Using Kuler to Create Color Swatches

I'm starting to appreciate the "science" aspect to painting more and more, especially in regard to color. It's one thing to just slap a base coat down, throw a highlight on, and then wash it with a shading wash. It's another to paint in a way to represent reality. Don't get me wrong, I do my fair share of quick painting to get models on the table, particularly for models I'm primarily painting just to play. However for the last year I've been trying to train my eye to better understand the colors I'm seeing in the real world. It's actually quite fascinating once you stop and look closer. What follows is a new technique I've added to my toolbox to help in that regard. This was inspired by starting to work on the Lady Justice model, and her predominant feature: long flowing red hair. I've tried red hair before and had, at best, mediocre success. Time to step up my game!


The first step was to find a reference photo. A quick Google photo search turns up plenty of options. I scanned a few and settled on this one. I've included the link to the original site, which has nothing to do with painting of course. I won't elaborate too much on why I chose this photo too much. The key reasons are: 1) It matched the tone I was looking for, and 2) It was large enough to provide good detail so that when I load it into Kuler, it would be easy to pick out various color zones. That leads me on to the next step...





Enter the magic of Kuler! There's definitely other ways to accomplish this same goal, but I'm going to use Kuler because it's free and easy. Simply pop it open in a browser, hit "Create", and then "From an Image". Then you upload your reference photo. Kuler will automatically attempt to guess what colors you want for your theme, but that's not why we're here. You'll see that it gives you the image with 5 targets to move around. Simply move the targets around and they will display their target pixel's color at the bottom on the swatch. For this photo, I moved them all to various points of the red hair to get a sense of the color variation. If you want to create a Kuler account, you can save your swatches for future reference.

Something fascinating about red hair is that it isn't really all that "red" most of the time. It's more brown and orange than anything else. The swatch above shows that it's got a lot of flesh and tan tones to it. All of these colors have red components to them, but are not dominantly red.


Armed with my Kuler swatch, I now embark on trying to mimic those colors. I've got a bunch of plasticard pieces sitting around to create actual physical swatches with. As you can see here, what I've done is put down some paint that I think fairly matches the first color from the Kuler swatch. Unfortunately trying to photograph both my laptop screen and the swatch together doesn't do it justice. However, in this case I managed to match pretty closely using just P3 Umbral Umber. I then repeat this process for the other colors of the Kuler swatch until I've filled out my plasticard swatch.

And here's the finished plasticard swatch. I labeled the back for reference. This will definitely come in handy in the future. There's clearly plenty of ways to accomplish this same goal. For example, I've heard of other painters using notebooks to keep notes of particular color builds. For me, having swatch cards like this will come in very handy I think. This will also be useful as I start to work on Lady Justice's hair.

Vanguard

The Vanguard is an intriguing model to assemble and paint. It has sort of a hunched pose to it, with its legs bent down quite a lot. I'm not really a huge fan of the legs and considered trying to rebuild them, but in the end it seemed like too much trouble. I can always to a second one eventually if I get that motivated. Otherwise it's a pretty nice model. The shield afforded a nice opportunity to put some battle damage on it to represent its shield guard ability. I didn't want to overdo it, and I think I captured just the right amount of battle damage. Other than the right hand, I decided to avoid any battle damage anywhere else, to represent how it was doing its job using the shield and not its body.

Nothing much extra to say here. It's really another speed paint job, but I tried to put some decent zenithal highlighting practices to work on it.

Yay for Mercenaries!

Another slightly delayed and pictureless battle report. I got two games in the other day with my merc selection and these were two incredibly fun games. Here's the highlights...

Battle 1 - 35pts:
Me: Ashlynn, Vanguard, Nomad, 2 Forgeguard(6), Gun mages + UA, Herne & Jonne, Dougal, Bokur and Stannis.
Henry: eDoomshaper, Mulg, Axer, Mauler, Fennblades(10), Fell Caller, Chronicler, Swamp Gobbers.

