Back after a break

So been a few weeks.  A few reasons behind that.  Got rather sick for the better part of a month, did a lot of machining work, added a gas struct to my milling machine, worked on some robot stuff for the kids and generally just ran out of steam for painting.  So gave up for a bit and had a painting break.

Terminator Genisys figure

So getting back I started with a gentle start and did a few more Terminator Genisys figures.  Another 8 to go and then I'm onto LotR figures as my "other" painting project.  Nothing special here just some quick tabletop level painting.

..and another one

Second up was a Ral Partha figure that I think I got from the bring-and-buy at MOAB one year.  It's been in the box for awhile.  Really liked the almost Gary Chalk feel to this figure.  I had another go on painting wood texture on the spear shaft and I'm getting happier with the result.  I used four main colours

Ral Partha how I love thee

- Blue tint on the armour
- red on the cloak
- green on the clothing
- light brown on the horns/gloves

Reasonably happy with him.

Next was getting back to the Orphan 9 figure and base.  I worked on the base as I was still warming up and wanted to get the background colours sorted before moving onto the figure.  The two holes are the mounting point for the figure.

Starting to look like a base

The wall was undercoated a red/brown.  I then picked out individual bricks and painted them lighter/darker to add some variation to the wall and then painted in the mortar.  The mortar impressions in the foam are very slight so I couldn't go for a 'cover everything and wipe off' paint trick to do the mortar.

The posts around the top will have some wire on the so I started with the off white to pretend the ends are porcelain insulators.  The large door I went of green to give some contrast to the wall to and make it obvious that the second point of interest in the diorama after the figure is the door.  Just got the base colour down for it.

I used some Vallejo stone paste on the ground to add some texture to the plastic card.  Then I painted it grey and did some dust glazes followed by some dark brown/black glazes.  It was still not looking like much so I added the pavement lines.  There was still a bit of moisture from the previous glaze with allowed the dark brown/black paint I used for the lines to bleed a bit.  This resulted in a great effect of making the pavement lines look much more natural.  I then added in some extra cracks.  Need to add a few highlights next, but more as splotches/stains of colour.

Adokul the monk and some old school 25mm Ral Partha and Grenadier

Adokul the Monk by Andrea

I did a lot of prep work on Adokul this week.  First up was drilling and gluing in pins in all the parts to hold him together.  I always pin my metal figures together and then use two part epoxy to glue them together.  The fact that the two part epoxy have some bulk helps filling the gaps as most metal figures don’t have that good a join between parts (compared to plastic figures).  I glued the legs and body together and then filled in the gaps with some Milliput.

Adokul wooden base underway

For the object under the left foot I played around with a number of options and in the end went for a dwarf stone statue head.  Makes him more fantasy based but that is ok.

I had to wait until the weekend to undercoat him as it’s a bit cold at night in the shed.  I did the usual two stage undercoat of all over black, and the white on the highlights.

Ral Partha thief

While waiting for undercoats to dry I wanted to try doing some armour and do some colour/enamel like effects.  So into the stash of old school Ral Partha/Grenider figures.  I found a nice plate mail figure and a thief to do while I waited for the plate mail to dry.  I ended up doing the thief first, she was a bit hard as the face was obscured by her hood.  Also my eyes needed to be trained back to doing 25mm again.  After all the broad brush work on the Anonymous bust hard to go back to super small work.  Plus the eyes aren’t what they were 15 years ago when I was painting these more often.  Kept her pretty dark as that fitted with the thief idea.  Thieves don’t want to stand out too much.

Grenadier fighter underway

For the plate mail guy, I decided to go for a dragon skin cloak and practice on getting my reds better.  Wanting coloured armour I mixed some Jo Sonja’s Phthalo blue with the AP Plate mail.  I bit more subtle than the standard metallic blue.  I do like the AP metallic range, I find them very smooth and the mica is really ground fine (so no silver flakes).  I need to do the armour highlights/shades still and more on the red.  His face was a pain as it is quite recessed and the left arm of the figure gets in the way when trying to get a brush in there.  I think I did the eyes at least 6 times.  Definitely lost the touch there.

