Warhammerfest!!!

Hi all

So warhammerfest is here and I've just finished some models to take down with me. They're not painted to win, not that I could paint to win anyway, but it will be nice to let some of my models actually see the light of day.

I went to games day in the 90s and loved it. Great memories. My last games day was 98 or 99 I think. Last year on the Saturday before games day I made a last minute decision to go back to games day. Although I had some great chats with brian nelson and mark Bedford, both really nice guys, the overall event was pretty lifeless. It was basically a big shop. Not even golden demon could redeem the event as the models were very poorly displayed.

Anyway when warhammerfest was announced I bought a ticket straight away and have high hopes that this will be a much better event.

Fingers crossed :)

Finally here's a quick pic of my entry. Its amazing what a deadline can do. I spent weeks trying to find a good way of basing those blood angels from earlier in the year and in as I had nothing else to take I decided last night to get them based and take with me. These bases were modeled in 30mins or so and all painted in the last couple of hours. I'm really pleased with how they have turned out too :)

Hope you guys like them!

Cheers

Will

Dark eldar 4 wip

Hi all

So yet another dark eldar warrior. I wanted to try out my retarder on a full model to see the difference and for me anyway its been a huge help. I feel its my paint stroke holding me back now, which I'm fine with as I can improve, rather than the paints limiting me.

Think this guy is looking the best of the bunch (I hope!)

Anyway here he is, hope you like.

Paint retarder, a revelation !

So I know this is probably explaining how to suck eggs for a lot of people but I had a bit of a revelation last night with my painting.  Basically with lots of thin lines of these dark eldar I was really struggling to get a nice crisp line.  I was thinning my paints,  using different size WnN7 series brushes and have a steady(ish) hand.  Why were my lines still looking chalky ?

Anyway by chance I decided to try some drying retarder that I bought probably a year or two ago and couldn't believe the results.  The paint changed from chalk to silk.  Suddenly I was getting the kind of line I was looking for.

I guess it is doing two things,  obviously stopping the paint drying but to be fair my paint is on a wet palette and thinned down so it should be ok anyway.  The second I guess is changing the opacity and consistency of it.  So I get a smooth finish that is slightly less opaque so therefore slightly more forgiving.

Anyway  I thought I would show an example.   One leg painted without drying retarder,  and which I spent a lot more time on,  vs the drying retarder version.  Hopefully I don't have to explain which is which.

So there you have it,  I know its not going to make me a golden demon winner but personally its a huge leap in terms of the crispness of lines I can achieve which is the direction I want to be going in.

Anyway heres the pic and thanks for reading :)

Will.

Sorting out my hobby!

Hi all

So a couple of years ago I spent some time,  and money,  sorting our office room of our new home.  We had a huge desk area made,  ,lots of drawers storage etc and I was really happy with my hobby area.   I could finally pick up and put down my brushes in the same place and have a permanent area for my hobby.  previously I was painting on the old computer desk pulling everything out and putting everything away each time,  very annoying!

Anyway,  fast forward two years,  and like any "new" hobby,  my collection of just about everything has expanded three fold at least.   The drawers became overflowing and my ability to sit down and paint turned into sit down,  sort through the mess on the table,  find the right paint pot,  hope the airbrush is clean etc.  I get very little hobby time with two young children and so when I do get the time I want to enjoy it and it just be the nice parts.  |The irony then when I get a day off with just me and the house to myself,  that i choose to spend non of that time painting.  I instead decided to sort out the hobby room.

My main issue was storing paints,  airbrush equipment etc.  With big open drawers they just rolled about all over the place so I wanted something where I could whatever I am looking for instantly and also something where I could open and close the drawer as much as I like without everything moving about.  I went very low tech after looking at just about every option available,  ie premade,   boxes,  also some laser cut mdf plans which I drew up in illustrator and got some quotes on.

I ended up with some 90 degree strips of plastic from BnQ glued to some mdf.  It couldn't be easier.  I also got a happy accident when I realise that the GW paints actually stacked up perfectly upside down when using a certain size of plastic strip.  This was perfect as it stops your paints drying out and also lets you see the colour of the paint easily.

