Tuesday, June 30, 2015

One last post for June

This will be just a quickie.  I've had these two..... not sure if I'd call them models or tokens, but regardless, I've had these two guys sitting on my desk for a long time.  Well, I got tired of looking at them in black primer so I painted them up on Monday.  I basically followed the steps from Tale of Painters tutorials.


The way the skin was done with the Lahmian Medium glaze was a bit different than what I'm used to.  It really didn't start to take shape until I added the Sepia wash.  I'm not sure how I feel about it, but I think they turned out pretty good, minus a little frosting from the purity seal.  All in all pretty good.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Dwarvern Command

I know I've taken a slight sabbatical on LOTR lately.  Well, probably since like March/April'ish.  I do have a few projects coming up that will involve more LOTR stuff.  Anyhew, this past week I opened up my Dwarf Command box that has been sitting idle for over a year in one of my various storage Tupperware containers.  I cracked open the box and inspected the miniatures.  Sadly, it's a first generation failcast product with holes everywhere and fiddly parts on the verge of braking along with shards of pink rubber from where the molds failed.  I wish I could say this was rare, but with most of the older line of LOTR stuff that got cast in finecast, this is the norm.  I'd be willing to bet money that if you bought any Lord of the Rings miniature in finecast even now (note; not The Hobbit finecast), you'll have a similar experience as myself.

Well, I sucked up my disappointment and cleaned up the miniatures where I could and did a rather amateur job green stuffing and remolding warped parts.  I'd use liquid greenstuff, but I always have issues using it.  Whenever I pick up a pot, it's always half cured and I always get piss poor results whenever I use it.  So, I cleaned them up, slapped some paint on them, and here is the final outcome...





Not particularly thrilled with the blue color, but it suits them.  The two guys with shields did not have a good cast and I did the best I could to try to resculpt them.  I mean, the shields were warped and both were missing the bottom half of the detail.  The captain on the right had part of his bottom right armor completely missing and I had to resculpt it.  The shield bearer on the left had a weapon that was overly brittle and I had to soak it in super glue to give it any strength.  I would've resculpted the shaft, but I was afraid I'd warp it even worse in the process.  Even part of his hand holding the axe was messed up to the point where sculpting would've damaged it even further.  All in all, this was some of the worst finecast models I've ever worked with.  I think for what I received from Games Workshop versus the final result, I did a pretty good job.  Comments always appreciated.

Friday, June 12, 2015

The Second Maggoth Lord, Morbidex Twiceborn

Another month has past since my last blog post.  I'll fully admit when I've been slacking on my hobby, and this past month I was not slacking.  I've actually been rather hard at work on many things and hopefully in the month of June (or July) you all will see my hard work come to fruition.  Seriously though, I've got like 4 projects that are around 75% done which is odd for me.  Usually when I start something hobby related, I either focus solely on that, or I put it up and forget about it for a few years.  Oddly enough, "The Wandering Painter" is becoming more and more truer everyday.

I know, I know.... I'm beating around the bush here.  Nobody comes here to read my random thoughts.  You've come to see miniatures... hopefully above average miniatures that will motivate you to dust off your brushes and get to work on your own projects.  Anyhew, without further delay, I present for your viewing pleasure....

The Second Maggoth Lord.... Morbidex Twiceborn












 


















So flew it alone on this one.  No Warhammer TV to assist with color scheme, no Duncan Rhodes to show me how slow I work with his awesome British accent.  So yeah, I went it alone only going off the box art and my own imagination as far as colors went.  I decided to go with the rosy skin triad from Reaper for the maggoth beast as I thought the fair skin tones the box art used were a touch too light for my tastes.  Also, I really enjoy doing the sore skin around the cuts and infection, so I decided to put in the added effort to make him appear gross as can be which is actually fairly different from the box art.  As far as Twiceborn is concerned, I spent almost as much time painting him as I did the maggoth beast.  He had a fair amount of detail on him, and I wanted him to have a fairly clean paint job.  I'm not used to painting straight green skin, so I experimented a little bit with the color scheme and eventually went with Deathworld Forest as a base, followed by Elysian Green, followed by a fairly diluted Yriel Yellow.  With my non-art background I didn't realize that a bright yellow works great as a highlight for brighter greens.  It really gives it that pop that makes the raised surfaces stand out.

So I think up next we'll bust out some LOTRs and then return for the 3rd and final Maggoth Lord to complete the set.  I also plan on completing a few more projects that are almost done before summer ends.  I'm hoping this summer will be productive as far as my painting is concerned.  Hopefully far more productive than my last two summers.  Thanks for looking!!!