Dum, dum, dum, dum de dum, dum de dum.

Here's the crimson guard, step by step with lots of pictures. Quick note I am in my 40s some of my paints are in their 30s but there are near enough versions around and I just like these colours. Here we go first step for me with anything red is GW foundation paints Mecharite red which they no longer make but I'm sur they'll have a base similar to it. If you manage to get hold of any on the onterwebs and like me you're a brush licker be warned, they taste like shit.

 The next stage is done with GW mephiston red base across the cloth areas only.

Then pick up the raised areas with a mixture of mephiston red and ruby red, the first picture below is left hand guy before right hand guy after.

 Then with all of them done.

 And finally a wash of Drakenhoff nightshade which picks out red shadows nicely.

After that leave it to dry for a night and come back to it, then you start it all over again but with thinner colours and this is what should you get the next day.

 Now with watered down mephiston red start toning down the ink and blending here's another A-B comparison.(there's a theme here)

 And now with a a highlight of mephiston red and ruby red mix A-B-C (see showing off now)

 And finally just picked out highlights in ruby red(A-B-C-D will it never end) when doing the highlights look at the miniature from above and pick out where the light hits.

 Now to the shiny helmet(couldn't help myself tried but failed) This is mephiston red mixed with quite a lot of ardcoat about 50/50 mix this is the base for all the colours so you'll have to have enough to finish all the figures but it only has two stages.

Add caption

 The next stage is add ruby red  till it's lightened to the point you like then pick out the edge of the head band bit and round the eye slit.

 Finally P3 Thamar black on the staff and GW irongut highlighted with GW chainmail  at the tip for the steel pieces. Then paint the base how you want and dirt up the bottom of the robes if it fits.

 And here they are with the rest of the completed figures.

 And finally this is what I've been doing over christmas, This the ghost from star wars rebels which I really hope makes it into X wing and it would be nice if the crew made it into  Imperial Assault.

I have you now!

What do I have? I have Imperial Assault! And it has many pretty toys find it here.
http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=5263

And I have started painting the figures that have come with it which are quite a few and although not upto most wargame figure standards they are quite good for boardgame pieces.

I have split them up into two groups, Stormtroopers, Nexu and rebel heroes white, AT-ST and everyone else black. I had intended to spray them all white but didn't think I had enough in either can to completely undercoat either of them.

we'll start with the AT-ST.

I scoured google for images and the thing is pretty uniformly grey but it's a very light grey, I've used GWs Mechanicum Standard Grey as my base

Important tip and learn from my mistake, Build the sod first, there is absolutely no margin on the pins paint there is your enemy as is trying to get the chin gun in without snapping the barrels. Mine came with warped barrels and lightsabers these can be rectified with a cup of boiling water and a cup of cold water. Dip into boiling water for a couple of seconds bend straight dip into cold water to set.

And huge leap time because I didn't take any photos, hers the steps I took;

1. GW mechanicum standard grey mixed with old GW codex grey
2. GW codex grey
3. GW codex grey and P3 white
4. Rust patches are done using GW blazing orange (get most of the paint of the brush and dab) 
5. The barrels are done with P3 battlefield brown drybrushed on the with P3 black drybrushed on with GW blzing orange rust dabbed on at the vents.
6. GW nuln oils was used on all the cogs and then P3 turquoise ink added on top to give it that oil sheen
7. Green bits are GW straken green using the same technique as the orange rust
8. The base is a mixture of sand and gravel painted P3 bloodstone and then highlighted with a mix of P3 bloodstone and GW zandri dust
9. Finally some secret weapon weathering powders rust red and exhast black where added on the gun barrels to give it a flatter carbonised look and the rear vents for heat damage and rust red on the legs for dust.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
10. Finally added rust red round the rivets and painted 501 in Aurebesh and went over in grey in place to make it look as if it had faded off.

Now stormies;

Sprayed with GW white and then painted with P3 white and black, I use P3 white as it has more pigment in than GWs so it's less coats, There are some horrible mold lines on the troopers on the upper arms to the shoulder pads that you'll have to slice off with a sharp scalpel and one on the left hand side of the helmet that pretty much buggers up the vent details. 

So paint the white bits white paint the black bits black and they are quite acceptable, or you can then give them a very watered down GW nuln oil wash(or watered down black paint) then leave them to dry for a couple of hours.

Then take them back upto white again, I've used P3 white mixed with GW ardcoat to give the white a gloss sheen without making it look like I've lacquered them. Tidy up the black and add some wash to pick out the vents some more. The same basing as the AT-ST and don't wory about hitting the lower legs whilst drybrushing.

Finally using secret weapons rust red pigment powder brush lower legs and hands and barrel and everywhere you decide dust has gathered (less is more whilst applying this stuff) and bits of exhaust black to denote wear. When doing this so they didn't all look the same I thought about haw they got dirt on them, this guy just has general marching grime, this guy fell on his arse, this guy was crouched firing this one kneeling.

And finally I added some tufts which just make the basing infinitely better.

 And there they are.

I was planning on doing the crimson guard tonight but I'm sat waiting for an engineer so I can hand over the Fucking Electrics of death I've found on  a site today. I am in a pub in Liverpool there's no power because I've had to switch it off and It's December, I am a tad chilly and a Manc.

Till next time.

Painters block (or living with others)

Well todays blog is brought to you by management inefficiency and power mad little control freaks as I've been sat waiting to do a half hour job for the last 3 hours, so we'll have a quick update of where I'm upto on my golden deamon entry.