So I now have a couple of daylight bulb each size,  one with a magnifying glass (which I hardly ever use but wish i did),   paint brushes upside down on the wall  ( I need better than blue tack for these really ),   an ultrasonic cleaner for the airbrush which actually fits all airbrush parts in,  hairdryer,  hobby drill,  airbrush holder, two water jars,  basic hobby tools,  cutting ,at and underneath you can just make out the airbrush compressor and also the airbrush studio which folds out and works really well.

Anyway,  here are the pics of my hobby section of the office so far.  It still needs some tweaks but its getting close to being exactly what I want.

Dark eldar 3 wip

Hi all

Another small update on a new warrior. I'm trying some bounce light and a tighter paint scheme with similar pallette to my last guy. Very much enjoying painting this guy more than any model I can remember. Lots of freedom and room for experimenting with this style. Wish I had a steadier hand with these highly detailed models though. Especially around the eyes I am.struggling to get the lines tight enough. I don't think the red is helping. The green was far easier to work with for osl.

Anyway hope you enjoy

Dark eldar 2

Hi all

Quick update. Got a bit of the this morning before the grand Prix to get this guy finished. Its definitely a more loose style than my first guy and I kind of like it. Not sure if the eyes really pop as much as the green of the first guy so looking forward to trying out another style of a third guy.

Hope you like!

Thanks

Will

Dark eldar number 2

Hi all

So in the spirit of more regular updates here is my second dark eldar wip. The first guy was very easy metal style, although far from their standard. This second guy I want something more emotive and sinister. I like this style, its a lot more fun and mistakes can become happy accidents instead of laborious errors. Looking forward to hopefully finishing him (or her) tonight!

Dark eldar

Hi all

Two posts in one day??? What's going on?
Well not only has my PC been dead for the last couple of months I also broke my phone recently too and its taken about 5 weeks to replace! I do almost all my blogs using my phone using bloggeroid app. Its so easy. Take a pic on phone. Write up the post and done. Well I now have a PC and phone and with winter coming I should hopefully be blogging a bit more regular.

Back to the model. I've always thought the dark eldar range was the best model range gw ever made. Its almost a shame that they still are as let loose this is what we should expect for all armies. Anyway I got the urge to just paint as the grey knights modelling time has taken up 95 percent of my hobby time for the last couple of months so I wanted to get some easy models to get back into painting.

I've kept the gw paint scheme to keep things even more simple, with a more extreme osl on the eyes. Quite happy with this guy, who knows, he may be the first of many :)

Hope you guys like!

Will

Work bench

Hi all

So summer happened and also I got married  :)   It's been,  and still is a great summer in the UK,  particularly for the north west,  so time spent in the hobby room has been less than normal.  However things are still progressing.  I thought I would just add a couple of pics from the workbench.   The 5 Grey Knight models are now all finished and I'm really happy with them.  They were a challenge and I found my inability to decide on the smaller details proved the biggest issue in finishing them.   However the paint job on the first guy I thought was just looking a bit boring to be honest so hes going to get another coat of paint and I'm going to be adding battle damage,  rust etc to try and add some character to them.

Ive also started work on, for me,  my most complicated conversion so far,  a true scale terminator.  I know the Space Wolf Lord is I guess a true scale terminator,  but this guy I think is a lot bulkier and probably a bit taller too! You can see the scale in the pics he's looking pretty huge and in terms of what I have to do,  theres not too much there,  just lots of layers of putty etc. I like that in the first pic the scale of each model relates to how they should be in the fluff.  Should be fun!

Finally I will post up a recipe for the space wolf armour in the comments below some time this week,  sorry for the late reply on that one!

Hope you enjoy the pics :)

Wolf lord

Hi all

So I mentioned a while ago about my space wolf army and the conversion I did for the wold lord so here he is. Hes my first major conversion and was probably more of a challenge than the grey knights. The legs were cut horizontally across thighs and shins, then extended with plasticard, greenstuff and milliput. The torso was extended width ways with plasticard and his stomach area is all greenstuff (not the best really.).

