass hat I was after. Very nice.

That's all for today folks, more shinies inbound soon

TTFN

Grubby, grubby mechanics

Greetings and salutations folks, quick one for you today. A trio of grubby mechanic types from Blight Wheel Miniatures:

You may remember "Tank Spanner Girl", well, these three are companion pieces to her. Marginally less grubby, but well used all the same. I quite liked the sculpts, proportions are a bit off here and there but the design accents are really nice. I especially like the crenellated edges on the garments. Gave them a real "medieval sci-fi" look and fit in nicely with the mechanicus cog wheel imagery.

Painting wise they're not much to talk about. As part of the Khaki crowd they're just, well, shades of brown. I did my usual trick of adding a little German Camo Black-Brown to the metalwork basecoat when I want metal to look well used and rugged. The grime is just black soot weathering powder worked in to enamel Engine Oil weathering paint. The whole effect is then softened by "stumping" with odourless turps to make the stains "sink in" to the fabric rather than visually sitting on the top. Like I say, not much to say on the painting front. But fun!

More shinies soon

TTFN

Krieg Kit-bash Konversions

Hi folks, fairly quick one today as we have but two candidates on the workbench:

These two gents fall in to a nebulous "Krieg but not Krieg" category. On our left is a kasrkin whose head has been rather violently removed with various saws and replaced with a Krieg one. The right is more of a kitbash, Elysian legs and arms with Krieg grenadier torso. Both look rather lovely I think. The aesthetics blend nicely. Well, except that the old metal kasrkin is massive compared to the forgeworld models. Seriously, look at the base sizes in the picture, I had to tweak the scale to make the picture look anything like sane. But anyway, enough with the scale grumbles, lets talk about painting man mountain fink:

 It's hard to see but the kasrkin is the same paint job as these chaps, I think he's supposed to be an officer or something leading them. As a result most of my colour choices were already made. In the end almost none of the Flecktarn camo can be seen but from the back he is very stealthy.

This chap I needed to do more thinking for. He's to join a group that has black; green and yellow as a colour palette but he needs to still be a soldier. So while I knew I needed some nice saturated green in to the model... I figured I still needed some more soldierly green to form the main body of the fatigues. The armour is much brighter in person than it seems in the photos by the way. The yellow was always going to be more tricky to pull off. Too much would give it a cartoon vibe but there needed to be some in order to bind him to the group theme. Inspiration struck by realising I could just put some quick arm-of-service-esque stripes on the gun and helmet. It's small, but it's enough.

There we go, like I say, a quickee today. More shinies soon!

TTFN

Death Korps, now with mustard

Ahoy shipmates, guess what? There's some more Death Korps leaving their assembly areas on my workbench and boarding the cardboard transport to the front lines.

I believe these are some kind of specialist unit on secondment to the rest of the DKK already with the client. Brief was for grey with mustard details.

The yellow is based on the Averlander yellow I use, i.e. Val Tan Yellow with glazes. In this case two coats of Seraphim Sepia to create a more ochre-ey (totally a word) followed by matt varnish to kill the shiny wash effect.

It's tough to see on the images but the greys are different between the armour; coat; and canvas mask/puttees. If you were painting for a studio and online photos you'd want more contrast. Realistic doesn't always look good on "film".

Final pics for the day are two random Inq28 goons. Well, one goon and a monk. The monk is based on a real order which are beige with brown flecks. Meant breaking out the pointillism to make the little flecks. The goon needed to look "classy-threatening" so pin stripe suit and a nice black leather trench-coat was the order of the day to go with a shotgun straight out of the ministry of emphasis.

That's all for today folks, not much to natter about so just enjoy the pretty pictures :)

If pretty pics are your thing by the way, head over to the Beard Bunker, I just finished my series of shots of our trip to the new warhammer world (from quite a while ago), there's some good stuff there.

Warhammer World - Part One; Part Two; Part Three.

TTFN

And I Beheld A Pale Horse...

