Mantic Games Dungeon Saga and the start of the violinist diorama

Valandor from Dungeon Saga

To earn some cool dad points this week I finished off the Valandor figure from Dungeon Saga for my son.  The more I painted him the more uglies I found.  He unfortunately has some very bad heat ripples in the figure that come through the paint job.  Given the figure is only in two adventures he was a bit of a quick and dirty job.  Lots of blue, silver and gold.  Very pretty :)

I’m not sure of the colours yet for the violinist figure so instead started working at some of the elements of the diorama.  The sub parts I need to work on are

* iron fence
* cobblestone pavers
* fountain
* terracotta pots
* 2 dogs
* 1 cat
* garden area
* brick wall behind fountain

Pots for all

First was the terracotta pots.  I tried a number of mixes to try and get the terracotta colour but couldn’t get it.  My yellow/browns kept going green.  However then I tried VGC Parasite Brown.  Near prefect straight out of the pot.  This was highlighted up with VMA Light Brown and VMA Yellow Ochre.  To shade down and dirty the base of the pot I used VMC Leather Brown.  I’ve done a test pot and am pretty happy with it.  So I need to do the real ones next.

Trial brick wall sections.  Oil wash at bottom, pigment wash middle right

The wall behind the fountain will be made from bricks using the J’s Work mould I have.  I made up a number of wall sections in plaster as practice trial runs.  I am so far trying dark red bricks with an off white mortar.  The bricks are painted first and then the mortar is washed in.  I’ve been trialling the wash method.  I have tried using an oil wash.  This gets into the cracks very well however it is very hard to complete get off the bricks so all the bricks end up slightly white.

The second method I tried was using pigments mixed in water.  I found the colour coverage not as good as the oil wash but it was much easier to clean off the bricks.  By happy chance I also found that the pigment fixer when brushed over the entire piece made the bricks go glossy, almost like a kiln fired glaze.  Ie they look like real bricks.  Need to do a full test now where I paint the bricks with colour variation and do the whole process end to end.  Once happy I’ll make up the full wall with resin cast wall sections.  The plaster is much to fragile to work with.

I also tried using watered down poly-filler but found it (unsurprisingly) to have too much bulk.

Max the dog, base coat

Starting on one of the dogs I choose the one that looks like a German Shepherd.  After a few Internet dog viewing sessions I was off.  I went for the standard tan dog with a black saddle.  Best to use colours everyone knows for minor items so it’s easy for people to classify them.  Paint a panda colour German Shepherd (yes, they exist) and everyone will just think you got confused.

Getting there.

I used a base of VMC Golden Brown with highlights of VMA Light Brown and VGC Bonewhite.  This didn’t work out too well as the highlights started to bleach out and the dog looked very odd.  I also tried using VGC Parasite Brown as the first shade but again that didn’t work.  So what I had tried on paper first didn’t translate well.  The colours were fine, they just didn’t look like dog colours.

Slight highlighting on the black saddle

Instead I went back to near the base coat and went much finer on my highlights and less range.  I switched my shade colour to a mixture of the base coat, VMC Black/Grey and VMA Light Brown.  This came to brown that on the black saddle (using it as a highlight) it looked right and on the Golden Brown base looked ok as well.  I found this to be crucial as the black saddle and the yellow tan base coat are very different.  Having an mix colour used on both areas unifies the figure.  I need to finish off his eyes and ears now and add a bit more highlighting to the tops of the figure.  The good news is that from afar he looks like a German Shepherd, which means the ratio of black to tan and the distribution of each is right.

Another technique I made sure I used was that the majority of the painting (i.e. brush strokes) was done in the directory of the fur.  This way the paint builds up on the sculpted hair lines and this adds to the volume.  To make fur look like fur I’m finding that lots of layers and lots of subtle variations in the colours seems to be the key.

A bit of Tamiya, Dungeon saga and 54mm Nocturna violinist

A productive week this time round with a few little side projects all going off together.

Now that Death Dealer is done I took some better shots of him front and rear in the light box.  Glad is he done and I didn’t make a total hash of him.

Death Dealer

Death Dealer

Tamiya 1/35 German AT gun crew

I’ve had the old Tamiya 1/35 German 37mm AT gun with 4 man crew sitting around for a year or so.  I did the base coats of the figures but didn’t really like the colours.  A year later I had another go, changed all the base colours a bit and things started working.  This is the first figure of the four.  I’m using him as a way to get use to painting larger scale figures again after all the 28mm figures I’ve been doing.  In a later post I’ll put up the colour scheme I used.  I have a number of 1/35 figures in the cupboard but always get dragged away by the nicer 54mm figures I have.  I seem to purchase the old Tamiya kits out of a sense of doing pilgrimage of the classic kits (I’ve done the Africa Korps Panzer II already).  However given my interest in figures over vehicles, and the time to do a tank it’s going to be slow going on the 1/35 side.

