Fevered Dreams

So it's been a few weeks since my last post, and the reasons for that are coming down with a nasty fever that took me out of commission, and then a trip up north to help a friend move.  Now though, I've had to play catch up.  Breetai is finished, so let's take a look at how he evolved.




I decided on using the very first zentraedi seen in the Robotech series.  The pics of it had the under armor looking a bit purple, but I decided to go with a solid navy.  Getting the shading on something of this size was a little tricky.  On smaller minis it's easier to accomplish because there's not as much surface area, but on larger minis you have a lot of ground to cover in order to get a smooth coat.




The armor in the series was brown, so I tried to go with that.  The colors were very close, but I think I need to make an investment in new paints soon.  I used my favorite sepia wash from Vallejo's Game Color line, and on the upper armor it came out great, but it was kind of off on the lower armor.  I checked with my patron who gave the ok on things.  It doesn't look bad, but it's not what I was hoping for.



Here's Breetai himself, and just himself, finished.  The rest of him went by pretty well, and I was particularly happy with how solid the yellow on his insignia came out.  Yellow is a very tricky color to work with since it is very thin and colors beneath it will show through very easily.  What I did to help get it nice and smooth was to paint the area in a light stone grey since grey is a great base color if you need to paint over (that's also why I use it for primer).

Let's talk about the sculpt itself.  When it was originally announced Palladium noted that Breetai would have an open hand that you could put something in.  Their suggestions was a veritech head, or arm, or some other conquest of battle.  My patron jokingly made the comment, "What about Minmay?"  This got me thinking.  I still had my Wyrd's Orphange Accessories pack, which had a small girl doll in it, and well...




It's better than what I could sculpt I'm sure, but it came out pretty creepy looking.  Perhaps it's the world's largest Minmay Doll?  I don't know, I'll leave that to you to decide.




Here he is in all his glory.  I used Games Workshop's Agrellan Earth to give the base a different look.  The last time I tried this I learned that you needed a darker color underneath in order for the cracks to really shine through, and trying it out really shows how right I was.

Now that I had Breetai finished I decided that I wanted to get a seal coat on all the models painted thus far.  So I sat down last week, broke out my paint on seal coat, and went to work.  Disaster struck though:



UGH!!!!  How horrible!  All that work just pretty much down the drain.  It seemed to affect the green and the grey, but I couldn't get the frosted look off of the model.  This meant I'd have to do some retouching up the hard way.



I was working on two more models in an attempt to catch up with my opponent, and started putting more green down.  Since this was a finished model I wanted to just get as much distance as possible, but it wasn't going to look finished until I went the distance.  Here he is now:



MUCH better.  This leaves me with the dilemma of finding a new way to seal models.  I switched to the paint on because of a similar experience with spray on, but if the risk of paint on is going to be the same I might just switch to a spray.  The only problem there is that it comes with temperature and humidity considerations.  Either way it's going to take some thought and research, so you'll hear about it later.



Being out for as long as I was caused me to fall behind.  My opponent got a fire lit under him thanks to the lead I had at the time, and now leads me by one mini (11 to 12) even after the above two and Breetai.  Thankfully he's going on vacation later this week, so I'll have some time to pull ahead.  My order of Kingdom Death: Monster will be arriving tomorrow, and I've received permission to switch out minis so I can have fun painting.  I'm going to be painting at least 5 KD:M minis, possibly a few more, so I'll be returning to Robotech in the future, but I'm taking a break to paint some of my own models for once.  In closing I leave you with a couple of group shots:



Three guardian mode veritechs painted, two to go.



Five painted fighters, flying in formation.  This is a thing of beauty.  Each, "Veritech," in the game has three modes, and thus 1 unit in the game has three miniatures to go with it.  With all five fighters completed I've completed 1/3 of a group of five veritechs.  Technically it's more, but I'm enjoying the satisfaction of knowing that all the fighters are done.

