New paint rack and work on Tribal Warrior (orc)

New paint racks

I’ve purchased some Jo Sonja paints recently for terrain painting and also for general painting.  However they have been sitting in a pile and always seem in the way.  So I decided it was time to make a paint rack for them.  My painting area is next to an Ikea Billy bookcase so under one of the bookshelves I attached some home made paint rails (like the ones the paints are sold on in a shop).  Just some pine strips with some 3mm ply glued on underneath and then the whole lot was painted and screwed into the shelf.  Gets the paints out of the way and under the paints I have room for some more bits and pieces.

Tribal Warrior

On the Tribal Warrior I spent a bit of time playing around with him.  I’m trying a new idea of around zenithal lighting where the areas in light should be highly detailed and the areas in shadow less so.  This was one of the ideas I picked up from the book “Colour and Light”  by James Gurney.  On the fur cloak I gave this a try.  As I progressed down the cloak the contrast between the base coat and the highlights and shadows was reduced.  At the top of the cloak I tried to maximise the colour variation.  All of this is to try and draw the eye to the top of the figure and the face.

I’ve still thinking about the flesh colours.  I tried for the light green/yellow orc skin and had some trouble.  In my first attempts he ended up going the full zombie so I had to add a lot of yellow to bring that back.  Also adding some red and purples to the mixes helped.  It still isn’t great.

Next up will be the armour that I’m trying with metallics first.  I’m not sure the cool temperature metals are really working.  However bone armour doesn’t work and I’m a bit stuck for what colour to try instead.

Heat induced time off

Well I planned to have a week off after Cancon but that kind of stretched to two weeks due to the heat wave going through Sydney currently.  Over 30 degrees C isn’t much fun and over 35 painting just isn’t possible.  Even in a wet palette the paint dries out too fast.  However today it cooled off a bit so I could get back and do a few things.

Battlefield accessories row boat

The small mdf rowboat I purchased from Battlefield Accessories I glued together and used some wood putty on the outer hull to smooth it out.  I simple paint job and it’s ready to be added to the box of 28mm terrain.  I am thinking that I need a person fishing…

I helped both kids with their mdf building from Knights of Dice.  The daughters farm house is put together and she has started painting it.  We did the tile roof in the old school “cardboard packing cut into tiles” method and put glue everywhere.  Just needs the ridge caps to finish off.  My son glued many rocks/etc onto his ruins and that is currently in the shed airing off after undercoating.

Little farm house

I got out the “Tribal Warrior (Orc)” from the Twelve Elements of War range that I purchased at Cancon two years ago.

Tribal warrior

I’ve pre-shaded him and now need to work out a colour scheme other than boring brown with red-brown fur.  Not even sure if I’ll paint him green.  Maybe go for more of an ogre look (he does have slightly pointed ears).  While thinking about that I made a small wooden base for him.  I used the top of a resin rock I had cast (yes, it’s lime green - the overrun from another job) to add a bit to the base.  I won’t do anything more as he is more an experiment in smaller scale while I think about what larger project I’ll do next.

Tribal warrior arms