Forge World's Eldar Lynx Painted

Time for a few shots of the painted Lynx and a quick summary of how it played in Apocalypse at the weekend.

I wanted a predominantly white paint job for this Biel Tan tank. After priming, I sprayed an even coat of Astronomicon Grey all over, then preshaded the recessed areas and bases of plates and surfaces with Regal Blue and pre-highlighted with pure white on raised areas and edges. I then covered this with a further basecoat of Astronomicon Grey, then built up the white by adding Skull White into the mix in several layers. Even though my airbrush is extremely basic, it is possible, particularly on such a large model as this, to get some good gradation from dark areas to light, and some strong edge highlights.

The white worked out so well, I was then left with a bit of a dilemma - as this is Biel Tan, I need to add some green, but how to do that without covering up all the work I had donepre-shading and -highlighting? I went with the panels you can see and the vanes in green and most of the gem shapes in red.

Adding some vines helps break up the large white areas a bit more, but the tank still looks overly pale and is not super-interesting to look at. I think I need to change the colours on the weapon assemblies; my first thought it to make them black to break up the space between the two forks, but a friend suggested making them green, or even just making the tip of the pulsar green. I might have to play around with a photo editor before making up my mind.

As for fighting, well this thing was great in a 6k a side game last weekend. As my side was going second I had to keep the Lynx in reserve to make sure I got the Titan Holofield save when it came on. It went toe-to-toe with a Baneblade and won :) The Lynx costs more than the Imperial tank and has one less Structure Point, but its destroyer weapon and Holofields meant it destroyed the Baneblade with two shots, survived all the return fire and Blood Angels and their Stormraven shooting it at point-blank range with meltas from the rear.

If you're looking for Eldar Apocalypse on a budget, the Lynx is a great investment. Serious firepower and survivability make it a threat to any enemy :)

Tau Riptide

I have been feeling quite encouraged by the hobby in the last few weeks, and, as a result, got a fair bit of painting done. The renewed enthusiasm has come from playing some cool games (Zombicide really is great with four or more players) and attending some cool events. I have also had several great miniatures to put together and paint which always helps of course. Here are some pics of one I finished  today. Well, I say finished. I really mean 'got it to the point where I just don't want to touch it any more'.

 Its a Riptide, obviously. Mine is turquoise.

I think the Codex describes the dominant colour of Tau armour as being essentially a camoflage layer, with accents in the Sept colour. I didn't really feel like doing that though. Maybe its too long painting Eldar and Space Marines who don't tend to care too much about blending in. I just thought turquoise with a nice orangey brown would make a nice contrast. 

 I noticed that the paint job on the box model for the Riptide used proper metallics on the screws on its shoulders so I decided to try that too. It doesn't look bad, but, tbh, dances a bit too close to the too-far line. They stand out a little, is what I mean. I thought about putting more gold elsewhere, but decided it wasnt' absolutely necessary. And, as I hinted earlier, I had really had enough of this model.

 I saw the base a good opportunity for contrast and had to scour the stands at Salute a few weeks back for suitable scenery. The weird red plant-bloomy things are resin casts. The flock is clumps of something autumnal from MiniNatur. The clumps come with glue on the bases but they are not super sticky. I can see them staying on for a while but need a bit of PVA at some point in the future.

 The legs were a real pain in the butt to get right. I clipped off the positioning pins the model comes with to make it more poseable and even took a picture of the wife balancing on a stool so I could line up all the joints the way I wanted. Even then, and even though the model is supposed to be poseable, I could not get quite the dynamic pose I wanted. For one thing the gun on the right arm is so bulky you can't really make it do anything but point straight ahead. You could maybe get a sort of flapping action too, but thats about it. I also had problems with getting the feet to stay stuck to the slates on the base. Eventually I also had to realign the model as I felt the pose I had hid too much of the pieces on the base and by then I had superglued the ankle joints. So it looks cool enough, but its a compromise.

