54mm Samurai armour and coat work

54mm Samurai

This week I tried working on the green armour pieces at the front of the figure.  I didn’t have much success.  My original shading colours just didn’t work.  The armour is covered in small recessed squares that are throwing me off.  Every glaze ends up running into them and makes a mess of things.  Instead I started to try and shade each square individually.  As I wanted the shadows on the top of the squares (as the recessed nature of the square means the top area is in shadow) I found it was best to paint upside down to stop any running of paint down the figure due to gravity.  Currently it’s all a mess so I think I’ll have to start it again.

54mm Samurai

After putting the green in the too hard basket I worked on the purple coat.  I though this was going to be a bit daunting but it worked out pretty well.  I also figured that the green was all sorted and easy too, wrong both times.  Using VGC Hull Red as the shade worked well but I also took it down a notch further than originally planned right at the base of the coat.  The Hull Red glaze over the purple ends up almost black/brown.  The highlights up with Fluro Magenta worked well but I needed to add some VMC Gloss white to pick up the shoulders to match the tonal levels of the yellow lapels.  I messed up one glaze and ended up with a watermark line which I need to glaze/paint out now too.  Seems to happen when using white and not being super careful.  Maybe it’s just the gloss white, not sure there?

Look mum, no arms

So I need to work on the purple some more but it’s definitely heading in the right direction.  The green, ugh.  Need to experiment and try something different.  I think my colour planning work was ok, but the recessed areas are much trickery than I thought they would be.  Still have the helmet hair, sandals, socks to go.  Also the lower leg armour and yellow leggings need some work too.  But at least I worked out where on the base the figure will go and have drilled out the mounting holes.

54mm Samurai and first Mantic Dungeon Saga figures

Wooden skirt work

Poked along a little bit this week with my Samurai as I only got to do painting on the weekend.  I spent a couple of hours working on what I thought was his hair until it was pointed out to me by the wife that the figure didn’t make sense.  If the top of the head was hair, how did the bottom armour cowl attach?  A quick google search of the original drawing (and reading the painting notes that came with the figure - doh!) pointed out the ‘hair’ was not really hair.  I was part of the helmet and made of horse hair to look like normal hair.  Sigh.  So need to repaint that to look more horse hair and less person hair like.

Helmet detail, sorry bad lighting

The next session was working on the wooden armour on the front skirt and rear of the helmet.  I base coated these in VGC German Pale Brown and shaded down with VMC Earth.  Then I did half a dozen highlight glazes using first VMC Iraqi Sand and then VMC Light Sand.  The problem I was finding is that the armour is sculpted as a series of sticks.  So any glaze quickly runs into the recesses between the sticks making the recessed areas the lightest.  Not what was wanted.  To overcome this I ended up glazing the highlights and then going back and doing a very careful re-shade with VGC Earth.  Finally I did some point highlighting with the VMC Iraqi Sand/Light Sand.  I found that it was much better to do the stroke as very small up/down strokes rather than painting across the edges in one long line.  This was due to the paint building up on the edge only rather than across the whole area and although the amount of paint being put on was the same having the strokes follow the pattern of the wooden armour helped bring out the detail much better.  Or to put another way paint the object as an individual (i.e. paint each armour stick as a stick) rather than a blob.  Which is odd as painting hair is pretty much the other way round to avoid the old school dry brushed hair technique look which results in hair that looks like painted straw, rather than the gentle colour transitions that occur with real hair.

Base together with wall section

On the base I drilled and pinned the wooden core that makes up the wall section.  This is give some extra support so the wall doesn’t get snapped off accidentally.

Dungeon Saga Troll

During the week my first parcel from Mantic of Dungeon Saga arrived.  This was the Orc expansion “Warlord of Galahir”.  The figures are much better than I expected (based on figures I have seen in Doom and “A Touch of Evil”).  They are almost too good of a quick bake base coat and magic dip paint job.  However I don’t have time currently to paint 80 odd figures for a game I’m not going to play that much.  I mainly backed the Kickstarter for the occasion game day with friends and for the kids when they get a bit older.  So I will probably just paint some of the character figures when they arrive for now.

Dungeon Saga Mawbeast

DIY scatter flock, 54mm Samurai and more resin casting

Milliput ground effects

 A mixed bag this week.  I was a little light on painting due to illness but managed to do a wide range of other activities.  First off was doing some of the ground work for my 54mm Samurai.  I used some Milliput and filled out the blank area on the base.  Just some gentle ground variations to make it a little less boring.  Then I filled in the cracks between the resin cobblestone piece and the wooden base with the leftover Milliput.  I also painted up the back of the wall piece in good old flat black.

Next up was some mold making and resin casting.  I made up a couple of molds for some pots I had purchased recently as I wanted quite a number of them for a market diorama I have in the back of my head.  Also using the left over Pinkysil silicon I did a quick mold of a tree piece I had made but didn’t use for my 54mm Prince of Novograd.  This was pretty much the case of “got left over silicon, quick find something small in 1 minute to make a mold”.  The macro shot shows what amazing detail you can get out of a home cast.  It will make a great fallen log on a base.

Resin log love

As my wife prepares for the next cosplay adventure I’ve been spraying various toy weapons to make them look less toy like.  Many plastic swords are now black and/or gunmetal.  I even got break out my old Paasche model H airbrush as the larger nozzles it has are great for mass coverage of larger items.

