Beasties and Pox

If there's one thing that can be said about my level of hobby progress, it's that I'm consistently inconsistent!

I spent the better part of a week basically doing nothing, then once again I churned out loads in a couple of days.

I decided to take quick break from my Elves to paint up some beasties for Middle Earth. There's a new Forge World character out who allows me to use them in a Mordor list so I rifled through my bits cupboard to see what I could cobble together:

They're nothing special tbh. Mostly painted with washes with a few highlights and hit with some gloss varnish on the Spiders. I am pretty impressed that I managed to finally make use of my Skull Pass Spiders though, after nearly 15 years! I'm not entirely sure where the Fenrisian Wolf came from, but he made for a handy Warg, so he got thrown in there too. Not bad for a few hours work!

The other thing I've been working on is for a mate:

The guy I've been painting all those Death Guard for wanted some Possessed, so inspired by ADB' Black Legion series, we had the pretty cool idea that they could all be captured Imperials. It's been pretty fun messing around with colour schemes and 'scumming them up'. This batch is nearly finished, just needing a few details picking out. He's wanting at least five more though so I get to play around with a few more Chapters. I'm open to suggestions on what those could be!

Anyway that's all for today. Figured you guys would enjoy the little update. Not sure if I'll get much done in the rest of this week, but I've got next week off work, so hopefully there will be more progress to show you then.

Happy hobbying! 

Monster Progress!

I think I need to stop making hobby plans for when I'm holidays. After everything going spectacularly wrong when I was off in February, then not getting much of a chance to do much in March, I was looking forward to using my 12 days off last month to get some seriously hobby done.

Fate on the other hand, had a different ideas. My glasses broke the day before I was due to be off, leaving me with a two week wait for a new pair and being unable to work on anything. I'm starting to get the feeling that I'm cursed!

Anyway, after that delay, I'm starting to get back on track and actually got a substantial amount finished:

My first Keeper, Shys'ell the Magnificent, is finally complete. She's taken me far longer than I even want to think about tbh, but I'm ridiculously proud of how it's turned out. The insane amount of layers really paid off. 

There's also a magnetised shield for her that I need to paint up, but that can come later. I'm at the stage where I'm just happy not to be working on her any more!

Not that I didn't enjoy painting her, it's just possibly the longest I've ever spent working on a single model and I'm definitely ready to move onto other stuff. Luckily, I also managed to get my other big piece finished around the same time:

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I've been painting Morty for a friend alongside my Slaanesh stuff and to be honest I was a little surprised at how long it took me to get through him. I thought the Keepers would take me longer, but there's an insane amount of detail squeezed in there. 

I also really do love how he turned out though, to the point where I consider it one of the best pieces I've ever painted! My friend loves him too, which is even more important. I'm looking forward to having him stomp my poor Slaaneshi force into the ground with him in the near future!

I am feeling a little burned out on big monsters though, so I'm going to leave painting my second Keeper for a little while before coming back to it. Instead I'm going to focus on something completely different.  I have something in mind, but you'll have to watch this space to find out what it is. 

I'm also doing a non-wargaming painting commission for another friend, which I may or may not show on here. That will influence what I work on though. Whatever I choose will be reasonably small scale until that's finished. 

Monster Mash

Remember I mentioned in my last post about how I've had a really crap couple of months? Well things got even worse from there. Without going into too many details, I really needed to cheer myself up and had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to break my self-imposed rules on hobby purchases and treat myself to some models.

Just a few 'little' bits. To be fair, it's stuff I've been wanting for ages and I needed the dopamine hit which comes with a plastic crack delivery! 

The Keeper of Secrets is a model I've been after ever since it came out. It's such a gorgeous sculpt, but I've just never gotten around to picking it up until now. I just hope that I can do it justice with my painting skills.

I got it assembled pretty quickly. I even started painting it:

I don't thinking I've done too badly for a couple of evening's worth of work. Still a long, long way to go though. 

I'm actually quite proud of how the layering on the back of the skirt is shaping up. It's looking a little rough atm, but it's heading in the right direction and it's not normally something I do well on a large scale. Even as I write this though, I'm coming to the horrible realisation that most of my hard work isn't going to be visible once I attach the outer cloak. Sad times. 

In between layers on that though, I've been working on something a little more... unusual:

I wanted my second Keeper to be a bit different to my first one, plus I wanted to create something which paid homage to the classic 80's Keeper, whilst still working in the modern game. Thus this abomination was born!

If someone had told me I'd be spending part of this lockdown sculpting thigh high boots on a sexy cow Deamon, I'd have laughed. Yet it seems I've reached that particular stage of craziness.

It was actually pretty simple to convert. Working from the AoS Ghorgon kit, most of it was created using my leftover bits from the 'proper' Keeper. I'd say that trimming the Keeper claws to fit over the existing wrist guards were the most complicated part of the process. That was more time intensive than hard to do though. 

The boots themselves were pretty easy to create. I just smoothed off the lower legs, attached a hoop of plasticard to form the top of the boot, then built up layers of Green Stuff and Liquid Green Stuff to form the rest of it. Fairly basic, but I think it looks effective. 