...And his name that sat on him was... Roderick... and the Death Korps followed after.

Yup, it's yet more Death Korps o'clock! This time it is the blue, sorta WWI Belgian variants and include one of my very favourite DKK models. The Death Riders always looked good on the website but getting one in my hands? Let me tell you all, Forgeworld knocked it out of the park on this one. Fantastic. Let's jump straight in:

I dithered a lot over the colour of the horse. I figured I had a couple of options, either a strong contrast or a colour that would compliment the regimental scheme. In the end the decision was made on two counts: One, the overall scheme would suffer by too much of a totally different colour being added (and I was worried a dark horse would diminish the impact of the creepy tack) and two, I had called to mind that "I beheld a pale horse" Revealations quote and figured that was perfect for the Death Korps. I didn't trust my ability to get a nice "champagne" colour - really tough with painted horses as much of the tone is the skin showing through the fur - so a pale grey was the best option. Plus it felt like the sort of colour that might be bred en masse for a consistent regimental appearance.

The horse of course (of course, of course) was not the only animal on the base. The officers little dog was a plastic part from another kit added on to give even more character to the piece. I joked with the client that the lack of gas mask meant it must be an Eastern Krieg Gashound bred for hardy doggy lungs. It's shape though was much more spaniel in form so spaniel it got!

The rest of the painting (including his two buddies) was the familiar Fenris Grey with assorted mid greys, rubber mask and brass fittings. Not terribly tricky and discussed in prior DKK posts so I won't bore you with it. Suffice to say, a fun project and was I to be doing a DKK army any time soon? It would have a shedload of the riders in it as they. are. awesome.

TTFN

Krieg Troops and Catalogue Models

Hiya folks, more shinies this week for ya!

Long time readers will definately recognise the colour scheme at work here. I dread to think how many of these brown Krieg I've done over the years but these are amongst the last. However, it's rather clear that three of these things are not like the others... let's check them out.

These three lovely ladies are more of the "Toughest Girls of the Galaxy" range, yep same as the Vostroya Today cover model. While these are still posed in rather a "catalogue model" attitude I quite like them. The middle one has a too large head but the sculpting is actually really nice and they were a ton of fun to paint. Not least because the client wanted darker skin than the usual Caucasian. Picking which exact shade you can paint a model generally depends on the sculpt. These girls are very European in sculpt, but that means you can choose anything from the far North of Norway down all the way to bits of Turkey. Lots of choice. This skin tone started with Val Beige Brown, shaded with a mix of Reikland Fleshtone and Agrax Earthshade, highlighted by adding increasing amounts of Kislev Flesh to the Beige Brown and then glazed with Seraphim Sepia. I think it came out quite nicely and is definitely being added to my repertoire of skin tones I'm happy with.

The rest of the paint scheme was rather informed by their attachment to the brown Krieg forces. Camo greens, khaki and a saturated dark green was the order of the day and led to quite a quick, enjoyable session bashing them out. Fun models. No idea what I'd ever do with them myself, but fun nonetheless. One of those times where its nice to be a commission painter as you do things that you wouldn't have chosen to try yourself.

Heading back to the gasmask lads, well, there isn't a lot to say that I haven't said dozens of times before. So we'll just check out the pretty pictures and not worry about my blathering so much.

Really like this tank commander. Such contempt for the kind of weapons normally flicked at an armoured vehicle that not only is he out of his turret, but in a pose of absolute, casual calm.

And that's all for today. Hope you've liked them and more next week!

TTFN

Vostroya Today Cover Shoot

Greetings people (never have figured out a satisfactory clever collective noun for readers of PVP), today we have a rather more glamorous guardsman than usual:

I'm fairly sure that she is one of Raging Heroes sculpts and one of the better ones in my opinion. Less obviously sexualised (note "less", as opposed to "not"), more a soldier. However the pose did strike me from the get go as, well, a pose, she looked like she was striking a suitable heroic pose for a cameraman somewhere behind the fourth wall. So in my head, that's what she became, a trooper pulled out for the commissariat's civilian propaganda and recruitment wing, more on that later.