I used this guy in a 6 game tournament last year. He looked awesome and started game in a drop pod with 8 wolf guard. He had eternal warrior, tda, hammer, storm shield, wolf tail something etc. Totally kitted out.

He didn't cause 1 wound in all 6 games ... Very disappointed. He succumbed to mephiston, a necron lord that made him hit himself, and a bloodthirster. He spent a few rounds vs eldrad but didnt cause a wound. As such he is now a wolf guard or a lone wolf and I will create a new wolf lord.

Anyway here are the pics. He really does make that standard marine look very small indeed :)

Basing ideas

Hi all

So I'm on holiday tomorrow for a few days so thought I would post a quick update. Still a bit stuck but very close I think on the base. I guess because its going to follow onto all my subsequent models for a while I'm being particularly picky on the feel. Here's a PIC of the first 5 test models. They are probably a little more red than the pick shows. I'm aims for a bit of jb style.on the base to bring some.life into the mainly black and neutral grey knight.

Bases made with soil, static grass on a base of Vallejo black lava.

Another small update

Hi all

So the grey knight is definitely getting there. I was hoping to have him finished now but real life swallowed my weekend whole. Mettalics are mostly done. I might add some more metal on the chest plate. Then battle damage, weathering and make a base.

Another small update

Hi all

So this new technique of painting a part at a time, although has its advantages, is also very slow. I've finished all the base colours and am now working my way through the metallics. I'm not sure about anyone else but I never particularly enjoy the mettalics. They always end up feeling like they are going on too thick.

Anyway here are a couple more wips.

Grey knight wip

Hi all

So finally I have got round to painting the grey knight. I am trying something different with painting this guy. I normally paint a model one colour at a time. So prime in black or white. Then do all the reds, all the grey, all the browns etc. However when looking at other painters wip pics I've noticed some actually do all the base coats of every colour first then work from there. I can see the advantages, especially when painting a model with no pre set colour scheme as you can quickly see what red looks like here or there and be happy with the colour composition without having wasted time with shading and highlighting first.

Another new technique I am trying is painting sections by section. So the black armour I would normally paint all dark grey highlights on the whole model, then slightly lighter grey until finished. This time I am just finishing a section at a time.  So the lower leg,  upper leg,  maybe even just one panel if it is a major one.

I am finding both these changes a lot more enjoyable and flexible. I can try out more ideas which should hopefully help lead to a better finished product. Although I'm not going for 'best' finish on this guy as hopefully time permitting he will be one of many and setting the bar too high will only inhibit me further in finishing the squad,  I still want him to look good,  especially since I have spent so long on him.

Anyway with the waffle out the way here he is. I'm going for the old white dwarf colour scheme for grey knights which I think will suit the armour style of the model and I think is more gothic anyway.

Hope you like and thanks for looking. Comments welcome :)

Will

Rune Priest

Hi all

So I thought I would try to keep to momentum going with posting on the blog by putting some more older models up.  So here is a Rune Priest from my Space Wolves army.  I built this army for a local tournament in 2013 called the Ribble Rumble.  After the tournament I haven't really had any time for gaming so in September last year I thought I would travel down to Games Days and try my luck entering some of the models in Golden Demon.  I entered 40k squad,  40k single miniature and 40k vehicle and came away with two finalist awards which I was over the moon with!

Anyway,  here are a couple of pics of the Rune Priest.  Hopefully I will get some pics of the rest of the army including the HUGE Wolf Lord terminator conversion!

Hope you like!

Astra militarum

Hi all

So long time no update. Real life sometimes takes a hold and for various family reasons my hobby time had been cut to nothing. However in the last couple of weeks I've managed to get a few hours here and there for painting. The new astra militarum codex has gripped me and I am looking at a small platoon for my grey knights as allies ( or maybe the other way round?)

Anyway, here you go.

Liebster Award

So it seems I have won a Liebster award!  

This is basically a way to spread the word of other less well known blogs but is also a good kick up the bum for some more blogging motivation.  If you are not sure what this is a bit of google will give you the idea. 

I was nominated by the very kind Q from Questing Artificer who has an awesome blog showing some of his painting skills and some nice marines stuff. 