Later this week I'll be doing an unboxing of Kingdom Death: Monster.  Stay tuned!

Layer-By-Layer

So today's post is going to be a bit more involved and a bit pic heavy (at last count, 22 pics).  I've been posting on the Unofficial Robotech RPG Tactics page on Facebook, and have been getting comments that people like the paint jobs that I do.  So I figured that these guys might like to see how I paint up these guys layer-by-layer.  Let's start with the very first coat of green:



When I originally started these I asked my friend what color scheme he wanted, and the response was a dark green trimmed in black.  The bottle for this green looks dark, but it's very thin and goes on thin.  Right from the beginning I knew that this was going to take multiple coats of green.  First though I applied a coat of Nuln Oil (a black wash) to help get things started:



That is MUCH better already, but as you can tell the color isn't quite smooth yet so I applied another coat of green:



You can get to this point by doing a basecoat, wash, basecoat, or by doing two basecoats followed by a wash.  The two layers of basecoat give you the solid dark green color, and the wash darkens it even further, but more importantly it gets in the cracks/recesses.  You want that to happen when you start painting the layers on top of what you already have so the eye will have an easier time distinguishing the separation of plates/pieces.



I got a bit ahead of myself here.  The next step I did was to add a bit of highlighting.  On the right you can see the first level of highlights, and on the right you can see the covering wash I did afterwards.  Overall I've been having a difficult time getting down how I want to highlight robots.  Turns out that flat planes are more difficult to do than spherical surfaces.  So what I tried to go with was picking out the edging of the plates as if the lighting was coming from the front and above the plane.  I didn't do the best job, but figuring out lighting schemes is still a bit new to me.



Here's a comparison pick of how things look compared to a finished fighter.  When highlighting I like to take a brighter color and mix it in with the layer below it (in this case the basecoat), and I tend to err on the side it being brighter knowing that I like to do a wash over the layers when I'm done to help smooth things out.  Next up, the start of white!



I've talked in the past about painting white and I'll say it again.  When painting white make the brightest white the highlight and start with an undercoat of grey that's close to white.  In this case the layer you're looking at is a very bright grey, but it *LOOKS* white.  If you held up the bottle of paint though you'd see it as grey, and it's a nice subtle detail that works.  Here's proof:



As you can tell, the one on the left has a much brighter, "White," coloring to it.  In my experience that's the trick to painting white, and the inverse for black.  Make white the brightest, and black the darkest.  Now I'm going to put the white on:



It may not show up as well in the pic, but if you look closely you can see the grey next to the white both in the cracks and, "At the back," of the white (since the light is coming from the front I want the brighter colors at the front).  If you've been watching the missles in the past couple of pics you'll have noticed that I cleaned them up by painting them in the same grey, and in the above pic they have been washed with Nuln Oil:



Now I've gone over them with a creamier, more off-white grey.  The reason for this is because when I was painting the fighters I figured that if I kept them at the same grey I used to undercoat the other white parts that they'd be overlooked on the model and then forgotten.  Using the grey that I did (more of a lighter stone grey) they pop out a *LOT* more, but don't detract from the model.  This is one of those instances where something turned out really well.  When painting over the plating be sure to leave some of the darker layer visible.  This is usually the little recessed area between the plates.



Another instance of me getting ahead of myself.  With the majority of the fighter being done I have moved on to more of the details.  On the right you can see the base layer for the, "Metal," that I used for the gun, thrusters, and head cannons.  On the left is the highlight layer.  The thing that always strikes me when doing highlight layers is how bright they appear.  I have to remember that paint will dry darker than when it goes on, and that I also like to use washes to help smooth things over:



There's nothing like seeing the colors do what you want them to do!  Alright, now I'm quickly approaching the end.  The two things left to do are the cockpits and the bases:



