Monday, July 22, 2013

Shredders (5 and 6)

Super fast painted Shredders! Not trying to win any awards or accolades here. Just simple tabletop quality midget beasties to put on the table. It's part of my whole strategy to just keep adding more lesser beasts to my Legion force and keep beefing it up. I have to admit, it was refreshing to paint a couple of these guys again. I'm sort looking forward to picking up a couple more to paint.

Friday, July 19, 2013

Lylyth, Reckoning of Everblight

After what feels like a really long break, I finally have something new done. Certainly not my best work by a long shot, but I am quite excited to have Lylyth3 completed. I really enjoyed the couple times I proxied her so I made it a self-imposed restriction to not play her again until she was painted. Now that she's done, I'm looking forward to unleashing her on my opponents.

This project was fraught with challenges. It's quite a different model than almost every other PP model thus far and so I didn't really have any proper experience to fall back on in some areas. Rather than my normal "good/bad" analysis, I'm just going to overview those challenges:

Assembly: Normally I would assemble as much as I can, excluding base, and paint it in as few pieces as possible. This model however pretty much required that I work on it in 5 pieces: Lylyth, sleigh, 2 elk, and the cross bar. Painting those separate pieces worked well, but once it came time for assembly, things got really rough. Putting the sleigh on the base and then attaching Lylyth actually went pretty well. After putting together the base separately, I ran a pin down through the middle of the sleigh that also attached to Lylyth's front foot. This worked great except for the fact that with a single pin the sleigh tended to be wobbly. I managed to secure it by putting a second pin up through one of the runners. So far so good. But then when it came time to add the elk and cross bar, things started to go sideways. The pin holes for the elk to the cross bar were far from aligned, so I had to use smaller pins to make things sort of work. But before attaching the elk to the cross bar, I made sure the bar was ready to attach the the sleigh. Then I lined up the left elk, estimated a hole for the pin from it's hoof, and drilled. And then, well, the position of the whole was just wrong. This was first evident by the angle of the elk itself, but also when I tried to line up the second elk. So after drilling a second hole and doing some minor surgery, I managed to correct the problem and eventually get it all assembled. Would I have done it differently if I was doing a second one? Perhaps. But I'll reserve those theories for now unless someone out there is especially curious.

Painting: The challenge of painting in multiple parts is striking a good color balance, and I feel like I failed at this pretty badly. But there reaches a point where I have to just surrender to what I've done. This wasn't an inspirational piece for me so I am happy to end where I did.

Timing: I worked on this model for more than a month. It really is hard to spend that much overall duration on something particularly when there's a solid week of break in between some painting sessions. I really lost a lot of momentum which contributed to the frustration and desire to just be done.

Ok, enough of that. I really am stoked to have this model done and ready for the table top!

Sunday, July 07, 2013

From the Desk: Weekend Roundup #33

Early and short posting cause I'm about to get on a flight for Australia.

Lylyth 3 progress. She's pinned to the base but needs some work to hide one of the pins better. I also want to visually break up the snow a bit more so I'm going to add some grass tufts. Other than that stuff though, this part is mostly done at this point.

Here's the other parts not finished/attached. The parts are all about 50% done at this point. I was originally pretty psyched about this model, but as time wears on, I'm having so many logistical challenges with painting it that I'm running out of steam quick. Painting it in parts was pretty much required, but holding those parts has all been a real challenge.

And 2 Shredders that are still in progress. They are what I do when I'm just waiting for specific tasks to dry on Lylyth. There's lots of work left on these but they are small and fast to paint overall.