The Mauler Extreme

No witty title today. This guy has taken a long time. He's not fabulous, but he's done.

Things I learned while working on him:

• With a really large model, simpler is better. Trying to mix my own shades got me in some trouble when I didn't mix enough to finish all the areas I wanted to work on.
  
  
• Large heavy models are hard to handle. I fully assembled this guy to avoid having join points show up as much, but this guy is a beast. Seriously, he was just awkward to hold while painting.
• Future floor wax is great and all, but too much of it makes things shiny (duh). I went back to using just water to thin paints for this model. I used entirely P3's for paints and the P3's already have a somewhat satin finish. Lots of Future was just making it too shiny.
• Matt medium rules.

Deliveries go in the Back

My delivery arrived... I totally binged on models since I got down to just 1 model left to paint. Mostly Protectorate and Trolls, with a couple mercs and minions thrown in for good measure. Given that I'm on vacation next week, I'm hoping to get a bunch of painting done. Next up after the eMauler will probably be the Daughters of the Flame. As much as I want to do more solos, I really need another squad, and these little hotties are just begging for a classy paint job. I'm thinking I might go with something other than white and red. Maybe green and black. Something more sneaky at least.

The Blood Feud Continues

Last Wednesday (I'm only 2 days behind on posting now) I played against Zugbart again. He has once again done a marvelous job of writing of the battle. Next time I hope to remember my camera so I can snap some pics. I'll once again give some highlights from my side of the battle:

• Stupid trolls with stupid tough on everything! I swear, I've never seen such good luck with tough rolls in my life.
• Warbeasts are crazy. I need to focus on killing a single one rather than spreading my army out. I'm used to battling warjacks that can't repair. The two-handed throws and slamming are really gronking my normal tactics.
• Feora was totally the all-star. She comeplete annihilated the blitzer in one round, without even charging. I need to figure out how to get her more into the fray earlier on.
• Fire rules. Apparently when you're tough, you don't notice you are on fire.
• My normal tactics are pretty much brute force. I need to start using the terrain more to my advantage and spacing my guys out better.

I need to put together a serious "A" list for next week. Menoth must be getting sick of all my poor showings lately. Time to put the trolls in their place!

Primetime Tournament

This is sort of a catchup post. The Primetime tournament was last Saturday. Geez I'm a slacker at this blogging thing. In my own defense, I've done alot of painting on the eMauler, and been uber busy at work. Anyway, the summary from the tournament was that I got smoted... badly. However I learned a few things. Some of these could be viewed as whining, and I'm ok with that.

• Out of the 3 games I played, they were all against Crxy. Cryx made up half of the armies in the tournament. Not only that, but they were infantry heavy lists. One had 2 deathrippers and the rest was infantry. Mostly skarre lists too.
• People only bring their A lists to tournaments... rarely do people bring any sort of experimental lists.
• Warmachine (unlike Hordes) seems to be favoring infantry heavy lists. Especially against Cryx, it's just impossible to leverage enough attacks to inflict the same number of VPs in damage.
• Steamroller missions for Prime-only protectorate are pretty difficult.
• The tournaments just aren't as fun as random games. I'm hoping that the league games are more entertaining.

Anyway, here's the quick breakdown of the battles. I brought a Severius list with a Revenger, Vanquisher, Knights, Zealots, a few Deliverers, Eiryss and a Paladin.

The first game was Skarre with a pile of infantry. We ran out of time after 2 rounds, partially due to the volume of infantry.

The second game was Skarre again, with even more infantry. I got completely crushed on Skarre's feat round by a wave of Bane Thralls and Bile Thralls. By the end of the 3rd round, I only had Severius and the Vanquisher left. In all fairness, even though it wasn't a very fun game to play, my opponent was a master of executing the Skarre assault.

The third game was Deneghra and alot of infantry. This was the closest game. 2 rounds was all we had before time was called, and at the end of round 2 it was 4 to 2 on VPs. My opponent and I decided to just play out the rest of the game for fun. In the end, I was able to kill Deneghra.

All things considered, it was a moderately fun tournament, and I got a free coin just for showing up (and a Warmachine shirt), so I can't really complain. I lose alot, and I'm ok with losing alot. But losing alot to the same thing over and over isn't really much fun anymore.

I had another battle tonight, but I'll put that in another post.

Bleh

Up until late this evening, the eMauler was looking pretty lame. Kinda in that in-between phase before it starts to take shape. The attached pic is from this morning before I got another 3 hours of painting in this evening. Unfortunately I'm sorely behind on my posts here. At this stage the skin shading is mostly done, but there isn't alot of color or contrast on the model to help give it more character so it seems pretty flat.

