If you go into the woods today.

Hers some progress on the woodies for doubles. The white and light blue is now finished.

and the cloaks are now completely done bar the champions who needs vines and jewels doing.

So I've moved onto the dark blue on the bodies,

and that is now high lighted up to where i want it, it's not quite as harsh as this photo makes it but it's on my phone under my daylight bulb. just looking at this now I've seen the musicians arm in the background and realised it didn't get the last two layers of highlight. That will have to wait.

And so here they are in their movement tray.

The middle guy on the back rank is too close to the guy on the left to get a cloak on, but will he come off? will he buggery! I wish i could remember which brand of glue I used on him because he's staying put the ankle was giving when i gave up and decided i might have to adjust a cloak.

Darth Vader faced my little padawan at disneyland, Darth Vader may have worn it a bit as you can see here as the Jedi master restrains Blaise before the fight.

It's been a while

So it's been a while, but work has been progressing (so slowly) I'm not really a dark elf player and I'm not enjoying painting them, I have no dark side according to Robyn. But work is progressing and I will finish the project and then Robyn will have something other than witch elves in her main army. Robyn is vamping along for the campaign and doing well. So corsairs lets have a look.

 These are done and i'm okay with them, the ship is coming on nicely.

So far so good!

The Stern is complete

Deck complete 

Hull and bow complete

Planking of ship COMPLETE! Now to get wood to bend and you do that with steam. Whenever you see some cunningly twisted piece of wood it's been done with steam gentle but continuous pressure to twist it the left to set, so a pan of hot water and continuous pressure and,

Some success, not complete but better than it was. About a third of the planks cracked at the bow but not snapped, it was clear though that the thinness of the balsa was not going to take it all the way round  so the ships going to get a ram. On to painting and after trying various combinations of inks to test pieces in the end I went and got a pot of varnish from B and Q, this is the first coat.

bits where I've dribble super glue are being  a problem there's more on deck.

 3 more coats and now we have a dark ship and corsairs ready to go on.

We are coming for you people, Booty! and the hero is done now there is nothing wrong with him but I'm just not happy with him.

What do you think? Next woodies for doubles.

This is just a quick one whilst I'm sat waiting for anything to happen work( I may have been forgotten about,wouldn't be the first time)

The pallet

I wanted the armour to look enameled for protection against the sea, so I had a look on the internets to see what the finish looked like and found out there was no such thing really, enamel was far to expensive and fragile to use on anything but dress armour for the ultra rich of the time, so I had to make a look up. I didn't want to just ardcoat and have shiny armour, I wanted a satin look and I think I got it. I used old purple ink mixed with ardcoat and watered down, and the result is above.

I've also re-done the boots darker to be in keeping with the rest of the army done the green clothing, and the steel just doing the brass at the moment then it's flesh and hair and freehand.

And finally from auto awesome Blaise bench pressing(that bar is 10kg naked) strong little bugger isn't he.

EPIC conclusion

So I was updating apps on my phone the other day and generally pissing around when google + did something awesome AUTO AWESOME a name which pretty much does what it says it takes similar photographs and links them together into video giving you this.

 unfortunately the random blurry one sticks out like a sore thumb and it really could do with a way to adjust the speed but all in all auto awesome.

So CONTEMPTOR(still in capitals,still that epic) is finished tried some modest bits of battle damage,nothing over the top we are the Ultramarines after all and here they are.

not hugely convinced that i'm doing it right, but it doesn't look shit so we'll keep experimenting where I think it's appropriate. I'd intended on much more freehand on him but as I'd done the chapter symbol and his unit number he looked finished so I left it at that.

And the base is done...................

Now this is definitely one of those happy accident moments that I'm going to try to replicate, I'd washed the base and was feeling impatient so tried putting on the next highlight of grey which caused some interesting pooling effects but was to watery, so i dabbed it with kitchen roll to soak it up a bit and then started high lighting making sure each mix had the ink paint wash gunk in and dragged it along with a small flatbrush. Each successive highlight got streakier and gave a nice worn concrete look. Washes used are Nuln oil, agrax earthshade and whatever it's called camo shade with codex gray, then fortress gray then white.