 The real trick, when painting such a large model in so few basic colours, is knowing how much to paint with the accent colour. Too little and he looks like a giant mecha-smurf. Too much and the brown takes over, negating all the time and paint spent making him turquoise. Again, I used the box art as a guide. Whoever painted the GW show-model is a pro - why not learn from the best?

The end result is a nice looking model with enough contrast to engage the eye and draw it in. I hope.

I also magnetised all the weapon options. So as well as a choice of main gun, there are three shoulder options that are easily swappable. I'm not in favour of tailoring at all, but its nice to know you can just flick a weapon off if you feel like varying the Riptide's tactical role.

As for the paints used: the base is GW's Stegadon Scale Green, a layer of Sotek Green, and a final layer of Temple Guard blue. these were all airbrushed on top of a black base coat to get natural shading. I line- and edge-highlighted with mixes of Temple Guard and Bleach Bone. The brown parts are Vallejo's Beasty Brown, highlighted with Vomit Brown (the old GW paint). I also brushed Gryphonne Sepia and a mix of Asurmen Blue and Badab Black into the applicable recesses for shading where it was needed.

Sedition Wars - First Models Finished

A little under a year ago, I was going nuts for the Sedition Wars Kickstarter, by Studio McVey. I missed the bus for the Zombicide fund, but I liked what I saw on its successor and jumped aboard. After a long wait, the game got sent out and, after a slightly shorter pause, I have got round to painting up the first five (of about 50!) figures.

Not quite 10% of the way there...

The setting for the game is a future dystopia, nothing novel there. Except in this world-gone-mad, terrorists have attempted to awaken ancient gods or something but inadvertently fused AI with bio-matter, creating a new life-form - the Strain. Dun, dun derrrrr! Sedition Wars: The Battle for Alabaster takes place in a research station that has been infested with this new biohazard - players can be either the troops sent in to investigate and reclaim the place or the Strain.

Gameplay is fun enough, but I really want to talk about the miniatures here.

The McVeys are artists, so the visual design of the set is a pretty big component.

Girls! In space!

The art and the mini's have what I can't help thinking of as a 'European' feel. Maybe its the fact women are part of the Vanguard - the combat troops sent in to the fight. Maybe its the fact there are non-Caucasians in there.  But I think there's something else about the while thing that just doesn't feel like standard Americanised sci-fi. Nothing against Americans or American sci-fi.  But I'm not going to buy just any old marines-in-space game. These figures are all very very cool though. I'm looking forward to painting Akosha and the higher level Strain models in particular. But you do get a lot in the box, even if you don't have the Biohazard pledge level set with double the basic figure count or all the optional extras to work through. Add to that my addiction to BLOPS2 and Aliens:CM, and, well, its going to be a while before they're all ready.

Master Who?

The five Vanguard I have finished off are based with GW's Astronomicon Grey, washed with a mix of blue and black wash, layered again with the Grey, then a layer of Grey mixed with Skull White, then a line highlight of White. This gives a very cold looking model, so, to contrast,  I did the visors with a base of Blazing Orange, then a layer of Vallejo's Amarillo Yellow, and a highlight of Sunburst Yellow. For the ladies, basic skin tones and light coloured hair provided a bit of warmth. The bases are all done with a base of Black mixed with a touch of Codex Grey. I then drybrushed them with Codex Grey, Fortress Grey, and, finally, Space Wolves Grey. I washed them with thinned Desert Yellow, and added a few spots of Devlan Mud for added warmth.

Not entirely gratuitous - also to show the detail on the back

For playing pieces for a board game, I'm fairly happy with the standard and it didn't actually take too long either.

Next: a few Strain grunts, before I treat myself to a character mini.

Wargames Terrain: Oil Barrels

In ascending order of awesomeness, here are some awesome things to look at:

• A gaming table full of models fighting each other
• A gaming table full of painted models fighting each other
• A gaming table full of painted models fighting each other in and around painted scenery and objectives.