The sculpt is nice enough, technically very nice, lots of crisply cast details and equipment, nice. There are two minor quibbles I have, one is her hair which is filling a big undercut for the one piece casting of the body and head and thus only looks good from one angle. Fair enough, it's a technical rather than an aesthetic one but I might have tried to find a less obvious place to sacrifice. Hey ho, I am neither a sculptor, nor a caster so I know nothing, no-thing. The second is more of a subjective thing, it's the face. There is a tendency for female faces to be impassive masks devoid of expression. I know the problem stems from trying to get an attractive sculpt at 28mm scale where the slightest twitch of the sculpting tool radically alters the end result but I believe these were digitally sculpted so... Ah, I guess it's a personal thing, I think character comes from expression, displaying an emotion - determination, trepardation, fury, concentration... something. Anyway, on with the painting!

The brief was a delightfully Inception-like thing. I was to paint a Vostroyan-esque figure in the beige Death Korps scheme that was itself based on an old Vostroyan figure! Thus the scheme will be a familiar one to long term readers. Most of the choices thus made for me by Past Jeff I was able to just relax and enjoy the process. Really, the only choices I had to agonise over were the hair - I ended up going for platinum blonde to make the face pop from all the beige and to reinforce the already catwalk model physique - and things like the fur trim on the coat and hat. One big section that had me scratching my head was the flag. She's holding a large piece of fabric in her right hand, clearly a flag of some sort but not held with any respect, more a trophy. I figured I wanted a little bit of red and gold on the flag as, well, I'm painting a Vostroyan and I have something of a Soviet bent to my Bolt Action collection. Trouble was, that was going to be a very, very bright spot and would draw attention away from the face. Not ideal.

The solution came to me by first painting the flag as a captured arch-enemy banner. I would drag the flag through the dirt of the battlefield, thus dulling the colours and keeping the focus where it ought to be. My normal dirt weathering sequence wasn't going to work too well with my client's preferred urban basing. Mud doesn't work well with rubble. Thus I started by stippling a drybrush of Val German Camo Black-Brown - it's got to be a very dry brush - building up layers of dirt. Then Stormvermin Fur and finally a little light grey (can't remember which) mixed with the Stormvermin fur. I used a clean wet brush to do a little blending of the final layers that hadn't fully cured and finished the whole thing off with some spots of black for soot. Perfect. A point of interest but not a distraction from the rest of the model.

With the shoot finished (the camera and I are gradually reaching an accord) I couldn't resist a five minute photoshop job and create a trashy supermarket tabloid cover for her. I think Vostroya Today works ;)

TTFN

Men of Praetoria, Stand Ye Steady...

Yep, fire this up, because it's Praetorian Imperial Guard O'Clock baby yeah!

This is part one of the commission with a platoon command squad and a bevy of heavy weapon squads still to come. Common sense though dictated I start with the biggest "block" of the troops and get the solid 20 man core of the platoon completed.

These were actually a lot more work than I was anticipating and a lot of that was due to nostalgia-tinted glasses. It's really hard to get crisp, clean lines on the old guard models because the sculpting and casting wasn't that clean. There are big filled in undercuts and wobbly chinstraps and the like. Of course, being post-hoc conversions of the Mordian models that proved so popular at a Games Day that they got released didn't help either. So, in other words, these are models that you have to either paint like a character for each one or get to a point and say, yep, that is good enough.

But enough grumbling about archaic sculpting. Painting! Fortunately for my client I've been restarting my Napoleonics in recent months (sloooowly) and thus had found a rather lovely red just perfect for Colonial era Brits (appropriate and very punk song here). Essentially the whole thing revolves around doing a normal highlighted red up to an orange highlight. This will look ridiculous, waaay to orange. Then mix up my normal blood mixture of 2 parts red ink to 1 part chestnut. Thin this with water and glaze medium and glaze the whole thing, ta daaaa! Colonial red. Vallejo Off White then provides the piping and webbing details and my fake not-really-NMM gold took care of the braid. Interestingly, I was looking to see what colour to do the heavy weapons, red seemed too gauche, black looked too "sleek", and found that Victorian artillery was essentially Codex Grey. So mid tone grey it went and shiny it looks! I washed some of the basing colours into the wheels to make them seem a bit dusty and that was about that.