This battle was actually more about testing out stuff than a serious throwdown. I won the initiative and used the opportunity to rush up towards the middle, putting Quicken on one unit of Forgeguard and Admonition on Ashlynn. The trolls likewise rushed forward and spread out, with the Chronicler putting that loathsome song on the Fennblades to knockdown enemies that kill them. Both of us had positioned troopers in the way of our heavy hitters. At this point I had a decision to make. Due to the positioning of my heavy hitters and the threat of Mulg and the Mauler, I decided to take a sort of balanced advance plan. Dougal used his mini-feat and then his action to boost up Jonne's gun. Herne and Jonne opened up, clearing out multiple Fennblades. Then the Gun mages opened up, killing some more Fennblades and also managing to push back the Mauler and Mulg by 3" with thunderbolt strikes. The Forgeguard then charged and eliminated all but 3 of the remaining Fennblades which failed their command check at that point. Stannis moved up as well taking a shot, and then the Bokur and Vanguard took up flanking defensive positions for Ashlynn who advanced and camped her 4 focus. I specifically move her up and told Henry to go for it with Mulg and see if he can kill her. Boy was that a mistake! Mulg was easily over 12" away, and probably more like 14-15". The Mauler advanced and 2-handed threw Stannis at the Vanguard, just barely catching Ashlynn and knocking her down. It was super borderline and probably a 50/50 roll, but I gave it to him to taunt him into committing Mulg. Then eDoomshaper put wild agression and rush on Mulg and feated. From there it was just a whirlwind of obscene abuse. Mulg charged in and started clobering his way through things, using overtake and goad to close in easily on Ashlynn with 4 fury remaining. At that point it was academic.

In review, I could have played this game much more conservatively and feated with Ashlynn and hung back, but it was an interesting test. Mulg is a serious beatstick, and even without eDoomshaper's feat Mulg's overtake would have gotten him there which is just frightening. The arguments about his being overcosted are now firmly in the realm of being ignored by me. Sure, eDoomshaper is a great combo for him, but the overtake was really the star of the show for him.

Battle 2 - 50pts:
Me: Fiona, Buccaneer, Vanguard, Alexia, Gun mages + UA, Mariner (marshalled by Gun mage officer), Aiyana & Holt, Dougal, Nyss Hunters (10), Bokur, Sea Dogs (6 + 3 riflemen).
Henry: eAsphyxious, Reaper, 2 Deathrippers, Wrathe, Soulhunters(5), Tartarus, Bane Knights(10), Withershadow, Skarlock, Gorman, and probably other stuff but I forget.

This battle turned into a mercenary toolbox display. Again I won the initiative (shocking), and rushed forward, putting Nanokian Brand on the Mariner, Teglesh Mark on the Buccaneer, and Roth's Mercy on the Nyss. The Cryx army moved into position, with the Soulhunters running to engage the Nyss, and Asphyxious throwing an AOE and killing Aiyana, Holt, and 3 gun mages. It was time to show what mercs can really do. The first challenge was clearing a bit more of a hole in the middle, so gun mages and sea dogs opened up with a hail of bullets and cleared out a couple key bane knights. Alexia also used the opportunity to command a Bane Knight to kill his buddy. Then the Buccaneer, fueled with 2 focus, attempts the assault charge on Asphyxious. This went wrong in a couple ways. First, Asphixious was sitting in a Gorman cloud and thus def 17, so the Buccaneer needed a 12 to hit, which he missed. Second, he ended up in melee range of a Bane Knight, thus negating his Teglesh Mark. Doh! Despite the failed attempt to knock down the enemy caster, the Mariner stands firm, takes aim, and fires a sniped shot. I'd like to point out that with Dougal's mini-feat and snipe from the Gun Mage marshalling, he's got a 20" range with that deck gun. He had to use his boost in order to hit, but BAM, he laid some damage on the caster, which is always good news. However, I now faced a dire situation. The Nyss managed to cut down a couple Soulhunters and keep the flank held but I was going to be in trouble the next round, so Fiona marched forward, camped on her 5 focus, and used her feat. The following Cryx round was hilarious. The -1 die prevented taking hardly any casualties, and forced the Cryx to try and tie up key things in melee. The poor Buccaneer got blinded by Gorman and then cut into little pieces by the Withershadow, which promptly re-assembled him into a bonejack, the first time I'd ever seen this happen. The Bane Knights ran up and engaged the Gun Mages in melee, and the remaining Soul Hunters engaged the remaining Nyss. Tartarus, in a rash display of anger, charged forward and threshered to kill half of Alexia's remaining risen. Asphyxious laid out some spell action through the arcnode, but failed to hit his target. Due to an unfortunate dice roll, the Reaper failed to hit the Mariner with his harpoon, and thus 2 more focus went to waste. All-in-all, Fiona's feat made the Cryx army cry trying to hit def 13-15 troops on a single die to hit. There was much smiling on the merc side of the table. At this point, I could see how things would eventually turn out: Cryx would grind me down. It was time to pull out all the stops. Fiona dropped all her upkeeps and held her 7 focus (no bonus due to poor positioning of sea dogs on my part). I had a narrow path down the middle that needed to be cleared for my master plan. The Nyss cut down a key Soulhunter to clear the left side of the lane. The sea dogs ganged up and cleared a key Bane Knight on the right side of the lane. Then Alexia slid to the side, sacked a risen to boost herself up, and commanded Tartarus to do the unthinkable: walk back and stab Asphyxious. Success! Tartarus turned around, walked forward, and brought his blade down on his master. At the command of his client Fiona, the Bokur then ran up the lane to 4" behind Tartarus and smiled with confusion as hit orders. Then Fiona steps up to the plate. She Teglesh Mark's the Bokur and promptly starts rolling out the Influences on Tartarus. Slash! Slash! And down goes the evil Asphyxious at the hand of his own minion!!

