Air of Authority

Had some more mixed airbrush results recently. I was working from home on Friday so I had some time after logging off and chose to get as much of my Combined Army as possible undercoated with the blue colour I've chosen to start from.

No matter how thick I had the paint mix, it seemed to not be sticking, and pooling on the miniatures... This of course was after I filled the reservoir with a whole heap of blue, only to realise that it was the wrong blue... I persevered, thinking maybe another coat would do the trick once the first was dry but it didn't seem to help at all.

Later that night I tried to salvage some of the models with a mix of the blue base coat and Lahmian medium to attempt to make the finish a bit more matte.
In the cold light of morning the next day, the salvaged models looked fine. Great news. So did all the others though, so they never needed salvaging in the first place.
There are a number of things I think that went wrong here -
Poor light while airbrushing
Wrong temperature - I had the window open to vent the airbrush booth, maybe too cold
No glasses - They don't fit on my face with the respirator mask

I was completely downtrodden when I packed everything up on Friday night, but seeing the basecoat dried on those models I managed to undercoat makes me feel like I will do this again at some point to get everything undercoated, and some blending on larger models too perhaps, and OSL

We played our weekly Malifaux game on Sunday, and I think Titania finally clicked for me. Supporting Barbaros and Nekima is easy! They both had Fears Given Form which i felt a little bad a bout. At one point poor Cojo had to test for Titania's friendly scheme marker rule, and two lots of fears. He didn't make it...
We played Mark of authority, which was a lot of fun as well. Good game all around, including a couple of new scenery pieces :)

I'm currently planning out 300 points of Morats for a game after work on Wednesday so watch this space!

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Fresh Air

I promised that I would get some airbrushing done over the break. I tried talking myself out of it for various reasons like the time taken to set it up, finding all the bits and bobs, etc. In the end I managed to see through my own weak excuses and got everything plugged in, sorted and ready to go.

Although it's still a temporary setup, and goes away again after use, the booth & compressor setup easily and without a great deal of fuss to be honest.

The newer of the two airbrushes works just fine with whatever needle/nozzle combo it ended up with, and in general is a more pleasant tool to use than the first cheap brush I bought.
I wanted to at least make a start on the Morats, and after touching up the coat of black primer with VMA Black, I went ahead and primed a mix of VMA black Primer and VMA Grey primer from 45 degrees to help with shading. I mixed this originally for the Titania crew models I wanted to include in this session. I then basecoated the blue I had picked out for some of the armour panels on the Morats and used the rest on the Gorar from the Titania box before the heat cutout on the Compressor stopped the whole thing short.

A couple of learning points from the whole thing. First being that if I have a list of models which I want to get done, with relevant colours, I can be more efficient. The amount of primer I had mixed was more than enough for what I wanted to get painted so I was looking for more models to undercoat in order to not waste it.

The second is that I want to get 'proper' airbrush versions of colours which I will use often through the airbrush. the dilution of blue I used for the Morats seemed fine on them (although it maybe wants a second coat) but when I used it on the Plastic Gorar, it seemed to run off a bit? this is possible due to using flow improver rather than airbrush thinner/water but isn't ideal nonetheless.

All in all, a successful attempt, and promising for future uses. I don't think the airbrush I have is really suitable for anything other than basecoats really, or my use of it isn't at any rate. I want to speak to my Infinity buddy at work when he is back off leave to see what his airbrush is like :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Needles and Haystacks

I wanted to sort through the spare needles and nozzles I have for my cheap airbrushes, thinking I'd use the calipers I bought to help identify them as which size.
Long story short, I ended up getting quite muddled. the 5mm needles were easy to identify as they are massive by comparison to the other two pairs. the 2mm/3mm are almost identical though and I am only half confident that I have them separated out properly. I was under the impression that the entire needle would be thinner or thicker, to measure with the calipers, but it seems only the taper changes.

Anyway, I have a needle plus nozzle in each brush, and based on how cheap the components are, i'm not sure that .1mm will make a  huge amount of difference.

Maybe I'll eventually have enough practice to buy a branded one at some point. I am hoping to be able to put them to use on Infinity models over the long break, and at least be part painted for the first intro game I have arranged with my work friend. I find myself increasingly tempted by models outside of the Morat sectorial, and Umbra Samaritans/Legates etc are just too nice not to paint! They also go well with the Batroid TAGs which I definitely would like to paint up and play with eventually too.

I'll be doing a year in review hopefully next week, and a look forward to plans for next year :)

Thanks for sticking with me thus far, and as ever -
Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Quick Work

After a good weekend, despite not being at home very much, and a music festival providing a strange morning/evening routine with bands on until late, I did manage to get done the airbrushing I planned previously.