Looking at the photos, I might go back later and add some more bulk around the ankles, but I'll have a think about that. I've got a lot of work to do before I get around to painting it. 

Oh and finally, as if I didn't have enough big models to be working on right now, my mate's also asked me if I could paint Mortarion for him. Like a fool, I agreed!

I'm not entirely sure why I accepted the commission, especially as I've got three big models to work on already sitting on my painting desk. I guess I just wanted a different style of model to work on for when I want a break from painting Slaanesh stuff. The Keepers are going to require me to carefully build up many thin, smooth layers, whereas Morty lets me do something a bit more grimy and 'grimdark', as well as have fun painting a lovely sculpt which I'd never buy for myself. I may regret my madness, but so far it's been fun to do.

I've actually made some decent progress already:

It's not the best of photos. I'm still getting used to photographing big stuff in my light box, but it'll do for now. I'm going for a much grittier and down to earth colour scheme than I normally see him painted in. It's taking bloody ages and there's obviously a long way to go yet, but I'm happy with how he's shaping up so far. 

As you can imagine, pretty much all my hobby time right now is being poured into these three models. It may make for some very repetitive future updates, but at the rate I'm going, I should actually get through them reasonably quickly.

This ended up being a much longer post than expected, but that's not a bad thing. It just goes to show how much I can get done when I get bitten by the hobby bug!

 I'll post more soon. Until then, stay safe and happy hobbying! 

A rambling and non-exhaustive experiment with Contrast

I'm going to be setting some time aside to try and actually get some blogging done. I find running this blog really rewarding to do, but the problem is that it becomes too much of a chore when I start falling behind. In theory if I can catch up on things, it should keep the flow of motivation going. That's the idea anyway.

I've actually been up to a fair amount of hobby recently, but to be honest the main project on my painting table atm isn't even my own models. I managed to bring a friend into 40k in the latter half of last year through the Conquest magazine subscription, but he really doesn't have much time to paint anything due to family commitments. So I offered to step in and get some stuff done for him.

 I will admit to a couple of ulterior motives here. Firstly, it's an excellent excuse to have an experiment with the Contrast paint range. It's also a cheeky way to bump up my painting points!

Regardless of my other reasons though, helping a mate get his army painted was my main reason for doing this. Being able to play with two fully painted armies on our gaming nights is really nice thought. Plus it lets me paint something completely different to what I normally work on. I've been feeling the early signs of burnout on my painting recently, so hopefully a chance of pace and style will help me with that.

Anyway, onto the models.

I started with the basics. Poxwalkers are being used in GW stores to demonstrate the new paint range, so I figured was a solid place to start:

These were already half done before Contrast was even announced, using the traditional 'base, wash, highlight' method. It was such a laborious process though that it was taking forever, even for such a basic paint job. With Contrast, all it took was quick blitz with Militarum Green, Gulliman Flesh and Magos purple and I was able to finish them up in a matter of hours. I followed those with a few quick drybrushes, picked out a few details like the boils and guts, then just added a bit of Blood for the Blood God and I think they look pretty good. They're certainly not going to be winning any painting awards, but they're a decent tabletop standard.

Tbh this kind of thing is what I see as the main use I'll be getting out of the new range. I'll probably end up using them to skip the boring and tedious stages in a paint job, but then going over them and finishing them off with more traditional methods. It'll be used to speed up what I was doing already, instead of replacing it.

Next I decided to see what it could do on Marine armour, so I decided to apply Militarum Green over the Waywatcher Green base colour I'd been building up on one of his Plague Marines:

I think you'll agree that it looks pretty effective! Considering the Waywatcher 'preshade' I'd applied, it wasn't really any quicker than my previous method, but it gets a far more consistent result than I was getting with the Colea Greenshade layer I was going to add next.

Here's the whole squad:

The armour, skin and mutations were all picked out in various contrast paints, whilst the gold was done using more traditional methods. They're obviously still a work in progress, but the ability to add awkward colours easily means that I'm actually feeling motivated to push forward with them, rather than seeing those stages as something to be dreaded.

Next I decided to give it a try over existing washes. This was what I was most excited to attempt, as I do a lot of painting with washes over a simple white base coat, so I was interested to see how I could improve on that method:

The shell on Slimex's snail was just Magos Purple over a couple of layers of Druchii Violet, As you can see it's made a really solid and vibrant result. It seems to have just enhanced the colour rather than overpowering it. I might still go over it with a bit of a drybrush, but I'd be happy just to leave it at that stage tbh. I'm probably going to paint the rest of the model using non-Contrast techniques tbh.

So all in all, I'd say Contrast is definitely a useful tool in my painting kit. I don't think I'd ever paint a model just using Contrast as many people are doing, but it's certainly going to improve what I'm already doing.

One thing I definitely want to try next is using it over metallic basecoats to see how that goes. I've seen a lot of people produce some excellent results doing that, so I've got high hopes. That will have to wait though. I've got way too many projects on the go atm to veer off into that particular rabbit hole right now.

That's all for today. It wasn't the most comprehensive of posts, more just some random musings and experimentation. Hopefully I'll find the time to post again soon. Like I said earlier, I want to try and get a regular posting schedule up and running. Fingers crossed that I succeed!