  Anyway,  here goes  :)   

Eleven Truths:

1. I am a son, farther, brother and (soon to be very proud) husband of over 30 years of age. 
2. I can run a 10k in a little under 43 minutes. 
3. I can deadlift 110kg and rising. 
4. I've had eggs for breakfast for the last 4 months!!!
5. I've painted miniatures on and off for about 20 years. 
6. You get what you pay for!  Always spend more than you can afford on your art tools,  paint brushes, airbrush, lighting, paints etc.  There's nothing worse than tools holding back talent and you will never regret a good purchase. 
7. Outside of GW codex books and rule books I don't read any fiction of any sort!
8. I painted an army of space wolves last year for a local 40k tournament, entered a few of the models into Golden Demon and won 2 finalist awards :)  here and here
9. I love my airbrush!!!!  
10. I wouldn't paint models without my airbrush!
11. Did I mention my airbrush ? 

1.  Eleven Questions (answered to):

1. What is your favourite food? Not eggs!!!  
2. What was the first model you painted? Either a plastic skeleton or a deathwing terminator (painted gold!)
3. How did you get into your miniatures hobby? Some distant family I occasionally visited collected GW models and it kind of snowballed from there. 
4. What is your favourite book? The Gothic and the Eldritch or the Inquisitor Sketchbook
5. If you could choose any fantasy/sci-fi race to be, what would it be? Inquisition
6. Do you have any other interesting hobbies besides collecting miniatures? Some people may find what i do for a living interesting, I work here.
7. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?  To just go with the flow with my art more instead of worrying about quality control etc. 
8. If you could pick ONE model to paint/convert/have, what would it be? this!
9. What's your most prized possession? Outside my two boys and the Mrs,  did I mention my airbrush?  
10. If you were to travel to the Chaos Wastes/The Warp, what one item would you bring with you?  A brolli. 
11. Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight? Not that I remember but that doesn't rule it out. 

Eleven Blogs (in no particular order):

1. DownedinPlastic
2. Mars-Irea
3. MeltaBurn
4. Miniakh
5. Voyageaucentredelenfer
6. Inquisitor Hedemann 
7. winterdyne
8. blackdaggerpaint
9. gnotta
10. jahminis
11. kazube

Eleven Questions (asked):

1. Favourite colour?
2. Favourite glue?
3. d6 or d10?
4. Fantasy or sci-fi?
5. Karl Kopinski or John Blanche?
6. Favourite sport?
7. Buried alive or strangled to death?
8. Beer or cider?
9. Favourite musical genre?
10. Favourite model?
11. Favourite paintbrush?

A slow February...

Hi all

So February has been slow hobby wise. Real life, especially with a 1 and 2 year old can swallow a month without you even noticing.

Anyway, its not been totally swallowed. I actually hit a bit of a road block which took a while to get around. Basically there were some very inquisitorial looking parts I have from when you could order bits from gw. I order all the ornaments from all the inquisitor characters from the 55mm (I think) game.

I only have 1 of each so I have been looking for the best way to reproduce these parts. My first try was oyanmaru (spelling) and green stuff which was good but not great. I then stumbled on mixing greenstuff and milliput. This was an improvement but still inconsistent.

So I decided to do things properly. I researched resin casting and silicone molds and settled on the products in the pictures. Mouodcraft sg2000 and the far easier named blu-stuff.

These are my only reference for casting but I can say it was very easy and the results are perfect. Its definitely not cheap and I would honestly just buy the parts if I could, but I have enjoyed the learning experience and have a few more tricks up my sleeve when it comes to this hobby now.

So with the part now perfectly cast I now have the belt buckle for my grey knights sorted :)

Still learning...

So I have been learning a few, most probably very obvious, lessons during this project. Firstly doing 5 conversions at once takes about 5 times as long. Secondly making 5 models at once means making and fixing each mistake 5 times.

Therefore I'm going to concentrate on getting one guy finished and maybe even painted and then finish the other 4.

Anyway, I think this guy has a lot more Gothic look now with the robe, icons etc. I'm not sure about the bat belt grenades but we will see. Not too far left though I don't think.