Ral Partha Death Dealer part 4

This week was a bit light on but I managed to clean up all the small areas that still needed to be done.  This was the glove, axe handle, saddle bag, horns and a general clean up.

Getting there

The horns I redid going from off white at the base of the horn to black at the tips.  Given the small area I did wet on wet blending going from VGC BoneWhite, Beasty Brown, VMA Armour brown to black.  I then went back and spot highlighted some VMC Light Sand and white on the upper most part of the horn.

For the axe handle I originally tried the normal brown to lighter brown highlighting but it didn’t work.  Instead I repainted the whole handle light brown and then attempted to paint in a wood grain using dark brown/black.  Then between the dark lines I highlighted up with a brown lightened with yellow.  It’s ok, but given the position of the axe handle so close to the body the back was very hard to do well.

On the helmet I redid some of the shadows in VMC Dark Sea Blue and redid the highlights in AP Silver and VMA Aluminium.  I also did a number of yellow and orange glazes over the helmet, top of the horse and the top of the cloak.  Basically trying to lift up the light level a bit more and also harmonise all the top parts of the figure as they will all have a very mild yellow glaze on them.  The lighting in the pictures make the helmet brighter than it is.

For the shield the bottom of the shield was still looking a bit muddy.  Instead of shading with brown I went back and started glazing down with yellow/orange and then orange to red at the bottom of the shield.  By using colours closer to yellow like orange really made a difference and made the yellow look shaded rather than brown.  I also did a number of yellow to white glazes on the top of the shield to brighten it up.  To pop out the eagle I did a very fine brown/black line around the whole eagle.  I was finding all the yellow glazes had softened the edges a bit too much.

An old Reaper paint shaker skull

Finally I started on the base ground work.  Still working on this trying to get a colour that works.  The large rock has since been repainted a dark red to tone down the base.  I also added a skull for some Death Dealer bling.  I was thinking about redoing the base to be a field of skulls but that was a bit much.

So nearly there.  Need to finish off the base and then the fine fiddle until I stop before I make things worse.

Ral Partha Death Dealer part 3

Working on the armour initially I started with a AP Gun Metal base with a small amount of VMC Dark Sea Blue and black added in.  By adding in the Dark Sea Blue a lot of the metallic shine was removed which looked much better than the standard dark metallic colour I normally start from.  A dark metal rather than a shiny dark colour.  In the shadow areas I added some black and more Dark Sea blue.  For the scale parts of the armour I tried to underline each scale.  For the highlights I used the AP Plate Mail and Silver and finished off with VMA Aluminum.  Again each scale (where I could) was picked out.  I found that other than the helmet and scale skirt there wasn’t much armour on the figure.  The chest area unfortunately is just a blob as it’s the join area of the two parts of the mould and is quite recessed.  So I’ll have to use a fair amount of black to try and hide those (lack of) details.

A red cloak to hide the blood

Next was the cloak.  The original painting only has a slight amount of the cloak showing, with a hint of red in the painting.  So I went for red to add some life to the figure.  To unify the figure the cloak base as VMC Flat Red (4/5) and VMC Dark Sea Blue (1/5).  This was shaded down with more Dark Sea Blue (which made a nice purple shade) and black.  Highlights were done progressively with VMC Vermillion and VMC Flat Yellow and white.  I tried to add a lot of yellow highlight to the top of the cloak to get that bright sunlight look.

I had a go at the horns but then messed them up trying to do a too extreme highlight.  So they got repainted ready for another try later on.

Test shield - an experiment in yellow

I’ve been stuck on the shield for some time.  Rather than mess up the figure any more I grabbed a spare shield around the same size as the one on the figure and did some test paints.  Initially I went for a yellow base and tried to shade down with VGC Leather Brown and Beastly Brown.  However I got terrible tide lines no matter what and it all just looked dirty and muddy.  I also tried shading with purple but again it wasn’t working out.  I just can’t seem to work out shading yellow without it going muddy and ugly lemon yellow on the highlights.  So after a few sad faces I scratched that and went back a light tan (think Bleached bone) base.  At the suggestion of the wife I tried to use the pre-shading technique I had used on other parts of the figure for the yellow.

