Workhorse Brush
When I upgraded my brushes to Winsor & Newton Series 7's a few years ago, I started paying more attention to brush care. With the brushes' higher cost, I wanted to get as much life out of them as possible. For me that meant keeping an older brush around to do my painting dirty work.
Before I started using the S7's, I was pretty rough with my brushes. I was guilty of all of the brush sins, including things like stabbing at models sometimes with the brush and letting paint get into the ferrule regularly. While this wasn't a big deal when I was spending a buck a brush, I knew I had to change my habits with the new brushes, but doing so would slow me down. Lets face it - when you're base coating, dry brushing, or otherwise just trying to lay paint down quickly, doing things right takes more time.
¿Qué pasa con todo el azul?
My painting has been progressing slowly but steadily. Nowadays it seems like I can only spend so much time with the brush before I need a break. But I recently made progress on a handful of miniatures so I figured it was time to add to my (lacking as of late) collection of WIP shots.
Rhoven & Honor Guard
First up is Rhoven and the Honor Guard. I posted some initial WIPs of the Honor Guard a while back and since then I've made some pretty good progress. The Honor Guards have actually been sitting mostly done for a little while now while I worked on Rhoven himself.
I'm most happy with the lower portion of Rhoven's robes so far, but there's still some work that needs to be done. I'm going to repaint the stole for starters; the highlights were pretty borked when I did them the first time. That and some more general cleanup work should make him ready for sealing.
Photography Woes
I've been less than satisfied with most of the pictures from my last few rounds of miniature photography. I'm not sure what the problem is, but my color balance has been all kinds of out of whack. Even the manual color balance option on my camera hasn't been able to produce the results I'm after.
The miniatures that I've put in my last couple of site updates have each been photographed a few times now, and there are about half as many up as there should be, simply because they haven't turned out any good. I'm using the same photography set up I've been using for a few years now, but suddenly it's like I've forgotten what I was doing.
I'm just going to have to keep trying to fix my color balance and re-trying, but my goal of getting caught up by the end of the year is looking frustratingly less and less likely.
Diminutive Denizens Update: Nov 11, 2009
- Uploaded new miniatures:
- Added the Officer & Musician to the Striders, Legion of Everblight Unit
- Typhon, Legion of Everblight Character Heavy Warbeast
- Two Warmonger War Chiefs, Legion of Everblight Solos
- Fire of Salvation, Protectorate of Menoth Character Heavy Warjack
- Blessing of Vengeance, Protectorate of Menoth Character Light Warjack
- Update to the generated RSS feed to better integrate with feed readers.
Photography Slackage
Looking over my painted miniature gallery, it looks like the last time it was updated was August 8th.
Of 2008.
It would be fair to call that significant slackage. It's not that I haven't painted anything since then, I just haven't taken the time to photograph my miniatures and post. Yet. Time to shame myself into action.
Exemplar of Hate
When I sat down with my Bastions the other day to prep them for painting, I decided to knock out Rhoven’s Honor Guard at the same time. It’s been a couple years since I painted any exemplar models and I remembered I hated painting their armor, but I forgot just how time consuming it was.
I've been asked a few times how long it takes me to paint a model. Most of the time I don't keep track of how much time I spend on a given model - I usually don't want to know how many hours of my life I've spent on this hobby.
Usually I listen to podcasts, music, or DVD's while I paint, and the length of one of the podcast episodes I was listening to happened to correspond to a painting step that shed a pale sickly light on how long I had been at work on my exemplars.
Continue reading...
Miniature Sealant
Once a miniature hits the table, it's inevitably going to be subjected to the rigors of gaming. Even the most careful of gamers will have accidents. It's painful to see hours of hard work spent painting a figure vanish in one quick tabletop accident, but that's why most gamers seal their miniatures after painting them.
So how do you want it?
Sealants come in a variety of finishes, but for the most part they can be grouped as gloss, satin, and matte. Most people prefer a matte finish on their gaming miniatures but this brings with it a problem. Unfortunately the strength of a sealant is usually proportional with how glossy the finish is, meaning matte sealants tend to offer the least amount of protection to miniatures. This isn't as much of an issue with a display pieces but with a model that will face the rigors of the game table it means being more susceptible to damage.
Switching Gears – Painting RPG Miniatures
After the rush to get my army painted for Hardcore and the disappointment of not being able to play, I decided to take a break from painting Privateer Press miniatures. I'll come back to them soon enough but I spent the past couple weeks finishing up a handful of models for our weekly roleplaying game.
Hordes: Frostfang Brood
When I just tried digging up a link to my write-ups on the color scheme for my Warmachine/Hordes armies, I found an article for The Vermillion Menofix but I didn't see one for my Legion force. So to remedy that I snagged this off another forum and have copied it here to my blog.
Looking over my Legion of Everblight models, it didn't take long for me to decide to go with a color scheme that matched their background in the frozen mountains to the north. I immediately decided to have a cool blue be a dominant color and worked from there, eventually coming up with a 'bone-and-blue' scheme shown below. I won this warpack in a drawing the day of release and I began assembling the models relatively soon thereafter. The paint job was chosen to be unique at the time, but it turned out that since I started a number of people have had the same idea and my models were by no means the first ones done with this scheme.
Many of the techniques I started using on my Legion models were relatively simple and there were a great deal of large expanses to do but still... for some reason I felt drained after painting these up and had to take a break for a bit before picking the brush back up. I don't think I've ever painted a miniature (or group of miniatures) that took as much out of me as the Legion of Everblight Warpack did.
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Recent Posts
- I’m Jinxing it
- Workhorse Brush
- ¿Qué pasa con todo el azul?
- St. Louis Privateer Weekend III: June 4th – 6th, 2010
- Borderlands: No Heaven
- Packing Away the Cards
- The Fallacy of Risk vs. Resource Resource Management
- Hero Quest: Return of Zargon
- Revolving Door Villains
- Earthdawn 3e: Character Generation
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