Black vs. white

The title isn’t about racial tensions in modern America, but rather the (probably slightly less important) issue of choosing an undercoat.

I may have mentioned this before, but I always used to undercoat my figures in black (it was all the rage in the late 90’s), and so it was natural for me to continue to do so when I got back in to painting.

However, after painting a few figures that arrived from eBay pre-undercoated in white, I’ve slowly come to realize that it is a better fit. It’s generally faster for me and it mitigates my penchant for painting fairly dark and muddy colors.

It’s probably not the best demonstration, since they aren't totally alike but here’s two Skaven I finished recently:

The clanrat (to the right) was undercoated in black, while the globadier was undercoated white.

I’ve also tried a grey undercoat, but as I haven’t really been able to make the most of it, so I’ll stick with white for my old Citadel.

Croaker

Boom, Headshot!

I finished my Skaven jezzail team yesterday (yay!) and instead of just dropping a picture of the finished models, I thought I’d do a quick step-by-step.

I’m undercoating in grey. It’s a new thing I’m trying, and so far I’m fairly pleased with the results. Nothing controversial here.

Afterwards I wash the models with Army Painter Dark Wash and then apply a very rough drybrush in white to bring out the detail and aid with shading.

I then apply a coat of ink to the fur, wood, leather, warpstone bullets (at least, that’s what I imagine he’s got in the sack) and clothes as a base coat. I’ve tried this with the fur before, and I think it works, but as you can see, the red ink doesn’t cover very well – especially on the raised areas (I’d sort of hoped that the white drybrush would help, but it obviously didn’t).

To salvage things, I gave the red areas a couple of layers of P3 Brown Ink. It worked out fairly well, but in the future I think I’ll just give the red clothes a proper base coat.

I then drybrushed the fur and clothes in lighter tones of brown/red – both to add some further highlighting and to take the shine off the models.

After that, I did some detailing work and gave the skin and wood some extra highlights in different tones of brown to differentiate it from the fur.

Lastly, I painted the metal and leather. Metal gets a base color, followed by an ink wash and a quick highlight, while I paint leather by washing a base layer of light brown with sepia wash (I can’t remember the name right now – It’s an old GW one), then highlighting a couple of times by mixing the base color with more and more ivory, and finally giving it an extra sepia wash.

And here’s the final result. Considering how quickly I did them, I’m fairly pleased. I am, however, becoming painfully aware that red was a bad choice for the clothes, as the entire model ends up looking quite “brownish”.

Oh well… They’ll hopefully look good alongside the rest of my painted Skaven. I’ll have to do a “group photo” at some point.

Croaker

I'm back

Que the music:

That's just to say "I'm not dead - honest"

Has it really been almost a month since i last wrote something here? Wow - time does fly.

Between visiting the family, work and keeping the baby fed and (reasonably) happy, I simply haven't had the energy to do any painting.

But now things are slowly getting back to normal after the summer vacation, so I finally managed to finish the warpfire thrower team. Here they are:

They aren't really my best work. I'm fairly happy with the clothes, but the rest could have turned out better and I really, really need to lock down on a method for painting skaven flesh. As it is, I just splodge various shades of brown and pink on there till I get tired and call it a day.

At least they were fairly quick to do. Undercoating in grey works quite well, though in the future I may have to do a quick drybrush in white before applying other colors to brighten the models up a bit.

Next up are some of my favorite models ever - the jezzail team!

Croaker

Summertime

It’s been another couple of slow weeks. My speed of painting is as glacial as ever (and that may even be doing actual glaciers a disservice, what with all the melting of the poles that’s going on), and to make matters worse, I’m visiting the in-laws on the other side of the country this week.

So instead of showing some actually finished figures, here’s a picture of what I’m currently working on:

As you can see, they have been undercoated grey, which is something I’m trying out. You see, previously I always used to undercoat in black, but lately I’ve had some good experiences painting a couple of skaven that had arrived from eBay pre-undercoated in white. This made me want to try switching to white myself, but my younger brother suggested that I used grey instead, to get the best of both worlds.

Even though my brother is very much biased against undercoating in white (probably a reaction to growing up during GW’s “red period”), he’s also a much better painter than I am, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

So far it seems to be working well. I gave the fur a layer of brown ink and a two-step drybrush to highlight it. Looks (IMO).