Shield start

As stated I started with a tan/off white base.  I used the AP Soft/Strong/Dark tones to then do the shading.  I had seen on one of the Painting Buddha videos the AP washes used as paints/glazes (on a very light base) with a very good end result.  So I diluted the AP washes and used those for the shading going from soft->strong->dark tones.  I highlighted up the tan base with VMA Light Sand and white.  I found this much easier to get looking right wrt the blending smoothness.  Then once done I used VMA Medium Yellow (close to the VMC Flat Yellow) and did a very light coat (near glaze) over this.  With two coats the shield now was yellow, but the pre-shading had worked.  I tried an extra highlight of VMC Lemon Yellow but that was too much and the shield started to look green, as can be seen in the picture.  However I was onto a better way to paint yellow.

Getting better

This technique I redid on the figure and the end result is much better than any previous attempts.  Needs some more work to get some more details out but it’s a good start.  For the eagle I base coated in VMC Black/Grey.  For the highlights I used the same Medium Yellow.  This way the highlights would start to transition to the general shield yellow colour.  Again this is an attempt to make the highlights more of a general bright yellow sunlight effect.  I need to go back and add some yellow glazes I think to the helmet to tone it in with the top of the shield and the cloak.

So still to do is the axe handle, the glove, the helmet horns, the saddle bag and the centre of the figure (where everything is just a blobby half cast mess).  I may also redo one of the fetlocks where the transitions aren’t a good as the other three.

Ral Partha Death Dealer part 2

Death Dealer (with shield of failure)

Taking a break for the horse I spent a few hours working on the shield.  At the end of that I had a big pasty yellow failure and just painted over the entire thing.  Try that again later.

The next part I worked on was the fetlocks of the horse.  Again I spent a lot of time looking at various horse pictures to see how real horses look.  Surprising me was that many dark horses have white fetlocks and thus are more likely to have light hooves.  Normally the colour of the hair just above the hoof determines the colour of the hoof, which makes sense as the hoof is just hair.  So white fetlocks, light coloured hooves.

To blend the fetlock area I base coated the lower leg in a light tan colour and then did a number of rounds of wet on wet blending to try and get the transition from dark to light tan to white.  I used the wet on wet technique as I didn’t think glazing the dark brown to the light tan at the start of the fetlock hair would work very well.  So instead I did a light base coat and once that was dry put on the dark brown and tan and blended the two together with a fair amount of one brush blending (thanks Ben Komets).  This was then repeated for the tan to white area.  Finally the bottom of the fetlock hair was touched up with white using some very small brush strokes.  The brush strokes were done in the direction of the hair to enhance the effect.  I did a number of rounds of the blending until I though I was there.  Then the wife mentioned that the white needed to go further up the leg so I got to do it all over again.

For the mane and tail I wanted to start near black (as dark bay horses normally have black(ish) manes and tails.  My base colour was VMC German Black/Brown + VMC Dark Sea Blue + Black.  I’m finding these mixes are looking much better than just a straight colour out of the bottle.  They seem to result in a more nature looking colour.  I then highlighted (only) up with VGC Beasty Brown, VGC Bone white and some VMC Flat yellow.  I added in the yellow more an more to try and get that sun bright look.  I didn’t want to just highlight with tans and off whites as that would end up looking bleached.  I kept with the zenithal lighting idea but when highlighting selectively choose a few hair stands each time to paint.  This way the hair had a bit of dynamic lighting to it.  I’m ok with the tail but think the mane may need some more work as the upper neck area will the lightest area.

Love that saddle blanket.  

As there were no reins on the figure I made some.  I took some easter egg foil wrapping, smoothed it out on a hard flat surface and then cut out the reins.  These were then superglued into place.  The advantage of the foil is that you can shape it and it retains the shape perfectly (being metal).

