Weekly update

Still grumpy

This week I’ve been continuing on with two streams of painting.  First off I’m working on some more of the Doom Hell Knights at lunch time fixing up the shading.  I have the first figure I completed as a guide and am slowing getting through the figures.

Secondly I have started the metallic shading on El torres.  I’ve done the knee pads, elbow pads, gloves and lower armour skirt so far.  I’m pretty happy with the progress as there isn’t any big obvious line of black paint in the shadow areas but instead the shadow areas just look darker.  I can’t paint this at night as the lights reflect too much of the metallic paint.  I need some natural light it get the highlights right.  My dark to light paint mix is

VMC Black
Citadel Blotgun metal (old range)
Citadel Chainmail (old range)
VMC Silver
VMA Aluminium

The aluminium is used just for the extreme edge light bloom as it really pops.  So next daylight session I have I’ll finish off the breastplate and top shoulder pad.

Knee pad action

I’ve also started making notes on all the mistakes I’ve noticed so far, e.g. where I accidentally brushed some metallic on the pants.  That way I can have a clean up session and not miss something which I saw one day but forgot/didn’t see later on.

These are slightly smaller than Vallejo bottles

I have a number of old Citadel and Reaper paints that are slowing drying out.  To extend their life and increase paint density on the desk I purchased some paint dropper bottles off eBay (20 15ml bottles for $5) and decanted the old paints into the new bottles.  I also purchased another Miniature Scenery dropper paint rack from The Combat Company as well.

While at The Combat Company I picked up a copy of F.A.Q 2 from AK Interactive.  300 pages of AFV painting and weathering techniques gold with great quality pictures.  Looking forward to reading this.  I also got some complementary glow in the dark dice.  Cool but pretty silly unless you play games under a black light :)