I'll leave it there, as there are more of these to come and don't want to be saying "well, I talked about the painting extensively in the first post..." again. So for today,

TTFN

p.s. these are getting a break now, Tau next!

An Imperial Guard Smorgasboard

Greetings one and all, today we have a collection of Imperial agents and soldiers. All part of the increasing Inq28 forces I'm painting for the same client as Project Leviathan:

These three elements are - from left to right - an Inquisitorial acolyte raised from the ranks, an Imperial officer with something of a Goth complex and three members of the Mordian 7th:

Wait, the Mordian 7th... that name seems familiar... well, if you are in the same blogging circles as me you might well have run across the Mordian 7th in the blog of the same name. My client asked me to replicate the paint scheme so as to represent some of the 7th among his command staff on this side of the Atlantic (I believe they natter online).

Obviously, taking cues from another painter's scheme is often a cornerstone of a commission painters world. We're often matching from photos or other reference material. In this case I had to interpret a few details but for the most part there was plenty of source material on the blog. I wound up using the same yellow as my Averlanders for the weapons, "The Fang" and associated layer colours for the armour and some Vallejo chocolate brown for the leather. The beret colour could have been either the blue-grey or the red. I decided on the red mainly for colour balance reasons. It picks out the red from the piping and the grey is already nicely spread across the model. No need to add any more.

From a model with quite a specific brief to one where my brief was "Goth Officer". A Gofficer if you will. Being a man with Cruxshadows, Opeth and Sisters of Mercy (neatly pigeon-holing my age) well represented among a lot of similar music in my collection this was a brief I could handle. Sadly... the camera just can't. It's one of those models with subtle transitions of colour and texture that studios never ever use for this exact reason. It doesn't photograph well. There is purple brocade in his coat lining, as well as on the uniform piping and sash. Everything else is silver, either faux NMM silver or just straight up metallics. If it isn't either of those choices then as Ford once said "any colour so long as it's black". There's black leather (starting from a brown base), black cloth (starting from a grey), gloss black armour, black hat, black... oh you get the picture. For a bit less rambly musing on painting black, go check out the 54mm (and thus more photogenic) ninja post.

Finally we have the Inquisitional Acolyte, another fond user of black and red with lots of chipped gloss black armour plates and brass bits... what's that? You swear he had a scenic base? Well you were right!

The client wanted a vox caster included on the base and in discussions we realised that a planetary scale unit might be more cool for an Inquisitor's henchman. Sadly this would make him a bit unwieldy so using the same magnets and flex steel technology from project Thunderbolt I gave him a swappable base.

The base itself features an old battered ammo case as a table, an Apocalypse vox caster nicked from a tank and the acolyte's lasrifle with underslung grenade launcher. Worked out nice I think!

That's it for today, nothing too deep, just shallow dives into some progress tracking. Have a nice weekend folks.

TTFN

Flecktarn Special Forces

Greetings all! Remember these guys? Well, they're back in a slightly altered form:

First of all, these photos are all irritatingly shiny. I needed to use a dispersed flash in order to actually get pictures and that made the paint gleam. Finding a reliable matt varnish is a pain in the rear too, any PVP reader suggestions for a good solid matt varnish? Anyway, on with the real stuff: These are a terrifying hybrid creature made of DKK Grenadier torsos and resin cadian-style legs. They needed the grenadiers to be razor sawed through the waist (take care to preserve the lower armour plate) and then smooth the resulting cut ready to be glued to the legs. These were intended to be a Special Forces squad of the Flecktarn-style infantry. As a result the client wanted them to be reminiscent of the originals but stand out from them. Thus the decision was taken to use a different "season" of the flecktarn camo scheme, in this case Spring:

Try to ignore the SS icon, this was on all the elite Heer forces, just a shame so many of those were SS...