DIY scatter/flock

Many moons ago I saw a youtube video made by RubbishInRubbishOut about making your own flock/scatter material out of sawdust and cheap acrylic paint.  Having done a large amount of woodwork recently I had some sawdust to play with.  First I used some flyscreen and sifted the sawdust to remove the big chunks.  Then using the cheapest paint I have (the $2 for 100ml type from the discount store) I added just enough water to make it liquid.  Then I just kept adding sawdust and mixing the two until there were no more clumps of paint.  I found that once the sawdust doesn’t feel wet to touch you are pretty much at the right ratio of sawdust to paint.  Any more and you end up with bits of sawdust that don’t get coloured.

To be honest I hadn’t really expected it to be that easy or to work so well.  I made up five batches just to experiment.  The beauty of this is that you can use just a tiny amount of paint and only produce a small amount of coloured scatter.  No more buying a huge bag that you will never use.  Mind you I already have those huge bags so this was more an exercise in producing odd colours of scatter to add some variety to the basing materials cupboard.  Any colour of scatter I like now.

54mm Samurai

Any finally, I got a bit of mr samurai done.  I put a hold on the breastplate for now.  Not happy with it but sick of doing it.  I worked on the yellow areas a bit and they are tracking ok so far.  The shades down are reasonable and I need to work the highlights some more.  The ankle areas aren’t right so I will need to have another go there.  But in all the yellow worked better then I expected given how little I paint yellow.

54mm Samurai

54mm Samurai with Naginata and base work

Continuing on from last week I did the eyes on the figure.  I surprised myself by only having to do them twice.  They are quite recessed so I was pretty chuffed that I didn’t muck them up and need 5+ attempts.  I’m sure I’ll go back to them and try again before the figure is done.

54m Samurai

Next I started on the breastplate and face mask.  Since these are base coated in VMC Hull Red they are the darkest part of the figure.  Originally I was only going to highlight them up to the Warlock Purple (i.e. what the coat is base coated in) but that wasn’t enough.  The area still looked too dark.  So I increased the highlights some more on the point areas.  Also to add contrast I darkened down some of the shade areas with Hull Red and black.  Originally I wasn’t going to do any shades but by darkening an area the colour next to that area looks lighter in colour.

When I had enough of that I did some work on the base.  Firstly I’m using the base I originally made for my 54mm Prince of Novograd.  The large black facing of the base I think will work better with the bright colours of the samurai.  I envisioned the samurai standing in front of a castle gateway so using one of my J’s Work molds and Easycast resin made a small area of cobblestone road.  Then the stone wall corner I had made sits at an angle to the base and the road comes out of the suggested gateway and covers approx half of the base.  Never have things like a wall or road parallel to the base edges as it makes it look very dull.

Base with wall area at back

For the stone wall this is made of plastic card.  To add some strength to it I chopped down a piece of wood and glued that onto the card with PVA glue.  Some Milliput was used to bulk up the back of the wood.  Then i used thin (0.25mm) styrene card to cover off the sides as that will paint much better than Milliput or bare wood.

Plastic card hides all sins

So next week I need to move onto some other area as I could easily keep fiddling with the breastplate for a another 3-4 hours without really changing it.  So I’m thinking the yellow will be next.

54mm Men at Arms Samurai with Naginata started

54mm Samurai

This week was the start of painting on my 54mm Samurai.  I had played around with some colour combos before so the first thing I did was to do a colour chart.  I had read about this from numerous sources and decided it was time for me to get serious and try one.  Normally I just write do the colours I’m using and make up the shade/highlight recipes on the fly.  Can be an issue when you forget what you did a month ago.

The principle of the colour chart is that you work out all your shading and highlighting before you start on the figure.  Then when you are painting you should compare back to your original colour chart to make sure you are staying on track.  This stops you from having one way to shade a colour at the start of the project and another when you end (never done that myself of course).

Colour chart

So for the thee main colours I highlighted up and shaded down in approx. five steps in each direction.  For the green I had multiple attempts to see what worked and what didn’t.  In the end I went for a mixture of olive green and blue as the shade and white as the highlight.  For the yellow I first tried an off white as the highlight but that made things too dull so I swapped to gloss white which worked much better.  I want the yellow highlights to really be eye popping.  For the purple I used my standard highlight colour of an old Ral Partha fluorescent magenta and shaded down with a dark red brown (VMC Hull Red).  The small dashes above the colours in the middle of the page are to show the base colour.

Due to there being so much colour on the figure (compared to my usual green and brown colour range) I blocked out all the major colour areas just to see of it all worked together.  I wanted to see if large areas of the yellow/green/purple meshed.  This was a wise idea as I found the breastplate that was going to be purple didn’t work at all.  So I dropped that down to the lowest shade of the purple (Hull Red) so the tonal match was still there.  The same for the lower groin armour piece.  That was changed to a dull brown as it was originally green.  So much colour was overwhelming so I needed to add in some neutral colour areas as a break between areas and used the brown for this.  Just need to work out the sword colours now.

I did start doing some real painting and managed to work on the very small face area.  Not much to work with as all you can see are the eyes and mouth.  Even the eyebrows are covered.  Going to need to lighten up the face guard quite a bit to pull the viewer up to the face and not get lost in the yellow forehead guard which will be the brightest point on the figure.