The saddle blanket was a bit of a disaster zone to start but in the end came out quite well considering the loss of detail over time from the mould.  I would love to see an earlier production run of the figure as the saddle blanket has some great sculpting work on it but in areas it’s just all but gone as the mould has deteriorated over time.  So in order to try and work around that I ended up choosing some detail to highlight (and in some cases it wasn’t there on the figure) and repeatedly highlighting that same part again and again.  This way the paint layers actually started to build up and a near lost detail could be recreated.  I got a bit distracted and didn’t really keep track of the base colour.  Pretty sure it was VGC Khaki.  The shadows were AP Soft tone and in the very dark chevron I used VMA Armour Brown.  The highlight colours were VMC Light Sand and white.  The highlight and shading went back and forth a number of times as I keep making the shadows deeper to pop out the highlighted details.  I don’t remember how many layers I did on the top of the blanket but over 10 at least.  However it’s the part of the figure I’m liking the best at the moment.

I’ve started the armour, axe and cloak so hopefully next time round they should be well under way.  Yes, VMC Dark Sea Blue is used a number of times.  It’s almost becoming the unifying colour of the figure.

Ral Partha Death Dealer

I took a few days off this week as I just wasn’t in the head space for painting.  I find ever couple of months there will be a week were I’m just not interested in the actual process of painting.  One night I tried and 5 minutes later gave up.  Good news is I got to watch the movie “Red Dragon” again.  I think the real reason was that I was fearing starting on a new figure so subconsciously avoiding the task.  Probably needed some more teddy bear hugs.

Five coats of paint later...

However Thursday/Friday I was feeling the mojo again and did some more trials on my practice horse.  Part of this was from re-reading Shepard Paine’s “Building and painting scale figures” which includes a nice section on horses.  I learnt so much from those few pages on horses and markings that it made me realise how bad I am at seeing things in real life.  I’ve seen hundreds of horses in my life but couldn’t tell you what body colours go with what leg markings, etc.  So after the quick read and few hours of horse pictures from the net gave me a clearer idea of what real horses look like.  So research pays off, even on subjects that are totally familiar.

I pretty much have given up on using the airbrush and just went for a light/dark almost sketching process and after an hour or so was getting some good results.  I repainted (again) my trial horse and went to an extreme highlight on the flanks and neck of almost pure bright yellow to try and emulate the sunlight look of the Death Dealer painting.  I ended up with tide marks and spots but I had achieved the result of near black under the belly to near yellow on the top of the horse.  Time for the real thing.

In a painting lesson on glazing from Mark Soley he mentioned that you should start at approx 75% lightness as your base colour rather than starting at a mid colour base as normal.  It’s easier to get darker with glazes than get lighter.  Finally took that advice and although I want the lower sections of the horse be quite dark went for a lighter colour.  This made the lighter glazes easier as I needed to do less of them to get that sun yellow highlights.  After all black covers pretty well, yellow not so much.  Also I didn’t want to end up with a black horse with no tonal variation.

My dark to light combo was

Black
Black + VMA Yellow Olive + VMC Dark Sea Blue + base
3 parts VMA Burnt Umber + 1 part VMC German Pale Brown - Base
VMC Brown Sand + Base
VMC Iraqi Sand + previous
VMC Flat Yellow + previous

The pale rider

This results in near black (looks slightly purple) under the horse, dark brown on the sides to a very pale yellow brown on the top.  The legs of the horse are quite muscular so I have been using that muscle definition to try and pop some contrast a bit more.

VMC Dark Sea Blue is a new colour I picked up after seeing (via youtube) Ben Komets use it a lot.  Pretty much Paynes grey so I can see why he likes it.  I was using VGC Night Blue for the shading but that is quite intense and makes things very blue.  So looking forward to some more trials with Dark Sea Blue.

I trialled some pale fetlocks on my test horse and they are looking ok.  It makes the horse look a heck load better than the 28mm gaming “brown horse, black hooves” look.  One of those things that without them the horse doesn’t look quite right, but you can’t say why.  However once done you immediately think “oh, that looks much better”.

So more horse next week with the fetlocks, mane, tail and tack to be done.  Should give me some time to figure our how to paint the figure.

Dungeon Saga Elf Ranger figure

The Dungeon Saga figure paint off continues.  I was wiped out by the flu for most of the week so only did one and half figures.

