RtC: 3 Weeks To L&L

3 weeks to go! I'm officially in panic mode. Technically I will be on the road a week from today, so it's less than 3 weeks. At this point I've calculated that I have 10 remaining useful evenings of painting time left before Lock & Load. That's given work trips and visits with family and friends. Odds are it will be less than that.

So why has my blogging fallen completely off a cliff lately? Well honestly it's just laziness and focus on my competition entries. I did finish up the Beast Mistress and Finn, and my Gnarlhorn is nearing completion (although I'll leave photos out for the time being). I'm hoping to enter the Gnarlhorn in the Kublacon painting competition as well as sort of a litmus test.

So what else have I been doing? Experimenting with inks and pigments, ordering more brands of paints, searching for brush options given the Series 7 shortage, and using the wet palette way more. I've also been working on a painting plan for after Lock and Load.

The next few weeks will likely be quiet on this blog as I make a mad crunch to get things done. I do however promise to do some reviews of the many things I've been experimenting with once things calm back down.

From the Desk: Weekend Roundup #51

Apparently I haven't done one of these for 7 weeks now. Whoops!

Lots has been happening on my desk. I got a bunch of Shredders, Harriers and Stingers assembled and primed. There are more almost ready, but I haven't counted them as critical for L&L so they got bumped in priority. These ones here are the ones that I got trimmed to the best I could and may turn them into competition level squad stuff with a Beast Mistress. It all depends on how quickly I can get things done. If nothing else, I'm glad to have some more lesser beasts on my desk for painting in between other projects.

Speaking of the Beast Mistress, here's her current state. Lots of work got done. There's still work to do, specifically I need to seal and then highlight the metals. Before I do that though I'm bringing it around in person to my friends and getting feedback. I'll try to post that feedback on Wednesday to share. And of course, anyone can left me their thoughts here as well.

Finally, I distracted myself with painting Maxwell Finn just for kicks. He's probably about 70% done at this point. This is sort of a precursor to a future project but I won't spoil those details here.

RtC: Beast Mistress progress

Just a quick post of where I'm at with the first Beast Mistress. I'm really enjoying this model despite some of the fussy details that need more patience.

RtC: 7 Weeks till L&L

I'm totally tricking myself here by thinking it's 7 weeks. To be exact, there are 7 weeks until I'll be on the road driving to L&L. In between then and now I have many days that I won't be getting any painting work done. And ideally I'd like to be wrapped up 2 weeks early so I can go to KublaCon.

So here's the progress on the Gnarlhorn. Pretty pathetic really. I just finished the sculpting of the tree trunk and then put some black basecoating for the metallic parts.

The first Beast Mistress on the other hand got far more work done. I spent about 2 hours painting while my compatriots were facing off in battle. I love this sculpt, but having a first one to "practice" on before doing a competition one is definitely going to help immensely. There are some unique aspects to the sculpt that are a bit tricky to deal with paint-wise.

I've been toying a lot more with posting images to this blog directly from my phone in the hopes that while I'm at L&L I can post up a bunch of pictures of the many cool things to be seen. Well, back to work work, and hopefully more evening progress on both of these projects.

RtC: Gnarlhorn Basing

So lots of stuff happening on my paint desk, but this is one of the most significant things. I got the rest of the base prepped. More work happened after this picture, but I wanted to share this one since it shows the main Gnarlhorn model actually sitting on it. It took a lot of work to get it where I wanted and such that I could also include the tree behind him. Fortunately the layer of pink insulation foam made the process of positioning the model easier.

I also got a couple Stingers finished, got started on the first Beast Mistress, and a bunch of work in assembling Shredders.

8 Weeks To Go

With only 8 weeks before Lock&Load, I'm facing down a pretty big painting goal. I've stripped out all of the Malifaux projects in favor of just wrapping up my competition entries and my unpainted Legion backlog. Last night while my friends got a game in (where Skorne crushed Convergence), I spent the time trimming a bunch of parts. This picture shows the fruits of my labor.

As you may or may not be able to make out, this is 2 Beast Mistresses, 2 Stingers, 4 Harriers and 10 Shredders. I've taken the time to separate out the Beast Mistresses very carefully here. Specifically I was looking for which of the pieces between the two were the best castings and easiest to clean up. I really like these models and wanted to use one for a competition entry and this is a convenient way to save myself some time rather than going an extra mile on a casting that needs way more work. Ironically, both of these castings were quite good. It was relatively hard to decide which one is better but I've mixed and matched the best parts to a single model.