It's late, so I'll have to post my results from Saturday's Primetime tournament tomorrow.

Green skin?!?!

I started painting the eMauler last night. I started painting his skin green. After about 10 minutes of laying paint on him I set him down, took a couple steps back and said to myself "Ack! He looks like the Incredible Hulk!" Now normally I wouldn't mind that so much, but for some reason it completely put me off. I'm going to go with blue like I did for the regular Mauler. Since this guy is so huge, I'm going to work all the stuff below the waist first so that I can get him attached to the base to make him easier to work with.

Minor Progress

I finished the eMauler's base this evening. Turned out the eMauler himself needed another coat of primer, so he's drying instead of getting painted. Tomorrow night hopefully. In the mean time, here's a link to an eMauler's from CMON:

http://www.coolminiornot.com/index/whatm/Privateer%20Press/id/151741

I'm still thinking of going with the dark blue scheme, but I'm also thinking perhaps green/grey instead. Too sleepy to decide now though.

Nasty Trolls!

I got to play this last weekend against Zugbart, who wrote up this very comprehensive battle report. I won't reiterate his report here except to note that it is pretty much spot on to what happened. Great job Zugbart!

The battle was a total blast, and Zugbart was a very gracious opponent. I do very much enjoy playing against people who don't take winning more seriously than the playing, especially since I'm a terrible tactician. The army I brought was all prime stuff since I wanted to get a little more practice in before the primetime tournament next week.

Lessons for myself from this battle:

• Dire Troll Maulers are totally crazy badass. I'm glad I picked up a second one.
• Getting slammed is a good way to get put back on your heels.
• Severius is not the best choice against a Hordes army.
• Zealots should be in every protectorate list I use.
• Not having Rupert or Gorman really limits my flexibility.

I'm sorely behind on my painting, but in all fairness, I played and got a new painting desk. The new desk is great, but I spent a fair portion of today tearing down the old one and setting up the new one. Oh, and I went to see 300, which was freakin awesome.

Achtung!

My desk at work got elevated to a stand-up desk, which will hopefully be good in the long run for my back. However, during the adjustment period, it's going to strain me a bit probably. Fortunately I have a chair as well. The poor eMauler hasn't gotten a lick of paint on him yet after being primed. I don't know why, but Wednesdays and Thursdays are just bad days for me getting any painting done. Maybe tonight I'll at least get the base painted. I'm hoping to evacuate from work as early as possible in order to make that happen.

eMauler Assembled

Just a quick update. I snapped a couple pics this morning of the assembled eMauler before I primed him just to note where all the greenstuff work ended up. There wasn't really a bunch of sculpting to do, just filling in gaps and some bonding work. Still though, it gave me alot of practice with smoothing greenstuff which I sorely needed. The two pins in his feet are just temporary for now while I primed him. The bugger is so heavy that when I set him in the block of wood that holds pinned models, the pins started bending over. No matter, he's primed and drying at home and if I can sneak out of work at a reasonable hour tonight (which would be a miracle) I can start getting some work done on him.

I haven't really thought alot about color schemes at this point, but I'm heavily favoring either a dark blue (like the first mauler), or a medium green. I'm not very fond of the pale blue studio colors myself, and I love the look of red spines. There was a really badass eMauler on CMON but their site seems to be down right now so I don't have a link. The highlight of it for me was that the whole model was painted to draw the attention to the face, and the mauler's eyes were painted like gems.

Bokur 2

Finished my second Bokur tonight. He isn't as good as the other I think, but I'm still pretty happy. I did alot more experimentation on this one with battle damage and shading and conversion work. The flesh work on this guy was the most fun to do. I'm eager to see how good the P3 flesh wash is once they finally release it.

Also, the eMauler is completely assembled (except attaching him to the custom base). I'll probably prime him tomorrow, but I'll try to snap a pic first.

Stupid Time Changes

I hate the time changes. It always throws me off. I'm super sleepy at 10:30, but that could also have something to do with helping a friend move this afternoon. In any case, the Bokur is still about an hour from finished, but the eMauler is down to 5 seperate pieces now. I feel like I'm getting a tiny bit better at working with greenstuff after doing all the work on the eMauler. I'm doing alot of joining using both greenstuff and superglue and it seems to be making for an incredibly strong bond. Anyway, time for sleep.

Weekend Progress

I've made alot of progress on both the Bokur and the eMauler. The Bokur probably has about an hour or so more of painting needed and then he's done. I used sort of a reverse scheme from the first Bokur in terms of brightness and I like the look overall. The big challenge has been doing black leather. It looks ok, but in general I don't like the look of shaded black. I should prowl through CMON for examples of black that I do like. In any case though, this guy is nearing competion.