The rest got a layer of Army Painter “dark ink” to bring out the detail (I could probably have skipped this step, but I wanted to see what I was doing), and that’s as much as I’ve had time to do.

I’ll post pictures when they are done, but if the rest is as quick to do as the fur, I’ll be very pleased.

Croaker

Getting back on the horse, erh, giant rat

I did it! After, what, about a month, I’ve actually painted something! Here it is: 

To be perfectly honest, I’d already done most of the hard work (i.e. the fur) before my involuntary time-out, so it was a relatively quick job from there. But I find that I get a boost in enthusiasm whenever I finish something, so I’ll still count it as a definite win.

The figure itself is going to stand in whenever I need a Night Runner or Assassin in AHQ, so it’s probably going to see play soon (I hope to play the next installment in my ongoing adventure this weekend or the one after that).

Painting-wise it’s very simple. I ran into the same problem everyone who has to paint large amounts of black does – i.e. that it’s very hard to highlight without making it appear grey. I’m not sure I managed it completely, but Skaven are supposed to look a little scruffy, so I guess it’s fine.

Croaker

Pest(ilens) control

I’m getting closer (well, about half way there at any rate) to the point where I’ve got all the normal Skaven warriors I need for a game of AHQ, so I figured I’d better get working on some of the more unusual kinds. As one of my plague monks had arrived pre-undercoated, I got started on that one, along with an additional clanrat.

Here’s the result:

The clanrat is o.k. – nothing special. I’m getting closer to the skin color I want for my Skaven, but I’m just not sure I’m entirely there yet. I’ll keep experimenting.

The main star of today’s show is the plague monk. I’m especially pleased with the robe. It’s done by painting it bright yellow over a white undercoat and then applying a, very slightly, thinned layer of P3 brown ink. Immediately afterwards, you “paint” water over the raised areas to create the highlighting effect and you can then add a little extra ink to depressions if they aren’t dark enough. I think it worked out really well.

The main problem with technique is that, because the color from the ink “sets” so quickly, you only get one try. Get something wrong and you have to start all over again. Fortunately, small imperfections don’t show up all that much on an intentionally “grubby” model like a plague monk.

Croaker

Slaving away

Have you ever tried painting a figure That. Just. Wouldn’t. Cooperate? 

Well I just did – two of them in fact:

 I’ll be the first to admit that the paint-job is decidedly below-average, but these are slaves and were never really meant to be ‘Eavy Metal standard.

I actually began painting these two at the same time as the dwarf bolt thrower from last week, intending to use them as a gap-filler for when the dwarfs were drying. However, I quickly got absorbed by the crew and didn’t really get started on the slaves until last Monday, except for messing about with the fur. And that’s where I first ran into trouble…

I gave them a medium brown base-coat and then inked them with my P3 brown ink. I’ve complained about this before, but that ink is basically a deep red – not brown. Now, I didn’t know this at the time (it was the first time I used it) but as a result I ended up with two “ginger” Skaven – not at all the effect I’d hoped for. I’ve tried to fix it, but I’m not really sure I can get the red sheen entirely off without stripping them and starting over from scratch.

Next came the hands, feet, ears and tail. My previous Skaven have mostly had light brown skin, but I’ve seen some really nice effects with a more pinkish color, so I figured I’d try that out. The finished results are… “mixed” would probably be a good word. I quite like the effect on the ears and hands, but I simply couldn’t find the right tone of pink for the tails, and they ended up rather muddy I’m afraid.

The last major hurdle was the tunics. Here I encountered an issue I’m sure all Skaven players have faced: How do you distinguish the different troop types from each other? To the untrained eye a slave looks much the same as a clanrat or a plague monk, and if you aren’t careful you end up with an unfocused brown mass. On the other hand, you probably don’t want them looking too bright and colorful. 

As I’ve already painted my clanrats with green clothes, I decided to give my slaves yellow tunics. Higher orders (stormvermin, and characters) will then get blue clothes, and I’ll figure something out for the more specialized troops when I get to them. This color coding puts me dangerously close to bright-and-cheerful territory, but as muddy colors seem to be a specialty of mine, I’m fairly certain I can keep the whole thing appropriately muted.

