Paint Table Saturday

Crikey, it's been a long road. This is a slight expansion of the original War of the Roses project but I've now finished all the Perry Miniatures that were bought for me as Birthday presents back in January.

Here we have the Neville cavalry, rather neater and better equipped than their Percy counterparts. Again, I chose cooler colours from the blue end of the spectrum to help tie the forces together. 

The coloured lances, incidentally, are a detail I lifted from the ever useful Osprey publications. They were more prevalent than we sometimes think.

This is the one I did the major conversion work on, and I'm rather happy with the dynamic pose:

Like the ever Sainted Mr Awdrey I, too, have now to prepare for the new Academic year, so my painting will probably slow down. I am, however, determined to finish the human Blood Bowl team; so hopefully there will be at least one more completed project post before the new term.

The Nevilles Are Coming

So here's my ersatz Nevilles, first unit thereof:



I still really like Sir Stig.

I'm generally quite happy with them although the photo does show a couple of details that need touching up and shading but I think the white and blue work well together and, more importantly, form a strong contrast with the Percy red and black.





I'd just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who's been looking and commenting; I've never been good at Unit painting as I find it rather boring to do the same sort of things over and over again, so having any kind of support is key in slogging through it.

I imagine that after one unit of 12 I'll need to take a break and do something else. Given that I've been watching a lot of Ripper Street that might well take the form of the IHMN Reid and Drake miniatures.

To Ruin And The Red Dawn!

Note to interested readers: Theoden's armour is an absolute cast iron sod to paint.

I finally got the chance to get the shot of my growing Rohirrim force for Lord of the Rings. The warriors were painted as per the previous post; Theoden King, whilst using a simialr colour palette, required a slightly different approach. In the film, his armour appears black or brown depending on the lighting and digital shot grading; shots of the actual costume show it to be a glossy dark brown.

I undercoated the mini with grey primer as usual and then gave it a black wash to help with the recesses. The main armour was then built up with multiple coats of chestnut ink. Gold detailing was added between layers of ink so they gained a reddish shade. Final highlights and edgings were gold only; the armour was not highlighted as the grey showed through to lighten the raised areas.

As you can see, the whole force hangs together quite well:




There are 16 warriors of Rohan and Theoden here - which as well as being the decent core of a LOTR force also gives me two units for SAGA.

While I had the photography set up, I decided to get a decent shot of the two D&D character minis which are now based up:


I'm looking for a good Cleric miniature to stick a dragon head on to for the next one if anyone has any bright ideas?

A couple of late birthday presents popped up from friends who know my interests: Perry Mounted Men At Arms and a box of Griping Beast Saxon Thegns.

This means that the Pledge currently stands at:

Bought: 189

Painted: 17

YIKES. 

Paint Table Saturday - almost done

I actually managed to get some painting done on a Saturday for once, which means I get to use this fabulous graphic designed by someone much more talented than I.

So, we're at the point where the painting is more or less done apart from a couple of buckles, pupils and some gore (using the recipe provided by the always helpful Lord of Awdrey Towers). The next couple of sessions will be on terrain; this time, having painted the miniatures I'll be doing the setting to match their palette rather than the other way around as I did with the last lot. The idea here, though, will be to use some static grass to provide a quite bright background to give contrast to the dark figures. That's the plan, anyway.

So, here's the stout, God-fearing men:

 And here's the undead horde:
 And here's the wittyly anachronistic Ainsty Castings gravestones

 Last few compositional experiments before settling on the final layout:

 The most annoying thing is that on these photos I can again see mould lines that I missed. I must take more care on the prep next time. Thankfully the next project is a couple of single miniatures so I'll be forced to concentrate on the details rather than the overall effect.

Oh - and this post marks another Milestone: I've just passed 1000 page views. Thank you all for your continued support.

Painting

Well, we're getting there bit by bit. Via the simple expedient of packing the kids off to nursery I've freed up some hobby time. Slow going on the painting due to being asked to have a game of WFB for the first time in two editions. So that required some hard graft in drawing up an army list.



It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

In other news, I think I've cracked the zombie skin in a way which I'm more or less happy with. Vallejo dead flesh with a wash gives a decent base colour, although a little warm:





 Highlighting with dead flesh/bleached bone cools it down again and restores the slightly sickly hue:





All the base colours are blocked in now, so it's just highlighting and detail work left to do and then we're on to landscaping. As per usual, highlighting black is a joy; I'd sadly forgotten the last lot of painting I'd done in which I'd simply shaded down from grey to get black and painted my Covenanted Men in base black, leaving me the fun (hah!)of mixing various greys and then blacks to shade again. Anyway, they are also done:



I don't think this one will be finished until the end of next week but I have hopes that it will look pretty close to what I had in mind.

Thin Red Lines

Crikey, that was troublesome. A decent session tonight, broken up for a rather splendid episode of Doctor Who, allowed to start picking up where my long break has left me. As I said, brush control is a problem. It was getting better by the end of the evening but there were some awful cases of slips and blurring lines at the beginning. Anyway, by the end, I'd started to get into the swing of balancing paint consistency, brush loading and control. I think that tomorrow I'll be up to the fine detail work. Here you can see the chaps with main colour blocked in; the second coat of lighter red gives some depth to the coats and grey undercoat pays off with the thinned blue coat over the trousers. Basic detail work on the webbing and packs is also roughed in: And here's where we leave them this evening with all base colours in and some gross detailing on the faces, webbing, packs and what have you. I've decided on black cuffs and facings for the full Zulu feel. Overall, I'm quite happy with the sculpts. As I mentioned to the fine Mr Awdrey in the comments to a previous posts, the poses are a little limited but easy enough to tweak for vignette purposes. There's a few soft details around where the hands meet the rifles and 'round the back of the packs; all fixable in the painting, I suppose, but I'd want something a little sharper if I were building full on character models. But for rank and file? You can't argue with the price and the quality. Mark me down as a fan of Warlord, and I look forward to playing with the ECW chaps for the next vignette. So a slight break and I'll be painting some more Monday or Tuesday. Shading and detailed should see the brave chaps done.