The eMauler on the other hand has been reduced from 12 pieces to 9 pieces now. I've decide to assemble the entire thing except for attaching it to the custom base before painting, despite the potential challenge of painting it that way. He's taking longer than expected anyway just cause of all the greenstuff work to smooth out join points.

Yesterday I got a small set of drawers on wheels and a second arm lamp which has dramatically reduced the amount of junk on top of my desk. My wife actually suggested getting a smaller desk now that I don't need as much desktop space, so I might use this as an opportunity to find a really cool desk. I saw a table at Ikea yesterday that had enormous potential. It was a plate of glass on top, and then a space of about an inch and a half below the glass where stuff could be slid under. If it was a bit bigger, it would be perfect to stash paints out of the way and yet easily see them. Oh well. The search for a perfect desk will have to continue.

Late Night Status

Got a bit more work done on the Bokur, mostly just painting skin. I used primarily the midlund and khadic flesh colors, blending them lighter and lighter. I'm thinking that it needs a slight wash of slightly darkened Khardic flesh to really give it proper depth though. Also started cleaning and trimming the eMauler bits. I'm hoping this weekend will be productive. Anyway, very sleepy, so no pics or anything coherent.

Painting Leather

I was trading emails yesterday with a couple friends of mine that also paint and I suddenly realized that I haven't been blogging about the techniques I use. So, in the spirit of sharing ideas, here's a first technique description.

The leather I did for Doomshaper used a new technique that I just tried out and I have to say that I like it quite alot. Before I was always using inks to deepen the look of leather on miniatures, and it's a look I very much like. However, inks tend to create alot of glossy reflection and that is just not natural for leather. So, for Doomshaper's leathers, I painted on Vallejo Matt Medium (slightly watered down) right on top of the leathers themselves. I did it this way rather than mixing it into the inks at first. This worked pretty well, although I did also try mixing in the matt medium into the inks themselves and that worked satisfactoraly. I'm working on my second Bokur now, so this will be a good chance to try it out on another model and refine the technique, but so far I like the preliminary results.

Hopefully next time I do one of these, I'll have some pics to go along with the description.

Loose Ends

So I have a bunch of loose ends on random models that I never finished up. I'm hoping to deal with those before I order another wave of models. Here's the quick list:

• chains on the Harbinger (and pics for the blog)
• replacement hoses for the Castigator
• re-glue chains on 1 Wrack (unfortunate transport damage)
• ink tall grass on several models
• touch ups on the first Bokur (before posting him to CMON)

Eventually I need to snap a whole new set of pics of all the old stuff as well, but that's a weekend task I suspect.

Extreeeeeme!!!

My Dire Troll Mauler Extreme showed up today, and he is huge! Here's a pic of the 12 pieces, including the sculpted base. There's alot of trimming and cleaning to do. I also want to handle all the joins with greenstuff as best I can, which will require me to expand my skillset.

Acupuncture

Last night I had my second session of acupuncture and it was moderately magical. In addition to feeling super relaxed, I'm also riding a nice wave of snake-like tension where I'm tense enough to respond quickly to what's going on around me, but not overly tense as to be stressed or rigid. It's sort of like being made of water I guess. Anyway, I'm hoping that in addition to helping maintain a low stress level, it will also help me to be more steady and patient with my painting. We'll see how it goes.

Freshening up the old blog

New template for the old blog. I like this new template better. It's more Menothy, if that's even a word. I'm also adding categories to posts where appropriate to make it easier to find related stuff.

In other news, I ordered a Dire Troll Mauler Extreme today as well as picking up No Quarter #11. I realized that I really enjoy painting Trolls, and now I'm thinking I might get some more to paint. Protectorate are just getting tedious to paint at this point. Time to mix it up I guess. I still have 2 models left (not counting today's order), so we'll see how long much longer I hold out before ordering more models.

KoL: My Dirty Little Secret

Pretty much the only computer game I play anymore is an online browser-based game called The Kingdom Of Loathing. Not only is this game comical and entertaining, but it is well suited for me in that it only gives you a limited number of actions each day. I'll spare you a bunch of details and point you at the Casual Gameplay review of it. Also, here's a link to The KoL Wiki with a pile of game information, which is mostly useful once you start playing it. Ok, I feel that my last computer gaming obsession is properly confessed. Back to painting!

Wandering Eyes

Been checking out some interesting sources for perspective and object-source lighting examples... here's some of the highlights:

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

http://www.coolminiornot.com/22939

http://www.coolminiornot.com/111965

http://www.coolminiornot.com/85011

http://www.coolminiornot.com/139456