I can't express just how amusing this battle was. Henry was cracking up at the amusement that was my merc force. For me it was like one of those huge Christmases where you just keep opening presents with new surprises. The flexibility of Fiona continues to amuse me, and her feat doesn't pose the same logistical challenge to me that Ashlynn's does which makes her less difficult to plan around. The entire army brought such a toolbox of options for me that it would be hard to pick an MVP, but Alexia is definitely on the short list. I'm very excited about mercs and really feel like MK2 has brought them up to a respectable level of competitiveness.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with another long battle report. This weekend I'm hoping to get some serious painting time in, and perhaps even another battle.

Resurgence Recap

Resurgence has come and gone (a few days ago now), and the event was a blast! This is unfortunately a photo-free post of the event. All 3 of my games took the full time allowed and I didn't get a chance to wander around and take shots of the other games going on. Even my games were intense enough that I didn't remember to take pictures during
the battle. Overall that was a good thing though.

The Event:
This tournament was a hit. There were 14 players there, several of which I had never met before. In talking with some of them, there were a few that had played years before, but were just now getting back into it due to MK2. And despite opening it up to Hordes players as well, it was an entirely Warmachine event. I'm not positive on the exact breakdown, but there was pretty good representation for all the factions, looking roughly like this: Cygnar - 2, Protectorate - 2, Khador - 4, Cryx - 3, Retribution - 2, Mercs - 1. I have to give a shout out to my LGS as well. There's a different event organizer now and he had the tournament ready to go right on schedule. And other than a couple hiccups with assigning matches in rounds 2 and 3, everything went pretty well for being a new organizer.

My List:
25pts: Kreoss, Crusader, Devout, Zealots (10+UA), Choir (6), Knights Exemplar, Vassal, 3 Wracks
35pts: Kreoss -> eKreoss, + Avatar
50pts: Crusader -> Fire of Salvation, + Repenter, Hierophant, Orin Midwinter, Paladin, Covenant
I had a couple key goals to my list planning. First, I wanted to get the Avatar in as soon as possible, which meant I had to do some jiggery-pokery with swapping in eKreoss at the 35pt level. That also meant I needed to make sure the core of my list was already contained in the 25pt list, including the Vassal. Second, I wanted to have a serious Menoth knot, with an array of denial that would cause serious problems. It doesn't really come together until the 50pt level though, at which point the knot is in full swing with lots of spell denial, and knockdown protection.