The 5mm needle in the older brush is far too big, it throws out gallons per seconds worth of paint, only some of which gets on the model of course due to a wide spray cone versus a relatively narrow model profile. The Ortegas that got sprayed took a whole heap of paint, but when using the 3mm needle in the newer brush (being too lazy to clean out the brush for a second colour had a surprising benefit), the paint is much more targeted, and didn't really take that much longer. Coupled with the fact that less paint overall was used for only one good coat instead of multiple brush coats, I'd call this a win! This doesn't seem like much at all, and is far from exemplary use of an airbrush, but it's progress, and saved time :)

There are a couple of further notes I'd like to make at this point about the equipment I'm currently using.

First off, the airbrush booth doesn't seem to drag away a massive amount of the paint... This is either because I still hold the miniatures i'm working on quite close to me whilst working, or for other as yet unknown reasons. Also, probably because of the sheer output of the 5mm needle, there was some paint which made it through the gaps in the fold out parts of the booth and onto my desk. This was easily cleaned with some airbrush cleaning fluid on some paper towel, though so not a massive issue. Lastly some paint DOES still come out of the filter at the back, so unless the booth is venting out of the window using the parts provided, some paper behind the vent at the back is necessary to preserver whatever might be behind the booth in your setup (my monitors/items on the monitor shelf).

Second, the newer airbrush is far superior to the first one I bought. It feels smoother in the trigger, and paint flow, and clogs less which is a huge plus! It says something that the older brush clogged more with VMA paint and paint thinner than the newer brush did with VGC paint and thinner...

Lastly, regardless of using an airbrush booth or not, ALWAYS wear a filter mask. This is probably related to my holding miniatures so close to me still while working on them, but I felt a bit light headed after I was done, and breathing in atomised airbrush thinner can't be good for any aspect of health really. Look after your lungs!

Bank Holiday Business

After posting the other day, I started thinking more closely about what models are currently outstanding with a view to what would be the best use of an airbrush session.
Checking the Guild project page gives us the below likely candidates for some quick coats of brown leather:
Malifaux Child
Metal Sam Hopkins
Master Queeg
The Latigo Posse
Death Marshal Recruiters
Abulea Ortega

Of these, a lot of them will need basing work doing, which I will try and get at least some completed tonight.

After 'recent' games with the Guild, this will also expand my playable model count considerably. Especially if Brutal Effigy and Limited Francisco get anywhere near completed soon.

Lastly, some Neverborn models are ready and waiting for paint, and will benefit massively from an albeit very different basecoat:
Lelu
Lilitu
Black Blood Shaman
Widow Weaver
Mysterious Effigy

This weekend is pretty much a write off as there is a music festival that my wife and some friends want to go to (not my first choice for music) so I won't be at home much for any useful hobby time until Monday.
Let's see what happens based on this mission plan (despite the fact that planning things out for hobby time seems to be the guaranteed way to make sure it doesn't happen :P)

Thanks for Stopping by
Lofty

Bad Things Happen

A bit of a misleading title maybe, I just meant that I actually played a game of Malifaux. Shocker eh?

We went to Element Games the other weekend as some of us wanted to get the Promotion model. I didn't really have anything in mind that I wanted, already feeling pretty guilty about the mountain of miniatures I currently have to paint for Malifaux. I ended up sharing a box of Samurai with my friend who wanted one for his Ten Thunders, so I kept two because, well Samurai are cool, and also because I have Izamu already for Nightmare McCabe. I also picked up a box of Terracota Warriors in order to get the spend price up for my wife to get the promo model, and McCabe loves them :)

The following Thursday all four of us were free so we planned in a game of Malifaux. After so long without a game, I went with Guild as it's something more familiar. I lost pretty badly to a summoner list Asami I think she's called. I got bogged down on the stash markers, and never made it past there to score from my schemes (i picked poorly from a not very guild friendly pool). It was fun to get models on the table again though and got me thinking about getting McCabe ready for the table.
All I'm missing is a bit of time to triage remaining steps to get them at least ready to glue to bases and then finish off at a later date.

I also got to thinking how beneficial an overall coat of brown (leather) would be for all the guild (mainly Ortega) models I have to paint currently. So next time I get a chance to get airbrushing, I will hopefully get a some work done on my Malifaux. There are some Neverborn models that might benefit from a blue base layer too :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Mixed Bag

Had another airbrush session today, and the bigger needle definitely helped with getting a good coverage.  I got the Wraithknight, and two dragons undercoated black, and then a really nice pale brown basecoat on the wing membranes of the dragons.

