Giveaway #2 - Results

And the winner of my second giveaway is...

Thanks to those who participated. Stick around, because I like giving stuff away! Look forward to some work on my contest entries, battle reports, and maybe a game review or two.

See you tomorrow!

I Hate Chemistry

You know those times when you take something and mess with it, assuming that your messing will only improve it? I tried that and was almost tragically wrong.

I like using washes when I do my tabletop-quality miniatures. They're easy ways to blend highlights and create shadows in all the right places. However, I sometimes find the effect to be too much, so last week I tried to fix it.



Late one night I had a brilliant idea. I took a pot of my brown wash that was 1/4 full and an equal amount of distilled water. Surely adding water would only lessen the effect without somehow mutating the pigments into paint-ruining devils, right?

I was going through what I had left to do on the 15mm models in my head, and I had one of those oh no! moments. I grabbed one of my garbage models that I use for testing techniques, slapped different colors on it, and then hit it with my mad-science wash. Here are the annoying results:

First is the white gap between his helmet and back plate. That should be a very dark brown, but something has made the pigments turn chalky when they dry.

And here, you can make out a light purple/white reside on the inside of his elbow.

Granted, it would have been infinitely more dramatic to have the wash on my brush and stop mere millimeters away from the models. But alas, my heart gets to have a bit less strain this week and I didn't ruin my first 15mm paint job (pics coming when it's sealed and flocked).

Still, this wash debacle is a total mystery to me. What's interesting is that when it's wet, you can't see a difference. And in the time it was wet on the model, it looked like I'd succeeded in my goal of taming its effect. But why oh why is it trying to ruin my work?

So there wasn't much of a grand story or humiliating lesson here (thankfully!), but it does say a good deal about my knowledge of science and justifies my mild case of being a pack rat.

See you tomorrow for the giveaway!

OVERBYTES: "A' la Carte"

A new OVERBYTES argues on behalf on a new way for buying games digitally:

Slow and Steady

So... I'm a little bummed.

When I'm doing a commission, I like to set myself goals that I know I can just barely make. Today my goal was to get the 15mm models fully painted, washed, and ready to seal. I technically will accomplish that goal before I go to bed, but I'd really hoped to share the photos with all of you. I could have just plowed through things and sacrificed accuracy, but I'd rather take a few more hours to do it right; plus it means you all get to wait in anticipation even longer!

Today was a bit hectic. One of the hard things about being a commission painter and stay at home dad is that when the kids aren't sleeping, I rarely go more than 20 minutes before I have to answer a question or settle a dispute. I wouldn't have it any other way, but holy cow does it take learning something new and turn up the difficulty by 1 or 2 notches. Still, I'm incredibly happy with my results so far.

Everything is ready to be washed. The colors look pretty stark right now, but they'll all blend together nicely in the end.

Here's a bazooka team.



Mini grenade, incoming!



And here's the distance they should be viewed at.



I'm off to paint up the larger rocks to set them apart from the rest of the terrain, and then hit the models with some washes.

See you tomorrow!

Lollipop Guild, Represent!

I started a commission today that's proving to be no small task.

Up until now, the only thing I've painted is 28-32mm scale models. I knew there were "other sizes" out there, but I never gave much thought to painting them. However, my mind was soon changed when presented with the opportunity to paint some 15mm models for the game Flames of War.



It seems small, but just how small are we talking? Here's a comparison to a Warmachine model, which is 32mm "heroic" scale.

What's that? Irusk-Zilla is attacking the city?!

But the thing that excited me most about these is that because of their scale, there's minimal room for subtlety. One thing I always struggle with is making extreme highlights because I have difficulty stepping back and looking at the model from the appropriate distance; a highlight from 6" away looks considerably different than from a few feet away. Now I have no choice but to go for broke and use some more extreme highlights.

Tonight my goal was to get the basing done on all 12 bases. I'm following a guide from The Painting Clinic, which has always proven to be a valuable resource. In the guide, the first thing he suggested was hitting the bases with a coat of Spackle to simulate the relative unevenness of natural dirt.



Then I placed an assortment of basing and medium grit around the base, followed by covering the rest of the base in fine grit.



This is where things got fun. After using my airbrush (fun fact: I love my airbrush) to coat everything in Vallejo black polyurethane primer, I found a new appreciation for the beauty of basing.

Usually when I base, I'll do one of two things. I'll use some sand and a large stone or two, and use 2 or 3 coats of paint to simulate highlights and shadows... or just use some premade basing dirt. Following the guide though, I used 5 shades of brown just for the small and medium grit (basing grit will be painted grey after the models are done).

Going in to it, I thought the 2nd and 3rd colors would be lost so I wasn't holding my breath for amazing results. But after hitting it with the final drybrush, I couldn't help but be ashamed of all the base work I'd done previously. See for yourself:



The iPhone pic doesn't do it justice, but you can still see the depth and color variation throughout the base. The other day I spent a bit of time looking at photos of natural terrain trying to figure out how I'd lay out the grit and grass. Going back and looking at them now, I'm blown away by how natural it looks.

I have some Grey Knights that have been sitting on the shelf waiting for me to figure out what base they'll stand on. Right now, I think they'll be quite happy to stand on something similar to this. I just love how subtle the Spackle's effect is. The land doesn't have huge waves on it, but in the back of your mind you know that what you're looking at isn't 100% flat.

If things go according to plan, I should be ready to seal these by tomorrow evening. Stay tuned and wish me luck as I spend several hours parked in front of my magnifier lamp, painting detail on things smaller than my thumbnail.

See you tomorrow!

Perfection

Little sick of gaming-nostalgia mash-ups? Me too. But this? This is FUCKING BRILLIANT.

Sewer? I'll Take Her for All She Has!

After sitting down and figuring out how I wanted Hamelin and his swarm of rats to look, I realized that I just couldn't sell it without some appropriate scenery. Here's what I'm thinking.

If a guy controls rats, he belongs in a sewer. So that's where I'm planning to stick him!

Let me break down what I've done with my overwhelming ability to draw coherent images.

The light blue is the brick work. I still need to look at more source images, but I plan on having the edge closest to me break off, as though the scene were removed from the world and frozen in time.

There will be 2 walls. One on the opposite edge of the main path, and one in the back with a sewer pipe coming out of it.

The pipe will be appropriately nasty, and will drain in to a trough. I haven't decided what to do with this T intersection. I may have it go to a dead end with the sewer water going through an iron grate.

The black is a rough idea of what the swarm will look like. It will pour in from both ends of the tunnel and move toward the left. The black dot is where I plan on putting Hamelin.

And that about sums up my plans for this contest. Rats, kids, sewers, and one man to rule them all.

While I wait for my stuff to arrive, I'm going to try getting some work done on this terrain. The layout itself is pretty simple, but getting some bricks I like, and making them grimy, is going to be the bulk of my work here.

If you haven't yet, don't forget to enter my giveaway coming up on Friday. I'd like to get at least 10 entries, so tell your friends!

See you tomorrow!