My Matches:
My first match was against a pretty typical Deneghra list. This battle was actually pretty close, but my opponent played his army extremely well and with impeccable timing of his abilities. The match actually came very close to being won on scenerio by myself, but I ran out of time.
My second match was against the other Protectorate player who had brought a Testament list with lots of troops. Not surprisingly, we tarpitted in the middle and just kept punching each other in the face. I don't really feel like either of us had the upper hand during the match. Again, we ran out of time during my turn, but this time it would have been hard to actually clear the middle zone. In a longer time game I would have been able to grind it out pretty easily.
My third match was against Henry and his eSkarre list. We'd played almost this same exact battle previously. It really is a painful match because eSkarre's feat is just brutal, especially in a smaller model count battle. I ended up forfeiting a bit before time ran out because there was no way for me to really pull it out. The highlight of the battle though was when the Deathjack marches up, arm locks the Avatar (preventing both Enliven and the shield bonus), and the promptly attacks a zealot standing next to it which was Sancrosanct. Bam! Knocked down! There was much laughing at the moment as Henry realized his folly. Still though, a well played game.
Overall the frustrating thing about my first two matches was losing the initiative and then running out of time during my 3rd turn. In the case of the first match it probably made the difference between a win and a loss. The whole "dice down" thing really isn't my favorite thing. My biggest criticism of the event was that there could have been less time sorting out the pairings between rounds, and spend more time actually on the rounds.

The Results:
In the end it turned out that Retribution won the event. I was pretty shocked actually. The final match was a battle between Khador and Retribution. Unfortunately I was unable to get much more detail about the championship battle. I think that the specifics of the scenario caused a number of ties to take place, and I noticed that Retribution player was routinely done early with all his matches, which means it was likely that he was pulling off assassinations every time. I myself won the Protectorate coin, despite a pretty dismal record. I have to say, I really like the coins as rewards instead of the trophies from the SR4 tournaments.

The Community:
Overall I was pretty impressed with the players there. Everyone seemed to have a good time and I didn't see any serious rules debates. All 3 of my matches were quite civil and very enjoyable.
A shout out goes to Henry for being our Press Ganger lite, in the absence of our previous PG who has moved on to a different game now. *sigh*
One final note was that I got to be a part of a little community support behavior myself there. One of our Cygnar players had a Stormlance model that had broken right above the hoof. So I brought my trusty pinning kit (dremel, brass rod, glue, files, etc) and did a quick repair job for him.

Templar Kit Project - Part 2

Assembly:
There's a good guide in No Quarter #24 for assembling the Bastion kit which I made sure to refer to beforehand. Really there's nothing amazing to note except for using regular superglue instead of that nasty plastic-melting bonding agent that a lot of other kits need.

In terms of pinning, there wasn't much needed. Being lighter, the plastics are a lot more resilient to popping apart. However, being neurotic like I am, I decided to pin a couple spots. The dremel makes very quick work of this step so pinning effort is almost zero. The biggest risk is not accidentally drilling all the way through the piece since the plastic is so much softer.

For this kit, there are 3 heads. I thought briefly about magnetizing the heads so that I could swap them out, however that just sounded like way too much work for so little benefit. To that end, I opted to just use the Templar's head, since that's the model I bought the kit for. I think it is nice that they included all 3 heads.

Magnets:
Now it's time to talk about magnets. This was a pretty tricky proposition for me since I'd never magnetized parts of a model before so I knew this was going to be an adventure. I made sure to pick parts from the Crusader and Vanquisher to do first in case I trashed something in the process. Fortunately I already had some magnets left over from previous orders, so I got drill bits that matched the diameter of the magnets. Then I broke out the power drill. Not the dremel. The power drill. Talk about scary! I hand-drilled a pilot hole with my pin-vise drill and then proceeded to use the big drill. It worked out pretty well overall. In a couple situations I had to green-stuff things back together, but for the most part it worked well.

It took me a couple hours of messing around and carefully drilling and assembling, I got magnets into all the places I needed. Everything holds together quite well, especially since the magnets I used were probably more powerful than I really needed. There were a couple of key challenges:

First, the shield was a real pain in the ass to get on there. I ended up pinning paperclips into the hand (since they are ferrous) and then putting 2 magnets on the back of the shield. It sort of works, but the shield doesn't hold in an angle that looks good.

Second, the left arm (that holds the shield) has a tendency to swivel a bit. It's a result of the way the magnets are in place and their polarities.

So, given those two issues, I'm thinking that probably my solution will be to put a pin in to keep the pieces straight with just one end of the pin glued in.