If you look closely you'll see that I've started the bases at the same time as the cockpit, but what you might've missed is that I used the same color.  The blue I used for the basecoat of the cockpit is thin like the green I used for the rest of the fighter.  When I first tried this on a cockpit I was annoyed, but then I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if you painted this onto the base, and got the effect of the fighters rushing over water?"  I tried it out, and looked great!  There were some other things to do, but first I wanted to finish the cockpits:



As before, when doing a higher layer try to mix in the brighter color.  You'll end up with a better transition that isn't as jarring as if you'd just painted the next layer straight on out of the bottle.  Mixing is really easy to pick up, and shouldn't take a lot of experimentation.  Usually for me it's just a drop or two of the brighter color because brighter colors will lighten up darker colors MUCH quicker than the other way around.



Just a few swipes of paint and the cockpits are done!  Now to focus on the bases again.  The blue looks good, but on it's own it's rather bland.  To try and mix things up a bit more I drybrushed some green onto the, "Waves," to help give them even more variation.  Looking at them now I'm tempted to add some brighter white to it and see if that doesn't actually bring things out.



You'll have noticed that I brought the blue up on the stand holding up the fighter, and that's because I didn't want to just paint a stand that was all, "Air," and figured that some water being caught up in the flight would be a nice touch.  It's a personal choice in the end.



Another instance of it being difficult to see in the picture.  On the left is the one with the green, and the right is just plain blue.  You can see why I'm thinking about adding some white to get more of a wave effect.



Here I've started on the, "Air," part of the stand.  It's a very very light pastel blue.  The reason I went with this is that I want a very, well, air look to the stand.  The next step will be to drybrush over it with actual white.  This will have the added help of bringing out definition on the stand while keeping the lighter colors:



One thing to note is that I toned down the height of the blue.  I like more subtle/smooth transitions, but am not sure how well it turned out in this case.  I'm happy with it though, and it's not jarring to look at, which is the intent.



Now I have two pics where I've got the red down on the missles (again, making them pop a lot more), and the wing lights.  I followed my normal procedure of dark then light, but the pics didn't pic it up very much.  Looking at the models I can see it, but my camera just didn't capture it.  Now that I've just about reached the end of this week's entry I'm remembering that I forgot to do the thrust, so I'll have to sneak that in next week.  Speaking of next week, I got the urge to do a little work on him:



More on him next weekend.  My blog posts are likely to show up on Sunday as the rest of October my Saturday's are pretty busy.  I leave you though with a picture of four finished Fighter Mode Veritechs:

Pair-a-gons

Last week was busy both in terms of painting and work.  I got stuff done but didn't get it posted, and now I gotta go back and touch up some stuff from this past weekend.  So today you get the finished Paragons!



As you can see they both look pretty awesome, but it was a rather arduous journey to get them finished.  When I finally got my Relic Knights order in I was quick to assemble most of my Shattered Swords so I could start getting in games before Gen Con (of which I have only gotten one in).




While I was prepping the Paragons to be assembled I noticed that they would be difficult to paint if fully assembled first; so naturally I assembled them anyways.  I've always been a fan of giant robots/power armor, and the Paragons' artwork really got me excited for the models.




Part of me wanted to just rush through and get these guys done quickly so I could get to the rest of the models, but the more I painted them the more I realized that I wouldn't be satisfied if I didn't give them my full.  I started with the base layer, hit it with a dark blue wash, and then went for a very light grey:



Every time I use my a light grey it always looks white, and that's exactly why it's my mid-color.  Once you start putting on the actual white as the highlight the armor really starts to shine. 



How to paint both black and white is one of the more common questions I hear when it comes to painting miniatures.  As you can see, the trick to painting white is to remember that actual white-white is the brightest you can get, which means your middle color needs to be close but not actually pure white.

Here's a group pic of what I have done, which is also the Shattered Swords starter set:

Approaching the Finish Line

The holidays this year have been a busy time, and even though I haven't had much time to paint I've still eeked out a little here and there.  For starters I managed to get the infantry for the last OGRE camo unit painted.