This week I decided to challenge myself a little bit and paint something I don't normally do: scenery. GW added exploding fuel dumps as an optional extra to the latest version of 40k. I have had a small piece of barrel-filled scenery sitting on the shelf for months now, plus I came home with another set from Games Day (free! From GW!), so I decided to paint those suckers up and make some. obstacles/objectives for wargames.

First up, the set of barrels and jerry cans from the GW batttlefield scenery kit. You only get three barrels and two cans in the set, which is barely enough to make one fuel dump. Its representative of a fuel dump, is probably as generously as its possible to describe the piece. But with 6th ed. rules you can hide behind them, I guess, and thus make them explode. So hey ho.

On the other hand, these are the barrels GW gave me fore free(!) at Games Day this year. Now thats more like it. A proper collection of potentially explosive containers. They also gave me some tinfoil (!) and half-heartedly told me I could paint it as camo netting. I binned that though as I had a better idea - see below.

First the paints used and techniques. This all comes from Forge World's Model Masterclass Volume 1 - a great primer on advanced modeling and painting.

I sprayed the cans with Desert Yellow first. GW don't make this paint any more, of course, because it was great, so you'll need to find your own alternative. It doesn't really matter too much what you choose as the base as you'll be weathering the *&%$ out of it later on. But I recommend a khaki or olive colour for verisimilitude.

I then sponged on Charadon Granite to get the chipping, concentrating on raised edges and the top and bottoms of the barrels as this is where the worst wear would occur. And that is a hard sentence to say or type.If you can't get Charadon Granite, look for a dark grey, almost black to sponge on instead.

 To pick out the details I used a mix of black and brown oil paints, thinned with thinners, gently pushed into the corners and crevices. The nature of the thinners causes the mix to flow along these lines, so mixing it up in the first place is probably the hardest part of this job.

I then made up some rust with the brown oil paint. some thinners, and some rust weathering powder. I flicked this onto the drums just by stroking my finger along the bristles of an old brush that was loaded with the rust mix. You get a nice splattering pattern this way, which you can then soften up by spraying on more thinners.

I used thinned brown ink as 'oil' and dribbled it around the seams of the barrels and on the flooring around them. This is definitely a no-smoking area. Lots of oil and dirt lying around. These cans are meant to be used and reused.

To make the larger stack of barrels a proper source of cover and concealment, I wanted to add some camo netting that would look a bit more convincing than painted tinfoil. I'm not saying you can't paint tinfoil to look awesome. Just that I can't. So, using another technique from Model Masterclass, I raided my First Aid box for a bit of bandage. I soaked this in watered down PVA glue, wrung it out, then draped it over the barrels.

The next morning the bandage had dried almost completely stiff. I first glued on several strips of thin masking tape. then painted it all with watered-down Graveyard Earth and lots of it. The bandage naturally soaks up the paint, I may have wrung too much of the glue out, and requires lots of coverage. I finished it off with a drybrush of Kommando Khaki, and hey presto, a camoflaged fueld dump.

 I'm very pleased with how the barrels came out, perhaps less so with the camo netting. I wonder if there is some way to paint the fabric before gluing it and setting it in place.

For now, I have two nicely painted bits of scenery to go on the table :) Next up - the ammo canisters.

Good old fashioned Blood Angel Terminators (with NMM)

I had a great day at Wayland Games/Tabletop Nation today, including a sweet game of 40k where my Eldar/Corsairs tabled a bunch of Grey Knights :) More on that tomorrow (I think). For today, here's some Blood Angel Terminators I painted a while back.

 Having painted nearly thirty Space Wolf Termies before this lot, it was kind of a relief to build and paint models with pretty much the same armour and equipment. Paint for the armour is the usual recipe of Mechrite Red, Blood Red layer, Blazing Orange and Vomit Brown highlights and Graveyard Earth shade.