Well, that's the progres so far. Here's a picture of the Templar configuration assembled. Next step will be to add those final stabilizing pins and then get him primed. He's definitely not going to be ready for the Resurgence tournament at my LGS this weekend. Overall I'm fairly happy with how the magnetizing is working out. I'd like the model pieces to fit together a little tighter, but given this was my first attempt at it I can't complain too much. If there are questions out there about the plastic kit in general feel free to post comments and I'll respond.

Templar Kit Project - Part 1

Ah... Sunday Afternoon! Time to sit down at the painting desk, put on a WM podcast episode, and start a new project. This last week I bought my first PP plastic kit: the Protectorate Heavy Warjack kit. There's a lot of controversy about PP going with plastics, and I figured I'd provide my own perspective by actually walking through my assembly and painting of this kit. My goal here is to review the benefits and drawbacks of plastics. I should note that long ago I played Warhammer 40k (15+ years ago), and so I'm familiar with old plastic kit bashing, so I'm not a neophyte in this arena. However I also have a certain preference for metal models.

Please note that I'll be writing these posts as I'm actually doing the steps I'm writing about, so it may be a little disjointed.

The Product:
My first impression of the kit is pretty favorable. It includes all the parts to build a Vanquisher, Crusader, or Templar. It also includes the cards for all three. The plastic parts are all in a series of connected plastic bags. Everything is packaged so that it's easy to review that all the parts are there. As you can see from the picture, it's mostly the same parts for all 3 jacks with the exception of the arms/hands and heads. It didn't take me more than about a minute to decide to magnetize the arms. It should be pretty easy to do it and it's a project I've wanted to try for quite a while now.

Detail-wise, I was a bit concerned about the pieces. I grabbed my Crusader and Vanquisher from the display case to compare parts. Overall, I can't say the detail level is noticeably lower. There's pieces that seem less detailed, and others that seem more detailed. The plastic pieces definitely have the option of sharper edges, whereas metals don't seem to support that. My impression on this kit is that any reduced detail level is more a reflection of the sculpting and not the material or casting method. I'll be curious to see other kits.

Trimming:
Trimming the plastic parts is pretty easy. As opposed to metals where I almost entirely use micro-files, for these I entirely used a hobby knife. In general these seem to be relatively few mold lines, but that's typical for a new kit. I definitely found that it was harder for my eye to pick out the mold lines on these plastic pieces, primarily due to it being a material I'm not used to. However the hobby knife definitely makes quick work of mold lines and trimming went pretty fast. I will say that the mess factor of plastics is different. With metals, there are lots of little flakes and filing which have their own challenge to clean up. Plastics tend to create little strips and being light, their static electricity makes them stick to things.

I also used this opportunity to try the hair-dryer trick. Sho'nuff, it works like a charm. I took the Vanquisher flail hand attachment and held the chain under a hair dryer. After a few seconds I could see it bend by gravity alone. At that point I turned off the hair dryer and held it in the position I wanted it to stay in. I blew lightly on it to cool it back down and viola! Very easy I must say.

Well, that's enough for today. Next time I'll cover the assembly, since that will turn into a pretty large step. I'm include the magnetizing as well most likely.

eKreoss vs eButcher = OUCH!

Last night I tested out my 35pt eKreoss list (with a couple modifications) against an eButcher list. Everything was going well until he feated. Then the wheels came off the bus and suddenly poor Kreoss was getting cut down by a Spriggan! It was relatively close, and some poor positioning on my part is what really enabled the situation, but still I have to give props to my opponent for really managing to wriggle out of a tight situation. I had the Avatar holding the center, barely still alive after the Butcher tore into him pretty good, locking most of the board down with his holy gaze. However it wasn't enough to hold off the assault.

I swapped in Eiryss into my list and I have to admit I wasn't super impressed with her as an addition to the list. I think there's still some refinement to go on my remaining 5 pts. Part of the challenge last night was that the Khador list didn't possess any of the elements that my list is good at negating (spells), and its strengths were in areas that I'm still somewhat weak in (hard targets).

Sorry for the terrible picture (unfortunately), but it's better than nothing I suppose. Next up I'll be doing a series of posts on the Templar kit. I picked one up (despite my concerns around plastic models) and will do a series of posts about my experience with it from start to finish.