A quick paint job on a shipping container

In a similar vein to the couple of bits of scenery I painted the other week, before I took down my painting area for the house move, I threw some paint on this Reaper Bones Shipping Container. Having learnt from last time, I went with much lighter colours for the drybrush - with one heavy drybrush and then two lighter ones with incredibly pale colours. This worked much better for contrast and tone in normal light.

Still, that's the last bit of painting for a while, as the painting table is away. I might manage to do a few bits of assembly during the packing depending on how it goes, but we'll see...

Old Warhammer World Photos: City Fight Table Part 2

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

These are the second half of the city fight table photos, and the last of the photos taken on this trip. I hope you liked them and they provided some inspiration for future projects!

Tidying up old ideas

I've taken the opportunity to tidy up the Projects page a little bit and cleared out some projects I've definitely decided not to do.

I'd been picking up bits of Chaos Space Marines and Dark Angels after being bought the Dark Vengeance set, but with my interest in 40K as a whole waning, I've sold off the remaining bits and bobs that would have been those two projects, and cleared the decks for stuff I'm enthused with.

I've held off on getting rid of a few classic Chaos Renegade models, as they'll make an excellent Kill Team, which I am still pretty keen on.

I'd written a little background for them that I salvaged from the Iron Warriors project page before I deleted it:

"The warband still holds a significant disdain for those among their number whose physical bodies have twisted from their time in the Eye. They are shunned even within these outcasts among traitors. On the battlefield, they group together, and referred to as The Unworthy by their commanders. They wear the name as an ironic badge of honour, seeking to outperform their brothers and show their prowess is undiminished."

Now, the only question there is whether or not to stick with the Iron Warriors plan, or pick a different warband for them to be from...

Old Warhammer World Photos: City Fight Table Part 1

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

I took a ton of photos of the (new at the time) city fight board they'd done. There's some lovely ideas in here. For the sake of my sanity, I'm uploading this lot in two posts.

Druze Bayram Security - and some Mercenary friends

With ITS Season 10 due soon, and my painting held up in turn by a messy painting area and a house move, I decided to farm out the job of getting my Druze Bayram Security painted up for the table. I mentioned this, and Aodhan from my local club offered to do it as he's taking commissions. I'm massively pleased with the results.

In terms of prioritising miniatures, I asked Aodhan to paint what I already had assembled at the time! This mostly means I've now got a full Druze Core Fireteam painted, along with Saito Togan and some Bashi Bazouks. More models will follow in time, but these are figures I'm pretty confident will get taken often.

Process wise, I knew I wanted the figures to look like they were operating in a near future city at night, bathed in neon. Aodhan used a couple of test figures and tried a few different techniques before settling on the one used here (ironically, pretty much the first one we tried).

I'd also picked up a few mercenaries for Soldiers of Fortune, which conveniently will also work for the Ikari company in the future, and as I didn't have any other Druze models assembled at the time, I sent those over for a nice paint job as well.

The nice simple paint job really accentuates even these older Yuan Yuan sculpts. I particularly like the sword Yuan Yuan, and I think Aodhan really liked her as well.

I'd also found a pack of the "fat Yuan Yuan" models - a limited edition sculpt based on an old in joke between Corvus Belli and the fans. So, they also went over to get painted up.

The biggest challenge was the one still landing his jet pack, as the flame jet needed to still work with the bright neon.

As it was, I think Aodhan did an excellent job getting the extra light source to work. This shot aso demonstrates the way the fire arc markers are working as well.

So, my first Infinity models fully painted, and I'm looking forward to getting some games in with them! I can defintely recommend hiring Aodhan if you want some of your models commission painted.

Old Warhammer World Photos: Fantasy Village

Back in 2013, I went up to an open day at Warhammer World, and at one point went around taking a bunch of modelling reference photos of some of the various gaming tables they have up there. I've been doing a bit of maintenance on old folders and found these during the clear out, and thought people might be interested.

This set of photos is of a fantasy village table, intended for gaming. What I loved about it was that they'd just used the standard kits of the time and painted them well to give a very different feel to the usual box art.

Painting some Reaper Bones Scenery

This weekend, with a lot of tidying going on for the housemove, I realised that I had cleared a space to my painting table, and there was actually some space to get some painting done. Revelling in the novelty of this, I settled down at the table in my tidying breaks to get a little painting done.

I decided the easiest "quick win" I had lying around were some larger pieces of scatter terrain from the Reaper Bones line. I'd already cleaned them up, done what little assembly they merited, and given them a basic undercoat.

Given that Bones is hydrophobic, I started off by giving them a brush basecoat in a dark brown. Even this was still pretty streaky, but it gave me enough to make do.

I played around with a couple of techniques on this "weapons locker". I tried drybrushing in circular motions, as recommended in the GW scenery videos, but I found my tiny drybrush really wasn't doing it. I managed some beautiful stippling, but it was hugely time consuming. I reverted to a sort of half drybrush, half paint still on the brush approach. I then gave it a thick wash of Typhus Corrosion, wiping off the worst with a piece of kitchen roll. This made it far too dark, so I went back in with a really light orange to drybrush a few corners to give it a lazy edge highlight.

The following day, I'd had an opportunity to pop into my local gaming store and grabbed a GW scenery drybrush. All of a sudden, everything made sense. It gave some lovely textured coverage with very little effort -this is a rough blue over the brown base. I then added another lighter drybrush with a lighter blue to give more contrast.

Again, I repeated the Typhus Corrosion wash and wipe off technique, followed by a final bright blue highlight on edges and the centre of the corrugation of bin lid to brighten it up.

This said, once I looked at the scenery pieces under natural light, rather than my painting light, they looked a bit dark. Let me demonstrate using my lightbox.

This is the weapons locker, on a white background with an LED light strip illumination, and my iPhone camera told to balance for the white. It's a little washed out, but you can see all the gorgeous texture and colours, with browns, reds and even oranges that fade towards yellows.

And then this is what it looks like when I balance the iPhone camera on the storage locker itself. Incredibly dark, and I lose a lot of the detail because the light doesn't pick it up. Let's try it again with the bin I painted...

Here we are focussing in on the white. This one barely even looks washed out - you can see the different levels of blue, the sponge chipping of metal, the built up grime...

And then we focus on the colour balance here. Again, it looks just a little too dark. It's not terrible - scenery shouldn't be too bright as you need to focus on the minatures they're next to instead. But I think I need to have a think about how I paint and perceive colour to stop painting too much too dark.

And I leave you with another teaser for next week's post, as I've done a bit of a photo shoot for some of my commissioned Infinity figures. Two weeks in a row with new paint jobs! Some of you may die of shock...