I looked at a bunch of Australian landscapes and found that there was a considerable amount of reddish-orange mixed with white and green.  I mixed up a bunch of ruddy orange to use as a base, and then did some drybrushing with bone to pick out the grains.  Once all of it was painted I used a little bit of grass flocking to add patches of green.  I'm pleased overall with how it turned out.

Moving down the list I was left with six skeleton musicians and an OGRE Mk. IIIb.  I opted to go for the skeletons first since overall they would be easier than the OGRE Mk IIIb.  I spent the afternoon on Saturday getting them all done in one fell swoop.




This completes the skeletons!  Now my only objective left was the Mk. IIIb, but with all the weather changes I had to grab a nap.  My intent was only to lay down for a little bit, but I came to several hours later.  I didn't pick up my brushes until later in the evening, and while I didn't finish it I made significant progress.



You'll notice that the white on the back portion of the IIIb is a much more solid coat than the front.  Some miniatures paints have a thinner consistency than others, and makes it a necessity to use multiple coats.  White is one of those colors, and if there is a darker undercoat it further compounds the issue.  The IIIb was primered with a medium-light grey, given a quick white basecoat of paint (two or three coats), and then I used a VERY thin black ink.  Normally thinning out an ink will reduce how visible it appears on the miniature, but as you can see it still shows up very visibly against white.  The arduous task in this whole process is the repeated number of coats to get a solid white.  Some areas take the white better while others require an unending number of coats.  The whole point of this process is to get nice solid separation between the plates.  Ultimately the white is the first part of a custom paint job for the OGRE, and the rest of it will be revealed in a post coming in the near future.

A Commission Completed

It started a little over a month ago, and it's been a bit of a roller coaster getting here, but I've finally finished the third and final Death Marshall for the Lady Justice box.




One thing I attempted with this model is a technique I've only tried out once before.  It's called OSL (Object Source Lighting), and it is essentially dealing with painting a glow effect.  The first time I saw a tutorial for it was over at Brushthralls, and it gave me enough theory to work off of.  This is an area I'm still new at so I imagine my attempts will look rather, 'unique,' until  have a solid method down.  For now though I'll show you what I got.  Here's the model before I even painted the flames.



When painting a light source you want to do the opposite of normal lighting procedures.  Whenever you paint an object, clothing, or even skin you put the shadows into the recessed areas with the highlights on the raised areas.  With a light source though you want the brightest part (and thus the brightest color) further in, getting darker as you go out.



While the flames I'm painting here are more green and magical you could look at a normal fire and see the same idea.  Yellow at the source of the fires fuel which then changes to orange towards the middle before finally fading to red at the tips.  The flames on this model are all over the place, and I had a bit of a headache trying to figure out the placement of the colors without it looking weird (having dark tips right next to bright sources).  Here's the flames and the start of the OSL.



For the base part of the flames aura I took some of the paint I had mixed up for the dark color and thinned it out a lot while adding in glaze solution.  Once I had a mixture I was comfortable with I gave a few coats surrounding the flames while trying to catch the areas where the glow would normally radiate to.  Once the glaze had dried I mixed up a bit of the base (neon green) with a little bit of the dark (turquoise) to get a shade close to but not exactly the bright part.  I did a touch of dry brushing over the glaze.  The idea was to get the glow to be picked out with the rest of the light fading away.

There was one other issue, and if you look closely you can see that there is something not quite right with the eyes.



I had the face painted early on, and it bothered me the entire time I was painting this.  After I had painted the rest and was ready to be done I still couldn't get it out of my head.  I thought about what the problem was for a while until I finally realized that it was the lack of contrast.  Even though the skin has shading it was still flesh and black.  My eyes were just two black dots even though I had put down white before painting in the pupil.  I went back and painted white over the eyes, and then used a much finer brush than what I originally used to paint in new pupils.



The result is MUCH better!  I felt like I could finally say the Death Marshall was complete, and he was finally able to join his companions.