After that though, it all seemed to go wrong. The red I then wanted to add to the scaly parts of the dragons went on really watery, and im pretty disappointed, not really even sure how to salvage it either. I need to do some reading.

I did get a decent basecoat of red/brown on the wraithlord though to later highlight with red :)

Brush the dust away

Back to song title blog post titles? Not sure if relevant title or return to wordplay attempt...

Anyway. In light of the things I discussed in the previous post I had a few issues with my airbrush. After painting so many single models/small groups for Malifaux, the thought of batch painting 20+ Space Wolves at a time is really daunting to be honest, so I'm pretty sure airbrushing is a worthwhile investment. Checking Amazon, I found a basic airbrush with decent reviews, and a set to help me clean blocked needle tips/nozzles. I also splashed out and got a quick connector set, in order to be able to use both airbrushes with minimum effort, as I imagine that switching between different brushes without having to let the compressor lose pressure first would be tricky. Lastly, a desk clamp to hold both brushes.

The plan currently is to use the original airbrush as undercoat and larger base-coats with the .5mm needle, and the new brush for finer details with .3mm/.2mm needles.

So at least that's the plan currently. I'll be sure to keep updating with the journey through airbrushing for the second time around. I'm definitely looking forward to using it on the various dragons/larger models needing paint. Hopefully I can get some decent OSL on some places too :)

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

One Step Forward...

So I mentioned in my previous post that I'd been home from work sick, and I managed to shift the earache, but the tinnitus and migraines might need another doctors visit :(

Anyhow, I managed to get a whole wealth of work done, and magnetised nearly all the weapon options a mounted Wolf Lord might need. It took a fair while yesterday, but it will be worth it, and I've not managed to find a straight answer as to how best he should be armed :)

I also managed to make him a base, which would have photographed better before primer...

I also alluded to some kind of special surprise to reveal this weekend, and it didn't exactly go as planned...

I bought an airbrush booth, after a lot of encouragement from a painter/gamer friend of mine at work. When the earache had subsided enough to break it out to test this weekend, I duly fired everything up, compressor still works, I still have some PTFE tape, great! I primed the base above, and the other TWC bases I made on Friday, plus my Wraithlord. I washed out the brush to get a coat of dark grey on the bases, the start of which can be seen above, and of course the brush got blocked.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to clean out the brush, and it seems (from the state of the needle) that I either put it away without cleaning it last time :( or the German grey i was using had some gunk in the cap which is now lodged in the 0.2m needle cover...
This was a bit annoying, as all I had managed to do was the work of a can of primer in about 5 times the time it would have taken :p

So the upshot of all this is that I now have the 0.5mm needle for primer and larger groups model basecoats, and a new brush in case there is something else wrong with mine, but that one will have the 3mm needle for more detailed things, and general work :)

I also ordered a brush holder and a quick release attachment set to switch between the brushes easily.

So, hopefully I'll be able to document Airbrush setup 2.0 at some point this coming weekend. That's all for now though

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Don't Stop Me Now

Things are still going really well, there is a lot of momentum to this project!

I've come up with a couple of paint schemes, but I'm having trouble picking one to go with (will be painting up a couple of spare guardians to see what they look like hopefully), any preferences please dear readers? I think the black helmet is in the lead at the mo.

KILLED AND LOST BY PHOTOBUCKET :(

To cover off from last time, I have readied ten Dire Avengers for painting (going to hopefully have a massive weekend of airbrushing base coats on EVERYTHING) sourced a High Elf Dragon as a wave serpent, and 8 Cold Ones for jetbikes.

The plan at the moment is to make Shining Spears - Dragon Knights with four cold ones/Dire Avengers and have two units of three jetbike guardians on the cold ones as well. I also have plans for a Farseer/Warlock council on 'jetbikes' at some stage, though cold ones are proving pretty tough to source so this won't be anytime soon. Both the Dragon Knights and outriders (Let's call the guardians) have been heavily inspired by other people's conversion work, as well as the Exodite fluff I've been reading in various places online. I plan on giving them a good amount of baggage on the back of the saddle, with bedroll, knife, personal effects etc.

I have been pondering ways in which to make the more traditional Craftworld elements of my current project fit more with the Exodite theme, and in this vain I have purchased some Instant mold. The plan is to take a mold from the spine/head area of one of the cold one mounts and have this scaly pattern greenstuffed onto the smooth head areas of the wraith units. If I can pull it off, i think it will look pretty good.