In order to keep myself on track, I've updated my "Models on Deck" tracker on the side of this blog to track what I have left to finish before Lock&Load. In 8 weeks it'll probably be a tally board of shame.

RtC: Priming, And How Less Is More

I've heard repeatedly how it's important to not over prime models, but never stopped to test it out myself. Well going into this next "season" of competition I figured this would be a good time to test out the advice. I grabbed a couple ancient 40k models from my box of test models and tried it out. As you can see from this first photo I just gave them a very quick spray. The left model got the lightest spray treatment and the metal is clearly visible underneath. I also want to note that I didn't wash these models before priming them and didn't take time to do a really careful spray of primer. I did however use the Vallejo Surface Primer for priming. So how did things turn out...

The results are good! As you can see from these two examples, the paint goes on pretty well. I did a single coat of 1:1 thinned paint:water mix. For reference, the green is P3 Cryx Bane Base and the orange is P3 Khador Red Highlight.

Lesson learned: Definitely use thinner primer coats in the future!

RtC: Prep and Assembly

So my current competition level project is a Gnarlhorn Satyr. Why did I choose this model? I've painted one before as a favor to a friend and just really enjoyed it. This is a chance for me to paint one for myself for the display case. Since I'm not painting it to field it in an army, I won't feel the same urge to finish it as I do with most of my projects. I plan on really taking my time with this model to get it just right.

Here's my current progress:

This represents trimming, filing, more trimming and more filing, and more of that stuff until I was satisfied. I didn't go completely overboard on trimming since several of the places were very tedious and risked damaging other parts of the model. In the cases where I didn't go the extra mile it was also because I knew I could hide the problems with painting techniques. After all that trimming I scrubbed all the pieces with warm water and then did the assembly up to this point above. I'm leaving the head separate to start with due to the challenge of reaching parts of the horns and shoulders. I'll assemble it more once those parts are done. I also added a ring of green stuff in the neck area to extend his neck just a touch. This will give me more final posing options. After all this assembly was done I went back and scrubbed him again with warm soapy water to get any last bits of release agent or oils from my skin off of the surfaces. The scrubbing step is something I rarely do normally but for competition pieces I find to be a key step worth my time.

On to Priming!

LL13: Wrap Up and Pic Dump

Massive photo dump follows from my Lock and Load trip. This isn't a spoiler recap post, or a recap of whatever else. It's a review of what I remembered to take picture of along with other random notes at the end.

First up, and probably the most memorable chunk of things I did, was the painting classes. Here is pictured Matt DiPietro doing his Introduction to Two Brush Blending class specifically. I also took his True Metallics class, as well as Meg Maples' Femme Fetals and Color Theory classes, and Ron Kruzie's Painting Unclassified and Army Foundry classes. I'm not going to recap them here for brevity sake. However I want to point out that these classes were all really well run. The video support for them was really amazing and helped the class immensely in comparison to other classes I've taken. They also included handouts to take home where appropriate. I also really felt like they were extremely organized and the material for the classes filled the time very appropriately. All three of them were great about explaining details, but I have to say that Ron was my favorite simply due to the number of hysterical quotes. I walked out with several pages of notes and lots of things to practice. One last note was simply the ability to watch how they paint and note the subtle differences in their processes and set up to give me ideas to try (like twirling my brush when picking up paint). As I experiment I'll provide notes on this blog.

Next are some pictures of studio models that were in the case. It was hard to get good photos through the glass, but these two came out really well fortunately. I wasn't trying to get a full view of the models, but rather details of some specific bits, particularly battle damage. It was pretty amazing to look at in person and get a sense of the detail level. Hats off to the studio painters on these.

Another quick shot of a studio model: the Night Troll. Not a particularly good picture, but really amusing. It was cool to see the new releases in the case there.

And next is... oh... err... yeah, I apparently went out for drinks to my favorite bar in Seattle. Let's, uh, move on.

I didn't take hardly any pictures of models in the case, but this one really caught my eye. It didn't place as best in its category, and I don't even know how it placed, but for some reason I really enjoyed it.

Ok this was just amazing. Raven from Advanced Deployment had brought her Legion army which includes 55 Shredders. I was perplexed to say the least. She has painted each one as a different type of poisonous tree frog. I had a blast chatting with her about it. The spread of them was really amazing.

Now I start to transition to actual games I played. This first picture is from me playing eThagrosh against eVyros. My opponent was great and we had a really fun time. I'd never played against eVyros so it was new territory for me. I ended up winning this game mostly due to pushing Thagrosh in his face and his assassination run came up a little short on damage output to finish Thagrosh off. At that point I had to do a little maneuvering but I was able to bring enough firepower to bear on Vyros and finish him off. I will say that the table we played on was quite nice except for the unevenness of it causing some problems.

