Resource: Base Sizes for 40k

Just saving this link for myself really, for when I start painting my Grey Knights.

Basing Guidelines for Warhammer 40,000 via Dakka Dakka.

Malifaux Posters

Not a proper update. My life is complete chaos right now due to medical issues. Just saving this link here for future reference.

Really cool Malifaux-style posters for printing and using in terrain making

50 Articles To Read

In case you missed it, this has a really great list of painting articles from 2016: 50 Articles and Tutorials To 'Do Not Miss' From 2016.

Resource: Kuku Kube

If you haven't tried this and wondering how sensitive your eyes are to color, this site is a great way to test it.

Resource: Kuku Kube

I know, it's sort of a fad thing, but this test is sort of an interesting exercise to get a sense of how attuned your eyes are to spotting color and brightness. However if you try this, I recommend not taking it in the spirit of trying to score as high as possible, but more in the spirit of just knowing how well attuned your eyes are. Training your eyes to see color and contrast and brightness is a skill that can be trained to some degree. Knowing your current ability to spot color gives you a sense of how much room for improvement you have.

So give it a try! Kuku Kube

From the Desk: Painting Videos

If you're relatively new to painting, go watch these for education.

If you've been painting a long time, go watch these for amusement.

SDUB's Paint More Minis videos

Resource

If you haven't already seen this article about composition, then you should go read it right now. It's especially useful for creating scenes. And just a tip from myself on this...

It's possible to practice this sort of compositional thought process in everyday life as well. Try arranging things on your desk into a composition, or even better, some models. Keep a sketch pad with you and just doodle and think about these principles. Or in the case of myself, practice it when doing art projects with kids. The other day my son wanted to finger paint so I got all the stuff out and got a sheet of paper for myself as well. My son is 5, so I'll spare you his rather abstract art, but here's what I painted.

Once completed, I took a studious eye to it and realized my key error in the composition: the sun is centered. If I'd moved it of to the left or right just a bit, it would have made for a much stronger overall composition with the space separated into thirds. Even further, I could have exaggerated the lines coming off of it to draw more attention to the empty space in the middle. It's a fun exercise to do even in these very informal situations.

Painting Purgatory: a Flashback and a Resource

Right about now you're probably looking at this photo and wondering what's going on. Although clearly no match for my current painting skills, this model was indeed painted by me. It's from about 18 years ago when I was in college (yes, I've been painting that long). However, I'm not posting it as a part of a nostalgic flashback. Instead, I'm going to drag out a bunch of my old models for review as a part of an exercise on color theory. I should note that my intent in these reviews is mainly for color use and not for painting techniques or skills, although I will probably add a little historical commentary just for fun. So let's get started with this Greater Daemon of Slaanesh!

Focus: Whenever I look at a model with a critical first eye, I tend to be super conscious about where my eyes go. In the case of this daemon, they are immediately drawn to the boots. Why? They are really bright. The horns somewhat pull the eyes back up, but it's still not enough to balance things out. I also notice that it takes a long time before my eyes even pick out the face of the model, despite its size.

Story: Next, after noticing where my eyes go, I pay attention to the general tone and emotion of the model. In this case, it seems dark and quiet. Why? Well, for one thing, it's really dark blue. Not just that, but there isn't enough variation in color to draw out the dramatic elements of the model. Color choices can play such a critical role in helping "tell the story" of the figure. Nothing about my color choices here really help tell a story. The darkness of the skin causes his face and outstretched hand to become indistinct, and that's really where the story of this model starts.

Readability: Now, I look at the color choices to see if they make sense for the material they are representing and whether they help my eyes to pick out the details. For this daemon, I'm 0 for 3. Dark blue skin, although amusing and potentially appropriate for a "chaos daemon", doesn't make a lot of sense. The brown for the boots on the other hand does work, since most leather is some shade of brown. But then there's all those green bits. Are they leather? Armor? Who knows! The green color choice makes it not only harder for the eye to pick out, but harder for the brain to "read" what it is. The dark blue skin, dark green and dark aqua claw all just seems to blend together. This makes the readability quite poor.

Harmony: Lastly I look at the overall harmony of colors. Now sometimes i'll want clashing colors on purpose, but that's an outlying case. Normally I want colors that all play well together. It helps all of the above things I've talked about. In this case my report card arrives with an F. Blue skin and yellow-brown boots? Ouch! And what's with that pinkish-purple badge on his chest? Must be first price in the ugly contest. Ok, all kidding aside, if you break out all these colors and toss them on a color wheel, the whole thing looks pretty chaotic. Don't be fooled either! Dark colors help obscure a conflicting palette, but it's still there.

So that's a general overview of how I approach color for my painting now. I'm no expert though, as even my recent painting shows. But these 4 aspects form the building blocks of my color theory now. I'm going to post more of my older models, but I'll skip this level of analysis. I started with this model not just for its age, but for it's complete failure in all 4 areas.

One last thing before I sign off for the night. I was reading various forums and came across this really great 4-part series on photographing miniatures. I've posted on this before, but for those of you looking for more good examples of setting up a way to photograph your work, this article has lots of good information and uses pretty minimal materials to accomplish it (other than the camera).

