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 :)