The tunics worked out reasonably well, and after painting the metal and a bit of detailing, the slaves were, finally, done. Only took me two weeks.

Croaker

Actual tangible progress

After last week, I was determined to make some headway into my pile of unpainted miniatures, and as I’d like to get my ranger unit assembled, I decided to paint another batch of troopers. To mix things up a bit, I also picked up another three clanrats, as I’ve found them to be wonderfully simple and, dare I say, stress-relieving to paint.

After some soul-searching, I concluded that I’d been a little too sloppy with the first two rangers, so I spend a little more time on highlighting and detailing this time around, though I’m not sure if it shows up too well on the pictures.

I didn’t really expect to finish the skaven – they were primarily there to give me something to do when the dwarfs were drying – but to my utter amazement, I managed to get them done as well, which means that I’ve painted a personal-record-setting six figures in a week! Yay!

  

Sadly, I haven’t yet discovered exactly how to get consistently good photos of the minis, and something messed with the colors this time around. I’ve tried to correct it in Picasa, but they are still a little washed-out. Oh well, just one more thing I need to practice, I guess.

Croaker

First of many

As a part of my effort to paint a full set of figures for Advanced Heroquest I’ll eventually have to paint a ton of Skaven, which is actually slightly scary for me. You see, I once tried, and badly failed, to paint a Beastman army. I simply couldn’t motivate myself to paint all that brown (this was back when I thought that all Beastmen had to be brown-furred, goat-headed bodybuilders).

There’s a little more leeway with Skaven (for one thing they tend to wear a more clothes) but there’s still no way I’m getting out of painting lots and lots of fur, so I have to stay on track, and my usual four-hours-per-miniature routine simply won’t cut it.

So, to maximize my chances of actually finishing all those rats, I tried a very speedy style for my first three clan-rats. Here’s how they turned out:

I’m really very pleased with them. Though the paint-job is quite basic, it took almost no time at all and I actually think that the overall effect is rather striking.

Basically, I dry-brushed the models with three layers of increasingly lighter brown. I only applied the last layer, which was almost buff, to the skin-parts (hands, feet and face) and, lightly, to the fur.

I then treated the skin and fur with different washes (red-ish for the skin, dark brown for the fur) which gave a nice variation to all the brown – though my camera sadly didn’t pick it out (probably because I’m using artificial lighting, but It’s cold and rainy outside, so that’s just how it’s going to be).

After the washes had dried, I painted the metal and clothes. Both got a base color and a layer of wash to bring out the detail, but no highlights. I figured that if there’s anything I can get away with not highlighting, it’s Skaven, and it saves me a lot of time on each figure.

Lastly I painted the claws, teeth, eyes and shields, and did a tiny bit of touch-up on some of the leather.

You’ll also notice that I’ve actually done the bases this time. I figured that it was about time to pick a style, but as I’d like to use some of my figures for both dungeoneering and field-battles, I didn’t want all-green bases. In the end, I decided to try Orlygg’s basing guide which seems to give a nice all-round effect. You’ll probably also notice that I didn’t quite manage to replicate the style. It might simply be because of my lack of experience or it might be because I’m not using inks. A proper set of inks are high on my to-buy list anyway, so this may be a good time to get them. Vallejo does a nice set.

I really enjoyed painting these three little critters – and I wasn’t expecting to, so I’ll call it a success.

Croaker

Rats!

As I’ve stated, I’m trying to get all the figures I’d need to play Advanced Heroquest. Since the campaign that's included in the game, The Quest for the Scattered Amulet, features Skaven, I thought I’d start there.

Yesterday I was looking over my current collection, and something dawned on me; It seems that I’ve inadvertently bought a small Skaven army.

You’ll notice that a lot of them are already painted. I didn’t do it (they arrived this way), but the paintjob is quite decent, so I thought I’d leave it until I’ve finished my other projects, which might take some time considering how slowly I paint.

The next question is; do I bring my small force up to a full army? I deliberately restricted myself to four goals in order to avoid “mission creep” (a.k.a. the-mountain-of-unpainted-lead-you-really-mean-to-get-around-to-painting-some-day-honest), but I’m also tantalizingly close to a proper Skaven force. I only need, what, a couple of dozen clanrats, another warpfire-thrower and a few rat ogres?

What to do, what to do…….

Croaker