So and finally a non spinning and less annoying version of the completed dreadnought.

 Next time something else I've got two units that have to be painted for the campaign, one thing that has to be made and painted for AGOM and some kingdom death stuff I want to try, must watch OSL tutorials when I can find some I like, I can find lots of OSL I like but no tutorials with an effect that looks anything like them. Essentially i want brush not air brush techniques any suggestions and links would be great(I'm busy I don't have time to trawl youtube)

Even more EPIC Dreadnought

Well in attempt to get my wife to paint her zombies i sat down and did some more work on the CONTEMPTOR, and managed to finish the blue, now whilst doing it I planned on taking a picture at each stage, but upon looking through the camera on my phone realised that there really wasn't that much difference so instead took pictures when I was done and explain how and possibly why(we'll see how this goes)

So even here it's hard to tell what I've done, although the piece of marketing tat has come out well.

 Anyway the base colour is Regal blue and mixed with in varying amounts P3's Frostbite till it's just Frostbite on its own. It's not  really showing on here but I've gone with an attempt at light source blending because of the circular body with some edge highlights instead of just edge. I'm still unsure how successful I've been but I'm used to not knowing how my figures turn out until they're nearly done, I always have a moment of "oh god I've fucked up my toy" before I'm done.

 This picture of the components gives a better idea of how it looks so next the metals which should bring the blues up, and the red and white. The scrolls and freehand will come after that and i'm trying to decide whether to chance my arm at a bit of paint chipping and battle damage.

I've taken the head of the base as I was just keeping it there so I didn't lose it but people seem to think I'd put it there on purpose as some kind of conversion kick in progress of a friends blood angels, this is not true the dead blood angels are on my eldar army where they belong. 

I am a planker

And here we are back to the ship, because i cant start my next 300 points for the campaign if the ship doesn't  work. I've done this once already but i painted it black and it didn't look good, so now i want to try ink washing the balsa so i still get the look of wood. tried a couple of different mixes still not completely sold on any. Anyway pictures time

This was the first step, recut the spaces for movement trays this was originally built under 7th edition so the middle section was two single ranks of ten crossbow men one on a step that I've cut out but as we can now fire in two ranks that formation is a bit pointless. So I have swapped it to two two ranks of five units as you can see from the debris this took some fiddling. I've then set up all bases in movement trays and made sure they slide out easily( more hacky/slashy) and put glue on them.

Now I've planked the main deck (this did involve an amount of fucking around and swearing but not a large amount) and started cutting lines around the unit with a scalpel. This is a fiddly job and delicate because if you snap the balsa you have to replace the plank.

As you can see the units now slide out, these are at the moment just cut at ranks not bases, we'll see how well it works then. I've started planking the side and will add photos of that next time.

The glue i have used is Javis superglue (red top) and it's been working fine.

CONTEMPTOR! (it has to be in capitals it's that epic)

So a lot of stuff is being painted at the moment, this is mainly due to Robyn needing to paint zombies for the campaign and mine first 300 is done (all 12 models,  Robyn has 52 to do) so to show solidarity(not fear) I'm painting stuff as well. The saint got painted over the last two nights and now it's the turn of the COMTEMPTOR DREADNOUGHT and I thought, more actual detail into painting.

It's a well known fact I like my smurfs dark so here is a picture of the beast at base coat.

So this guy is going to be the second dreadnought of the second battle company under Sicarius, Brother Agnathio who is armed differently in the codex but i'm not going to do a faithful reproduction of whats in the codex just the general make up which is full battle company and two dreadnoughts. The first one is the old metal venerable dreadnought so he's in good company.

So the paint the base for the blue is necron abyss, the red mecharite red, the metal is warplock bronze and scrolls and skulls in desert yellow. I don't think at this point I'm going to use any washes on the dread itself but some will get used on the base.

Tomorrow blending! the dirtiest word in Robyn's painting vocabulary,