I've done fuck all, but I have committed to not painting another 200pts of stuff by the end of the month! Oh and armies on parade is on so I'd better get cracking at that too, all with Robyn now at university which is very time consuming, because she has actual important stuff she needs to do and a 4 hour journey there and back to the place where she has to do these things. Also assignments appear to have kidnapped the kitchen table.  So what have I done? Well I've made a movement tray for my glade riders.

 See, pretty, it has a tree!
And I decided that the wood elf horses where not in the pose I required so cut them in half and made them how i wanted or as near as i could get with out just sculpting my own horse(this is Robyns fault as I spend a lot of time watching horses now and my OCD needs the horse to be in some semblance of accuracy)

 The other thing I need for my armies on parade board and my actual army is three more citadel woods, now I have the bits of one from last wood elf book where you were only allowed a six inch diameter wood that I cut and laboriously green stuffed to look good, only for the new book to come out and make all this work wasted, and that I'd bollocks up a perfectly good wood for nothing.

Lets put it back together! Now when I cut something apart I'm not gentle with piece I don't need so there are sections that don't marry up properly (there's a lesson here) green stuff will required to fill those gaps.

 Right it became obvious fairly quickly that this wouldn't last with out support as I'd created so many weak points in the base structure when I cut it apart, so I stuck the entire thing onto a sheet of plasticard and modeled in the bits I'd either lost or destroyed when making the original wood. I then cut the majority of the excess with scissors and trimmed it flush with a scalpel.

 Added some dryad bits to the trees and some unlucky beastmen and sprayed the whole thing black. We are now ready to ignore this until it has to be done for armies on parade.

So with all this why have I not done anything on the bile trolls, well because I've learned that if I'm not in the right frame of mind to paint a model I'll only fuck it up so I do a little side project to get me going or the project will just stagnate and become a burden rather than a joy. This is one of the reasons I don't do commissions as that attitude would have to change and an actual work ethic employed, which I could do but would ruin my hobby and as I've got 30 odd years invested in this lets not.
Next time actual progress as writing this has put me in the mood to progress with the trolls, it's amazing what a bit of blahing will do for you.

Killing time post

This is just a quick post while i waste a little time and will be mostly pictures with a little blurb, we'll see how that goes.

 I've started doing red on the exposed muscles and boils and tears in the skin.

 I've used used Sanguine base and Sanguine highlight  both P3 colours to start the base mix and used GWs Pallid Wych Flesh to highlight that mix, till we got to what we have above. There are about five varying layers in there and after this i washed the exposed muscle in Baal red and the boils in Carrienburg Crimson (that may not be the correct spelling the pots at home I'm at work) I'm also kinda searching for ideas on horn and talon colours, so any ideas would be appreciated, I may not use any of them but they will point me in the direction I want to go.
I've also done a test with the Vallejo water effect which I am quite happy with and I'm kind of overloade with ideas on that front just not sure if they will all work, but I'll go into that at a later date.

 And finally the Xwing addiction continues not with anymore repaints but with other tat Xwing soundboard app, get it and enjoy.

To Daemon or not to Daemon

For some years now I've known that whilst I am quite a good painter, I'm no golden daemon painter, a lot of this is down to impatience, I want my toys to look pretty but I mostly want to play with them, and once they're done, I'm not overly precious with them(which is why a friend of mine still draws breath)  Anyway this year I've decided to give it a go with these bile trolls because they're great models(don't fecking rank up but great, bloody good work Steve Whitehead now get that Kdai finished) and I'm painting it a bit at a time (possibly because Arkham Origins is great) and really putting thought into my colour choices rather than seeing where I end up.

First up base colour

Looking through the green drawer, very playschool(you'll understand if you're old) I settled on GWs Deathworld Green base applied with only a little water to stop it clumping on detail.

Ink wash.

A lot of thought went into this as I knew I didn't want a green or a brown which were the obvious choices for disease and finally settled on a purple and after much faffing with watered down GW Druchi Voilet to give it a more bruised and painful look. That done it's time to start picking out detail.

Boils and muscle.

So watered down P3 sanguine base to pick out all the exposed muscle, boils and strained flesh managed to paint a few flies until I realised what they where and some grubs, what I did manage to resist was to base coat every section I think Working on flesh and muscle first will give me a better insight into what colours I should use for bone and metal.


Now I also got these things from Cog O Two and slapped some paint on them.

Very happy with how these turned out and generally a great product( shameless plug for good shit that happens to come from Manchester) If you get some and want to paint them LEAVE THE STICKERS ON, it will make you look amazing when you remove them and your tokens and templates are perfectley painted with no overspill.

Well back to Daemoning lets see how we go.

Doing the impossible

 My friend asked me if I could do some work on his Bile Trolls to get his unit to rank up, he has 9 of them and uses them as Beasts of Nurgle in his Daemon army(yes he is a power gamer) and when he got married I offered to do a figure as his wedding present, the figure has changed and grown(power gamer) since this time to the point that I have never been able to do it. So I said not only will I repose them, I'll repaint and base them, partly because rebasing would give me more options to me for ranking up these monsters.

 So first step is to create a base for the unit I've used foam board and lined up 9 40mm bases in ranks of three and cut it out, then gridded it lightly with a scalpel, so I can see where the figures need to fit into.

Next I took the figures and removed them from the bases and only managed to snap off three of the feet, and put them in the box with the magic goop, if you have not used bio strip, you're working too hard. 

 

 Ten minutes in the goop rinse and whilst gently scrubbing with a nail brush and you end up with this.

A jug of boiling water stretching out limbs and compressing arms and raising positions so they interlock.

 That was Thursday night, and tonight I split them and cut so I could undercoat them.

 And finally here we are undercoated and still ranking up.