Next is where I played Absylonia against Ossyan. My opponent had this really strikingly painted army. It was green and gloss-black, which gave it a very "Tron" sort of look. We had a really fun game on a rather treacherous table (due to the slanted surface). At I think the top of the second round I took a Ravagore shot at Ossyan, landed it, and drolled triple 6's which killed him dead. My opponent was all set to shake hands but I called for a time warp and we replaced it with an average damage roll so that we could play out the game which is where the real fun happened anyway. There was a bunch of amusement with Eliminators sneaking around the side and flanking me from a stairway, my Scythean getting taken apart by Mage Hunters, and Typhon being a rock star and rolling in to beat a pile of face. To top off the fun game, Ron Kruzie came by during out game and commented on both our armies.

Oh, and yes, I drank more. Love that bar. Got to sit right at the bar and the bartender made custom drinks for us. This was one such example that he concocted on the fly.

Ok, so now to really nerd out this post, I'm going to list my "Achievements" from this trip:

Everyone To The Table! - I played every model that I brought with me! Well, technically not. I didn't play eLylyth (since she isn't really fun to play or play against), and I didn't play my unpainted stuff (cause I was enjoying playing fully painted in Iron Arena).

Iron Liver! - I went out drinking with my great friend Lance who I drove up with. Man what a great time we had. And I was able to walk back to the hotel safely as well!

Level Up! - I went to 6 painting classes and really feel like I learned a number of new things. Now I just need to put those into practice and use that experience to up my painting skills.

Hit Me, I Can Take It! - I sat down with Meg Maples and used my Shepherd as a sample model to get feedback. It was really constructive feedback with both things to improve and things that went well.

A Cut Above! - Not only did I enter the painting competition, but I got a Silver (for the Lylyth battlegroup mentioned before) and a bronze (for McBain). I also got great feedback afterwards and both Matt and Meg commented how much they liked my Lylyth battlegroup.

Like A Ninja! - I drove from the Bay Area to Seattle and back, and didn't get a speeding ticket or have any sort of incident with the travel. Hooray!

That's Unnatural! - I played a 200 point Unbound game with fellow painting fanatic Tyson Koch. I'll post more about that tomorrow, but needless to say, this was a first for me. I fielded nearly every Legion model I have.

There are more potential achievements, but I'll have to wait to see if I get those. Specifically appearing in No Quarter magazine in some capacity. Gotta wait till Sept apparently.

RtC: Lylyth (Competition Version)

This last weekend I brought my recently painted Lylyth to Lock and Load 2013 for their P3 Grandmaster painting competition. I'll post more about the event overall in the next couple days, but I wanted to get this particular model posted up first.

Cramming this model in right before L&L was pretty tough. I could have easily spent more time on it. The camera makes it rough to look at compared to in-person as well. However I'm still pretty proud of this model. My goal was to paint her to 90% of my best ability. Parts of it made it, while others didn't.

What went well:
* Having a deadline - This really kept me focused and on task. I worked on the model nearly every day during those 2 weeks.
* Cloak - I'm quite happy with the results on the cloak. It has a good mix of color variation and I feel like I achieved the effect I was going for.
* Metals - This is where I felt really happy actually. I spent a fair amount of time working on them and got them just about as good as my current skills could get.
* Basing - This also went great, and I feel like the basing was well worth the effort. I even did shading on the moss!
* Hair - The hair worked out pretty well. I used a combination of techniques here and just sorta went crazy. Who knows if I'll ever reproduce it.
* Not sealing - I didn't actually seal this model. I was happy with the final effect and didn't want to take any chances.

What could have been better:
* Skin - The skin is pretty rough, even in person. I could have done a lot more work on that. The hands aren't bad, but the rest could have been much better.
* Pinning - I had a heck of a problem with the single pin coming loose. It survived the trip and judging, but if I were to ever use it for playing, I'd want to re-pin it to the base.
* Arrows - Ugh, I hate painting the fletching on arrows. Especially the ends of the arrows all bunched up. No matter what it looks unrealistic.
* Not enough time - I could have easily spent several more hours on this model, but just didn't have the time.

So what was the net result? Silver! Although I should point out that I entered this as a part of a battlegroup entry, including the Teraph, Raek and Naga that I'd painted previously. Interestingly enough this represents a time frame of almost 4 years. I painted the Raek in July of 2009. I'm really not sure what to think about that, but I'm extremely happy. I think the best part was when I was asking Matt DiPietro for feedback on my entries, both he and Meg Maples commented on how they really liked my battlegroup entry. Needless to say, I'm riding a wave of happy vibes right now.