Painting Purgatory: Speed Painting Is The New 40

So I discovered today that the new blogger editing interface doesn't protect me from my own html editing mistakes and screws up the layout if I don't close tags properly. Lovely. Anyway, now with that mini-rant out of the way, here's my latest update.

A while ago I was planning to start a series of posts about speed painting, but that project sort of burned out quickly. However since that time I've noticed a lot of revitalized interest in the painting community in terms of painting armies quickly but still having good results. Dipping has been around for a while, but to be honest I can't stand the idea of it. For one thing it still requires the longest effort of painting which is getting solid base coats. Another reason is that if you ever want to strip the model, you're out of luck. And finally, I just have a personal revulsion to the methodology (no offense meant to dippers out there).

However, glazing and washing are techniques that get you similar results but can save you time over the dipping method depending on how you go about it. When I was painting many of my Cryx models, I used glazes and washes over straight white primer and found that I got a lot of good results. There is a catch though. These techniques can sometimes leave you with less consistent look to the surfaces, but that may or may not be a benefit given the model and your own style preference. Personally I like the variation in the surface colors because it gives a more natural look. There are times, like when you are trying to simulate enameled metal, that this breaks the visual cues of the material being implied.

In a recent No Quarter article, studio painter Matt DiPietro demonstrated the "underpainting" technique and it seems to be getting more and more attention. My first link to share is Adary's Scrapbook where he's been making attempts at this technique with good success. If you look closely at the last photo you can see how the black undercoat darkens the tone of the color in key places (like knees and fabric folds) where light wouldn't be hitting it as much. My second link is to a tutorial on Hand Cannon Online by Ghoul (who is an amazing painter). He gives a very good description of the process and paints a whole unit. He also gives some very educated history of the technique from well before miniature painting.

Seeing a revitalization of "old master" techniques being used in miniature painting is pretty interesting. As I continue to listen in to various painting communities, I encounter more and more of these sorts of things happening. The past is ripe with knowledge and experience, we just have to tap into it!

Holiday Link Dump

Today is another link dump day! A couple of random things I came across that were interesting to me on the Privateer Forums. Perhaps no one else, but at least now I won't lose these links.

This was a post about creating molds for bases which I found very interesting. I'm definitely going to try this out for myself.

Legion paint scheme
This was a post of some Legion models for which I somewhat liked the color scheme. Not entirely, but it's helping me decide what I want to eventually go with.

Link Dump Tuesday

Taking a page from the JIG site (a favorite distraction of mine), I'm doing a quick link dump, and minor project update.

These Bane Thralls were posted on the Privateer forums by Dead Dogg (of Brushthrall fame) and are seriously making me want to paint my own Bane Thralls, which are sitting in the drawer next to my desk.

I came across this basing tutorial the other day which is wicked cool. Lots of basic to mid-level information, but covers a wide variety of basing options in a single place.

I'm currently wrapping up painting the Gnarlhorn, slowly poking away at my 5 Revenants, and tortuously getting the Nyss assembled for this month's showdown challenge. The Nyss are an enormous pain to assemble cause of the many tiny parts. However, they are very cool models and highly configurable, so I'm not going to be doing any conversion work to make them all look different like I did with the Revenants.

That's all for today. Hopefully tonight will be highly productive.

Parallel Projects

Lots of stuff going on lately, and unfortunately painting time is at a premium. However I'm getting lots of projects moving and/or completed lately. Here's an update on painting/miniatures projects:

Display Case Enhancements: A couple years ago I bought one of the Ikea Detof display cases, which I have to say, for the cost, has been a wonderful investment. It's provided a great way to store and display my miniatures... until recently. I've got enough paintined stuff now that it has nearly run out of space. So, my wife made a quite clever and remarkably obvious comment of "Why not add more shelves?" So, this weekend I got some additional glass shelves cut (because Ikea doesn't sell the shelves individually), and some metal rods. Using some florist wire to suspend the rods in place, and then some 2-part epoxy glue, I secured the rods in place. Then a few rubber washers around the rods and BAM, 2 more shelves added securely and easily. The project probably took me about 2 hours once I had all the materials.

Troop Transport Options: I've been having a little frustration with laying out trays for my Army Transport case. I've got the small one that only holds 8" of trays, which I very much like, but it does create some challenges around planning trays flexibly. I saw a post on the Privateer Forums by bugbait_nz where he shows some custom trays he made. This gave me an idea to make some of my own trays. So after some hunting, I found a nearby store that sells foam (interestingly named House Of Foam). My plan is to create some half-sized trays similar to bugbait's so that I can have more flexible configuration options. The foam is ordered and should arrive next week.

Painting: I did actually get some painting done. I'll post those pics next as seperate posts though. I'm slowly working through my Sea Dogs, and hopefully will have them done by next weekend. This weekend though is full of entertainment (Cirque du Soleil and a Superbowl party).

Link Dump

Just a quick post, more for my own tracking than anything else. Below are a couple interesting links that I didn't want to lose track of.

Tiny Magnets! - These little guys seem like they could be real useful for a whole variety of applications.

Kublacon Painting Competion 07 - These are the pics of the winning entries from Kublacon07.

Photo References

Smoke: 1

Fire: 1

Rust:1