So as usual you need to break down the scheme to get a progression for the paint job (I have one more of these to do and am likely to do a step by step on the camo). The scheme is clearly a bright green background, with a dark brown layer providing the principle pattern. Then a brighter brown in the middle of the larger dark brown blobs. Finally more dark brown dots with bright green dots in the centre through the brown blobs. Note that this is not how the material is printed, but it is the easiest method to "stack" the camo layers while painting. The result is:

Fairly close, the green is the horrible - but perfect for this job - Vallejo Uniform Green with a mix of German Camo Black-Brown and Black for the dark blobs. Flat earth was the light brown colour of choice and the whole uniform was shaded with a thinned Agrax Earthshade. Previous flecktarn infantry dictated the German Grey armour and US Field Drab pouches etc. so that was an easy choice. These chaps however have collars, cuffs and a skull on the Ammo Rubber & Tires gas mask. What colour should these be? Anything bright was not going to be a win as these are special forces, drab is their thing. Then looking at the original camo scheme again I spotted the uniform collar. Perfect, thought I, so Val German Fieldgrey it was. It also looked cracking on the skull.

With so many colours going on with these guys already I wanted to keep all other spot colours very muted. Once you get above three or four principle colours you are getting dangerously close to gaudy and visually noisy. All you can do to keep the miniature focused is to boost certain colours and mute others in the hopes that you keep the whole job unified. I think these guys are pretty much there.

That's all folks! I know August has been a smidge quiet here on the ol' PVP but that's largely due to the rest of my life packing everything about six months of stuff to do into the eighth month. August has been proper busy... and isn't done yet. I'll be back to mostly normal in September but hey, at least August has had some updates right?

TTFN

Eisenkern Command

Hi folks! Remember these chaps? Well, we're back with some more, this time from the command box set:

I'm just going to come straight out and say this, these fellas just do not photograph well. The combination of the always difficult to shoot adjacent blacks combined with the gloss annihilating shading and highlighting means that they look waaaaaay better in the flesh. But ho hum! This is what we got so just engage imagination and press on. These were made with Dreamforge's Eisenkern command set and were then modified to have GW weapons to make them more Imperial Guard. I will say, I was a little disappointed with the options included. The set really only allows you to make exactly what is on the box. No real opportunities to play with the configuration. They're mix and match though so if you have other Eisenkern sets they cross-mojinate. In this case mercifully we had some spare arms so the special weapon squad could work.

Speaking of the special weapon squad. My client thought there were only five models in the box so the extra unit was a pleasant surprise. We decided that they would work well as a small squad of special weapon wielding dudes and that a "breach and clear" affair could be fun. Two meltaguns to crack open that tank/bunker/starship airlock and three flamers to hose the resulting breach. Nasty. As with the last squads of these, painting is fairly straightforward, the brief was "Tie Fighter Pilot" so shiny black the order of the day. To separate areas of the model, the undersuit is Ammo Rubber and Tires, the armour German Grey and then everything got washed black. The armour got another glaze of black before highlighting with the Grey and the gloss.

The command squad itself includes a nice long range comms/scanner thing with a nice little laptop. Strapping a medical auspex and a bunch of pouches to one of the Eisenkern and combining it with a white medic helmet made a decent field doctor. The flag comes with the kit and as with all these CAD-made less-than-a-millimeter-thick-details is a bear to paint cleanly. Seriously guys, we need either more height or a wider detail. Finally, the officer is just the standard Eisenkern with a chaos plasma pistol. If you ever want a nice baroque plasma pistol, go chaos, they've got lots of lovely exposed wiring. Makes it look dangerous.

And that's all folks, short one today with not being able to see lots of cool detail. More next week!

TTFN