Progression

Hi all

Another oldie, well 2 in fact.

I was a huge necromunda fan when it was released, it was a great game with great miniatures. It also had cool modular scenery which made games even better. I had a couple of gangs and various hired guns.

Anyway I present to you my old and new ratskin renegade. So one will of been painted when I was around 12 or so, the second was painted last year.

Now outside the hopefully obvious progression of painting skills one thing I noticed is something I have mentioned earlier in this blog. The 12 year old me may of not been the best painter in the world, but he was a lot braver!

The colored tattoos, the eyes and pupils painted. These are things I rarely "dare" risk the chance of them not working. You have spent hours on the skin the last thing you do is start painting freehand patterns over it and risk ruining all that hard work. Same with the eyes. Easier to add a fake scar and just dot the eye ball white. This is not a good trait of mine and something I need to rise above. Being scared of making a mistake is probably the biggest mistake you can make, and I am knowingly and constantly doing this.

Art should be brave and that is something I hope that will return to me.

Anyway, hope you like the models.

Some older works...

In this case not that old really.  Well a few months.

For as long as I could remember I have always loved the idea of a blood angel army,  however if there is a difficult colour to master when painting I would say it would be red.  What colour does it highlight to,  what colour does it shade to,  how to get a really even, smooth finish but keep that deep red look.

It wasn't until I started using an airbrush that I even contemplated starting a blood angel army for this very reason.  Even then my first attempts were far away from what i wanted.  Anyway I thought I would have another go after reading the new space marine codex.  The rules really pulled me in after completing my Space Wolf army so I had another go at getting "the perfect red".

I tried a lot of test models to get a really good recipe.  I also wanted it to work with the current GW paint line as I only had the older colours and didn't want to start a colour scheme that I couldn't expand.   This took a while and lots of paints bought that I didn't end up using,  however I think I did learn a lot from the attempts.

The final recipe is below.  I also got some good tips from the kind people at platoonbritanica on how to get the glowing eyes looking good.  A good tutorial for this effect can be found here so another big thanks to Cyril for this tutorial.

I still haven't decided how to base these guys but rest assured it is on the to do list.  Its not so much not having time but not deciding what would look best,  I have tried plenty of effects so far.

Anyway here are the pics including a line up of my test models.  If you would like to see more you can check out the thread I started for this project on here.

Thanks for reading and hope you like these guys.  Hopefully a future post will have them on bases and finished :)

Winged death

Hi all

So I am putting together some ideas for the Grey Knights army and one unit I would like to include are Interceptors.  Rules wise they are what I like,  fast moving and pretty tough.  Below is a model I worked on last year but I think it would be a pretty good base for an interceptor since they are kind of the Grey Knight equivalent of the jump infantry unit.

I really like the angel look of this guy.   It is actually based on a conversion I saw on Dakka Dakka but I lost the link a while ago(for some reason chrome doesn't save any kind of backup of your favorites,  at all!!) so if anyone else knows of which model I am talking about it would be great to give credit to the original creator.

My only concern is that this guy looks tiny next to my other grey knights but in terms of fluff I don't really see these guys as marines and more some kind of tricked out Crusaders.   Maybe I will try and de-space marine them a little more with some different shoulderpads and such to help sell that idea a bit more.  

The other Grey Knight are around 40% built.  Taking a bit longer than I thought with all the greenstuff and filling etc.  They are still the main priority,  however I thought I would look at some other stuff while they are all drying.

Anyway,  I hope you like!

Death cult assassin

So here is a death cult assassin I was working on before starting the blog. She is more a test model really. The painting is too messy and more just about figuring out a palette for what will be the rest of the unit eventually.

I really like the pose and the face on this model. There's something very 40k about it I think.

Anyway I hope you like :)

More knights of the grey

Hi all

So I have started on the rest of the unit. They have come together pretty quick really. I guess once you figure out how to do the conversion, which can take a while, repeating that conversion isn't too bad.

I'm really happy with these 5 together. I think I will tweak to poses a little while I refine them and add the torsos, hoods etc.

Anyway, I hope you like them!