LL13: Progress, Pain, and Procrastination

Well, it's down to just a couple more days before leaving for Lock and Load. I'm in a final mad rush of painting and assembly and pre-packing. The painting has turned into partial success and partial failure. I was hoping to paint 2 new things, but it looks like Lylyth is the only thing I'm going to get done. On the flip side, I have gotten a fair amount of assembly work donw. I have a second Angelius mostly assembled at this point, but it still needs some putty work that I'll probably try to wrap up before leaving.

I think the bigger challenge I'm facing is packing all my models. I want to bring my Croxorz and my Legion, but that's some 150 models, including 2 huge bases. Well, 3 counting Lylyth 3, but she's not fully assembled so it's not a big deal. In any case, I'll figure it out. Driving has an advantage of storage options that wouldn't necessarily be flying-friendly.

So what are my hopes for attending Lock and Load? Well, it's simple. First, I want to talk with other painters and share tips. Second, I want to have a great time playing a ton of casual games. So if you're attending and interested in getting a game in, I'll be floating in and out of the Iron Arena during the whole event. Come and find me!

LL13: Impressions of Preparing

This is sort of a massive mash-up post. It's a combination of musings about going to Lock and Load, preparing for a painting competition, and just a general update of things going on at my painting desk. Rather than go into a lot of detail, I'm just going to include a lot of pictures and short notes.

A few days ago, I decided to paint something new for the Lock and Load painting competition. Not really a lot of time to get something done, but I'm making an honest effort to push for it. The assembly part went really smooth actually.

Priming on the other hand turned into a disaster. My can of Krylon primer seems to have turned bad on me. I'd had problems before, but it really got horrible. So I ended up stripping them and starting over. I lost a day, but fortunately the stripping and re-priming went smooth.

And yes, I switched back to Duplicolor primer. It's shmowza math. I'm never switching from it again.

And here you can see some progress. The new Lylyth sculpt is really quite nice. I'm not sure this will turn out to be my best work, but I'm going to make a huge effort on it prior to leaving. Hopefully I'm not doing final work on it while I'm at L&L.

I've still got a ton of stuff to do before I leave for L&L. Not the least of which is figuring out how to pack my entire Legion model collection and pack up a painting kit. Oh, and get some models assembled and primed to bring along for painting practice while I'm there. So much to do, and so little sleep to get.

From the Desk: KublaCon, London, and Distractions

Hooray! Another KublaCon has come and gone. I only managed to get one entry this year (more on that later). It was McBain, and he placed a bronze in the masterclass level. I'm actually really stoked about this for a couple reasons. First, I was only hoping to place at all and had no designs on a silver. Second is that the judging was really rough this year, and there were a number of entries (especially in the open category) that didn't place at all despite being solid pieces. So all things considered, this was a win for me. You can read more about the KublaCon painting events on Facebook.

In addition to the painting competition, I got great feedback on McBain from Mr Justin of Secret Weapon. It was mostly around improving the color quality of the basing and using more color modulation to draw the attention to the face more. Overall though they said that the technical painting aspects were solid which pleased me quite a bit.

As to why I haven't been posting much, it's mainly due to work travel. This also prevented me from getting a second model completed. I was in London, Paris and southern California. I've been living out of suitcases for about 3 weeks prior to KublaCon and that was a severe crushing to any painting opportunity. On the plus side, I got to visit London and Paris for the first time and it was a real delight.

Lastly, I have to fess up to getting Diablo 3, and it's eating a large amount of my painting time. I aspire to overcome this addiction and better control the amount of time I spend playing it, but I'm very aware of my own shortcomings when it comes to controlling my obsession to finish a game. However I'm also starting to plan next year's painting entry and that might shake me out of my addiction (I hope).

RtC: More B&W Research

More progress, and I messed around a bit with my makeshift pictures process too. As you can see, the dwarf now has his head attached. I've also started working on a base for him as well, but no pictures yet since it's still in a lot of pieces. One of the really challenging things about painting this model in just B&W is getting the right look to various surfaces and implying texture without the use of color. More B&W photo research done this week. Here's a couple new items.

This poster of the grill of a GTO is a very interesting reference. The chrome is really bright. I used the Color Inspector plugin for Firefox and looked through some of the values. It goes right up to max white. Even the "dark" parts are still at 60+% on the brightness scale. The one challenge of this as a reference is there's obvious reflection of subjects in the chrome. It's hard to see, but it throws off the reflectivity study a bit. Still though, there's good value in seeing how metal goes from very bright to medium grey in a very short distance.