75mm man

I purchased a number of cheap ($2 each) 75mm figures for my kids awhile back.  This one figure caught my eye much like blue man did.  I had to sculpt in some hair for him (using milliput) but he is still just a bit too rough.  I really like the pose, but the figure isn’t up to a standard that I could enter him into competition so he goes into the “for the fun of it” pile in the cupboard.

Dungeon Saga Valandor

Between working on my German I started the Valandor figure from Dungeon Saga.  My son loves him so I’m doing a quick job on him.  He is a multi part figure that has been already glued together so you can’t get at a number of areas of the figure other than just mushing the brush around.  Lots of blue and armour there.  I had to replace his spear as the original was a bendy wendy.  I used a 1.5mm wire rod for the shaft and glued the original end and tip back on with super glue.

Rough set up, figure in the blank area

Finally I started on a diorama I hope will be ready for Cancon.  The scene is a violinist (figure from Nocturna) playing next to a fountain with an audience of a couple of dogs.  There will be a cat on the fountain and behind the fence a small garden.  The violinist I will be going for will be very run down/drab and in a little bit a tragic sort of figure, who is only able to play at an out of the way corner of the city with only old dogs as company.  Even the cat will have it’s back turned to him.  Going to be a hard slog to do all the elements involved.  So far I’ve prepped the figure and under coated the animals and the violinist.  Not sure if I’ll use the paving for the ground or go for a dirty/grass area instead.

Nocturna Violinist

Next week will be a lot of experiments on elements for the diorama.  I need to trial painting the pots, the brick wall that will be behind the fountain and the fence.  Need to get some reference shots of dogs/cats and look at the pseudo Venetian costumes for the violinist.

Tools and bases

This week I just had to finish off Death Dealer's base which I kept quite low key.  Lots of dark browns to make the figure the focus.  Now that Death Dealer is done I took the rest of the week off to have a break from painting and to some adjacent tasks.

Looks like a sound plan...

First off I decided to make myself a razor blade guillotine chopper.  I had seen these on the web (mainly on model railway sites) where they are used to accurately cut styrene rods.  Basically a straight edge with a razor blade cutter at 90 degrees to the straight edge.  There are normally some screw clamps on the straight edge to clamp down angle shapes (think the plastic triangles that come with protractor sets) so that mitre and angle cuts can be done.

The clamps in the "out of the way" position, they rotate 180 degrees to clamp down

Making a basic version I used a piece of 9mm ply for the base.  I purchased (the only bought item for the entire project) a ruler from the hardware store that I chopped down for size.  I could have just used a piece of aluminum bar but liked the option of having measurements visible on the straight edge.  The angle bracket for the handle was from the scrap box which was cut down to size.  Two 5mm bolts attach the bracket to the board and a single 5mm bolt is the pivot point for the chopper arm.  All the bolts are secured using nylon lock nuts.  The three clamp screw holes were old motherboard mounting screws that have a screw on one side and a hex nut on the other.  The clamps themselves were cut out from some metal scrap.  The chopping handle was a piece of right angle aluminum (12x12x1.4mm).  In the handle two 3mm holes were drilled so that the razor blade (just a normal razor) could be mounted.

Just add a finger.

Any cut metal edges were first painted in metal primer and then satin black enamel paint to stop any rust from forming.  The ply board was coated with 2 layers of estapol satin varnish to protect it from moisture and stains.

Do I really need one?  Do I plan to start scratch building obscure models?  No.  But sometimes it’s nice to spend a day in the shed using tools to make new tools.  Unfortunately due to the razor it has to live in the shed so the little people of the house don’t accidentally remove their fingers.  I’ve already taken the skin of one knuckle with an accident bump against the razor.

Death Dealer base

Second task was making a base for Death Dealer.  I started with a piece of 18mm pine that I cut to size and then routed around the top to give a rounded edge and smaller flat top.  The pine was then stained (Traditional Cedar) and then 4 coats of Jo Sonja's satin varnish were applied to seal it up.  Like all my bases a piece of dark green felt was glued to the bottom.  The top of the base doesn’t have any varnish (hence the discolouring) so that the glue will have a better chance of bonding.  I will drill in some pins to the base of the figure as I don’t want to rely on just the glue holding on.  The figure with horse is quite heavy.  So next week should be photos of everything together :).

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.