Dungeon Saga Elf Ranger

First off was the female elf ranger.  My base colours were

Flesh - VMC Dark Flesh
Pants and shirt - VGC Dark Fleshtone
Cloak - VMC Olive Green
Armour/gloves - 1/2 VMC Black/Grey, 1/2 VGC Beasty Brown
Boots - VGC Beasty Brown
Bow - VGC Charred Brown
Hair - Citadel Sandri Dust

Dungeon Saga Elf Ranger

I kept the shadows and highlights pretty simple.  The only one of note was the cloak.  My colour range for it (and this was more experiment than anything) from dark to light was

(VGC Night Blue, Black as final shade glazes)
VGC Dark Green
Coat d’Arms Russian Green
VMC Olive Green - Base
AP Necrotic Flesh
VMC Light Sand (which is an off white with some yellow)

By keeping the yellow in highlights I didn’t lose the olive green or end up with chalky highlights.  Near the end of the shadows I started adding in Night Blue to the glaze to get the shadows a bit bluer.

I finished off with a pretty heavy varnish which killed a bit of the colour as the highlights were a bit brighter before.  The pictures were taken after the varnish.  However these figures are going to have a lot of sticky kid fingers on them so they need the protection.

I’ve also done the base colours of the human barbarian (lots of flesh).  Poor old Keldan has stalled a bit after Ear-gate.

Ral Partha Death Dealer (aka Superhero)

While I had the airbrush out for the varnish runs I did some grey and then white pre-shading on the Death Dealer figure to try and help me with the shading.  I did a grey spray first at approx 30 degrees from the top of the figure first, and then did a white spray at approx 15 degrees.  This way only the top surfaces of the figure get the extreme white highlight.

More Dungeon Saga figures (and a Ral Partha classic)

Dwarf fighter from Dungeon Saga

On request from my son I painted up the dwarf fighter from Dungeon Saga as that is the character he is playing.  Nothing too fancy here with the emphasis on quick over quality.  The figure has some ugly sink holes and miscast bits so I didn’t get too concerned with making it a master piece.  Every time I see the figure I just think “Hammer time!”

Next off will be the female elf ranger figure as she is part of the standard adventurer group in the game.  With the male dwarf fighter and the female dwarf fighter (the Reaper Bones figure) that is the main party all painted (my wife is substituting the female dwarf fighter for the human barbarian).  My daughter is using her own figure which makes up the fourth figure.  I’ll probably do the human wizard and the human barbarian from completeness in the quick bake method.  After all there will be many grubby hands grabbing these and the figures are nice, but have the usual downsides of soft plastic mass produced figures with bad mould lines, missing details and sink holes.

Female Elf Ranger from Dungeon Saga

However I’m loving doing these figures quickly rather than the usual spending three weeks to paint a shield like I do on 54mm figures.  I’m also noticing that even doing these quickly how much better they are than all the older figures I painted for RPGs.  Zenithal lighting really makes a difference.  Also my brush control is much better.  I’m able to do the faces way better than before, and without needing a 10/0 brush.

I’ve found most of the figures with Dungeon Saga were bent in some way.  The recommended way to fix this is to put the figure in hot water to make it soft.  I found a better way was to use the heat of a cigarette lighter to make the plastic very soft, reposition and then put the figure under cold water to set.  However you have to be very careful as the heat can burn off some fine details and the plastic gets very soft very fast.

Finally I cracked open a figure I’ve had for 15 odd years.  This is the Ral Partha “Superhero” figure.  Sculpted by Tom Meier it is pretty much a direct take on the Frank Frazetta picture “Death Dealer”.  There have been a few pictures of larger scale Death Dealer figures going around recently so I got all inspired.

Ral Partha Superhero - aka Death Dealer

The figure does show it’s 40 year old vintage (made 1976).  The horse figure is one piece so there were some compromises needed for the mould, like the riders feet not hanging below the belly of the horse.  Also being a very old figure the mould has degraded a bit and some of the details are pretty soft.  That all said still a great figure.  To be honest the horse is really the highlight.  The sculpt totally captures the menace of the original painting.

Ral Partha Superhero - aka Death Dealer

I rebased the horse and rider on a plastic base and built up the ground with some milliput and rocks.  It will probably sit around for awhile while I consider how I’m going to do it.  Not sure if I will paint the foot figure.  The axe is all wrong and the legs aren’t that good.  Plus I’m having too much fun painting Dungeon Saga figures.