Photo not available, please click Unfortunately the gallery here prevented me from embedding a thumbnail of the image so you'll have to click and follow the link. It's a bunch of bladed weapons stacked up. This is a really useful reference photo. I think it definitely fills it's 1000 words quota without me saying more.

This Dire Troll Mauler was painted in black and white and is pretty interesting. I'm pretty sure this guy used an airbrush for large parts of it. Not that I'm against airbrushes (since I own one myself), but it definitely helps with the smoothness on the larger surfaces. I'm obviously in no position to use an airbrush on this much smaller dwarf. Still though, this model is a fascinating example. It got a 8.2 rating on CMON. Out of all the reference photos I've been looking for, this one is probably the most relevant in terms of learning something from. I could easily spend time picking this one apart but here's my top 2 observations. First, the difference between the rocks on his back and his flesh reads quite well as 2 different materials. Second, the highlighting on this model is all over the place and makes it hard (for me) to tell where the implied light source is supposed to be coming from. Both are good things to keep in mind when I work on my project.

That's it for this installment. I've got some other random posts on the way in the next few days as a bit of a break from just RtC updates on this project.

RtC: B&W Research

When last we left our hero, he had just taken on a quest of insane proportions...

So far I've been spending most of my time on the body. It's just a logistical issue of needing access to certain parts. Once I get the front chest painted to a point that I'm happy with, I'll attach the head and work from there. This project is difficult to say the least. My photos (as usual) seem to be really lacking, so it's hard to really tell that it's only black and white. I keep meaning to spend some time upping my photo quality but somehow I end up spending the time painting instead. This project is pretty challenging given that I'm also reading a really good book on color theory at the same time. (I'll have a review for it in a couple weeks after I finish it.) Trying to just represent materials through light value alone and no hue or intensity is quite challenging. To that end, I spent a fair amount of time the last couple days doing a little research on black and white photography, or rather the subject of that photography and how they turn out. Below are a set of photos I found particularly interesting along with the referencing links for them.

I liked this photo because of the deepness of the shadows in the creases of his skin, and for the reference of the transition between skin and his beard. Very helpful.

Uh, yeeeahhh... This is just a really sweet photo. Really inspirational. Not really applicable for this project, but it really inspires me to stick with the B&W thing so it's here for that reason alone.

The way the light falls over this guy's chest and arms is a really good reference. If the model I was painting had more visible flesh for doing some freehand I would totally use this as further reference for tattoos.

Raw unadulterated emotion. This photo caught my eye for that alone. The expression deepens the creases and thus the shadows on the face. Really helps convey the feeling of rage.

Ok, it's getting late and my muse is striking, so I need to paint now before I get too sleepy and/or my muse bails on me. I still need some good reference photos for metals but I'll continue that research tomorrow. Happy painting all!

RtC: A Study in Black&White

Challenge is good for the soul. Well, that's what I'm telling myself for now. I've embarked upon my second entry for the painting competition, or at least a good experimentation piece.

These pictures are of an old Rackham model for Pilzenbhir, Defender of the Plains (2nd Incarnation). He's one of the Tir-Na-Bor Dwarves from their Confrontation line of models, back when they were metal models. These are beautiful models that overall I found to be really delightful. The game however was somewhat lacking, so I never really got that many of them. There's a whole gallery of them here for those that are curious.

This project is relatively straightforward: A black and white study with a single added hue. Sort of in the style of Kim Anderson's early photography work, or the movie Sin City, or any number of other such examples. I can't really say I'm a particular fan of any of those in particular, but it should give you an idea of the end results. The goal however is much more specific. By taking out hue as something to work with, it will force me to really study how light value works and interacts with different material types. This will obviously not be an easy project.

At this point you can see I've just done a couple washes over the entire thing of grey and then black. I bought a bunch of empty droppers and have been prepping a set of pre-mixed pure grey-scale shades using just the P3 white and black paints. I'm just going to focus on the black and white work first, and then add the single hue at the end. I honestly haven't picked a particular hue to use yet and instead plan to follow my muse once she strikes.

My main goal at this point is to get enough of his chest area painted so that I can get the head attached and start working from there. I also need to ponder a basing scheme for him, since getting to a base relatively quickly would be a very wise idea. For the moment though, I'm just basking in the lunacy of this idea and wondering how long it will take me to want to throw the model into the garbage disposal. Wish me luck!