 The Storm Shield has a very basic Codex Grey base. I forgot what I used for shades and highlights. I believe the cracked effects are just lines of Codex Grey/Chaos Black mix, with a very fine highlight of skull white (maybe a very light grey?) to give that 3D effect.

The 'nid skull is a spare from a genestealer sprue. Its a happy coincidence that the few 'nids I have painted have been that colour as it matches the colours on the termies really well. Almost as if I planned it...

 Side view - so you can see the Forge World shoulder pads. The sculpt quality is pretty good. You can keep the ribbons and parchment as far as I am concerned, but the winged blood drops are really sharply cast - very easy to paint up with a striking contrast between the recesses and raised points. I don't think the Blood Angels pack is nearly as good as the Space Wolves one - it would have been nice to see a proper conversion kit, rather than just an upgrade style pack. But they are still a nice way to mark out your BA terminators out as different than the plain boxed ones.

 So here I wanted to show the blend I did for the NMM effect on the Thunder Hammer. There's something about taking pictures with my phone when the light is really strong though, hence that bar effect you can see. I suspect its just that the light is too strong for my camera, but hopefully you get the idea. For a steel effect, I often start with a base of Hawk Turquoise/Bleached Bone. I then blend up to Space Wolves Grey, then through to White. I blend down to Regal Blue.

Getting this NMM effect is, in my opinion, easier on smaller pieces, like these blades or Dreadnought claws, than on big pieces of armour. Thats because you only have to worry about light coming from one direction. Often my NMM blends can actually look really crumby until the very last step - the edge highlight and notching. I often do this with my lightest blend of the base but you can do it with straight white paint too. Basically, you overbrush the edges (every one!) so you get a fine edge highlight and then add a few diagonal streaks. Depending on how you do it, you can get either the effect of the blade being pitted from striking hard objects of seeming to shine with reflected light.

You don't have to do a NMM blend to get this effect either. Even if you use the old Boltgun Metal/Badab Black wash, followed by a drybrush with Chainmail technique, you can add a degree of verisimilitude to your blade by adding these notches/streaks. The trick is getting the lines thing enough to look natural and then knowing when to stop :)

PLEASE do feel free to ask any questions. I know you are reading this :) If you have any questions about any of the stuff I have painted or written about, leave a comment. Unless you're going to be rude, of course. In which case, move on - this isn't the place for you :)

Eldar Phoenix Bomber Paint Job - Now with Greyscale!

Finished greenstuffing all the gaps and holes in the bomber this morning. One of the tips I picked up at the GW open day was using the back of a knife to smooth down GS surfaces once they've dried for at least a day. Using this, I've done a passable job on all the surfaces and its time to paint.

I decided to use a greyscale base on the plane, so as to help with shading and highlighting later on. The idea of pre-shading and -highlighting is to apply a multi-tonal base. When you spray thin coats of other colours on top of this, the difference between the dark and light areas shows through.

First then, I sprayed the whole thing black.

Nothing special here, just some black primer.

Then I carefully sprayed a layer of Codex Grey. I took care to avoid the base of the slopes, and where pieces were joined together.

Then a layer of Fortress Grey. This was lighter than the previous one and I took care to put more on the edges of the wings and fuselage and raised areas, such as over the jet intakes.

Now its time for some colour. First a layer of Mechrite Red. This goes on fairly evenly - I'm counting on the greyscale to add depth and definition.

And (almost finally) some Blood Red. As with the greys, I emphasised the edges of surfaces and raised areas.

Thats it for the base colours. Now I need to use some liquid mask to mark out the spirals and probably to protect some of the gems and other details too. This is because this red recipe is really strongly pigmented and painting over it can be a right job to do. For example, painting the gold bits on my Blood Angels sometimes requires a layer of flat brown before the gold paints as the red just shines through otherwise. I want to do some blue gems and the detailing will likely be in gold too, so there's some work to do this evening...