I don't get as much time to assemble & paint as i would like, as our kittens are still pretty into everything they can see, so it's a very stop/start process. Slowly but surely I'm getting to where I want to be though.
I'm at a friends house on Thursday to see him play against a second friend so I can start learning the new edition of 4ok, which I'm looking forward to as it will allow me to better plan my collection/armny lists.

Further into the project, I will be making my own Howling Banshees (also intended to double as Harlequins somehow) Warpspiders, and a small corsair DE force to go with everything else, as well as Lizardmen monstrous creatures as grav tanks.
I'm also wanting to include a Carnosaur somehow eventually (Wraithknight stand in??) a Wraithknight (see previous) and I'm not sure how to represent further wave serpents, as the High Elf Dragon wasn't easy to come by, albeit being cheaper than a Wave Serpent kit...

This is a project which has run ahead of me, and I'm finding it quite hard to stay on top of all the things I keep thinking of to include in the force etc. It's very refreshing to have such a clean slate to work with, there is a lot to be said for the world of GW plastic kits and the options they leave a modeler.

I'll hopefully have something to show soon, but I can't promise anything with Xmas on it's way and being pretty busy. I will however show progress when it's made, especially with the more esoteric stuff like the dragon et al.

Thanks for stopping by!
Lofty

Game Changer

Firstly, this post is not marked for IABN so anyone who has arrived here expecting Privateer Press related blogging, this post is not for you :)

I'm sure that I've mentioned before that a couple of my friends still play GW games, both fantasy and 40k. Despite teaching one of my friends Warmachine, and him buying heavily into Cryx, 40k still seems to be the game of choice.

That being said, we have had a recent phase of financial hardship, but this has now cleared up in the form of my wife getting a new job.  However, this has led me to be excessively frugal on the hobby front, and I have made some absolute steals on ebay/facebook trading page to the tune of (for £80);

Eldar Avatar
20 Dire Avengers (new on frame)
10 Guardians (new on frame)
6 Fire Dragons (sealed in box)
11 Striking scorpions inc 2 Exarchs
1 Wave Serpent
5 Wraithguard (sealed in box)
1 Wraithlord (sealed in box)
1 Spiritseer (sealed in box)
New Eldar Codex

Needless to say pretty pleased with myself.  Plans currently include conversions/counts as for Warp spider & Howling banshee Aspect Warriors, as well as a whole heap of exodites - cold ones as jetbikes/shining spear, Lizardmen beasts as grav tanks.

This all pretty much stems from
a) Cash - it's going to be a whole lot cheaper to make my own guys than it is to pay full GW prices
b) Finecrapst - I refuse to pay money for 'fine'cast anything, so plastic is king :)

The only progress i've made so far is getting the fire dragons mounted on cork bases (originally planned for a city ruins theme, but will now be modifiying this to fit an exodite world), and re-assembling the ebayed Avatar and pinning to a large cork base.

I made a little progress on the hobby tidying i proposed in an earlier post, and have sorted out my hobby drawer in order to facilitate better access to bits and bobs.  The wife is out this Sunday for most of the day doing baking things, so i;m hop[ing to be able to make a real dent in the rest of what I want to do the hobby area in order to make things as easy as possible to get done.  I will also be planning out a paintinging docket, so i can make best use of airbrush basecoating without it being interrupted/stopping and starting too much. The idea is to have an hour or so each time im free to base coat a whole batch of guys which can then be painted during the week, which will speed things up as well as making the whole process easier :)

Long post today, but it should hopefully make up for my ridiculous lack of capacity recently.

I'm hoping to be able to update as often as i have anything to show/discuss so stay tuned,a nd thanks for your patience.

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

All Quiet on the Western Front

Just wanted to check in and ensure you all that I am still around and still hobbying.

I've had a couple of bouts of illness recently coupled with some really busy weeks, so I've barely been at my desk since the last post.
During that time though, I have eVyros ready to prime and undercoat, my witch doctor conversion almost finished (including a base that I really like), and Rask & various minions all ready to get basecoated.
All I need is time to spend getting everything set up and long enough to get them all sprayed ready to be worked on.

I'm also planning a magnetising project with some of the new Games Workshop Eldar models. These are the first models I ever purchased over 17 years ago, and the re-released stuff has really piqued my interest, and I look forward to a bit of a palette cleanse with this project. After all, how different are the miniatures from GW/PP?

I'm also planning on picking up some new airbrush paints, and I plan eventually to have base/mid/highlight colours for commonly used colours, browns/reds/greens/bone etc. This will be for any work that comes in (not sure how likely) but also to increase speed and efficiency for my own models, as I can reduce the amount of brush time spent with a model, in order to be able to spend more time on details, instead of repeated coats of base colours etc. I'm hoping this will give me more time to practice new tachniques that I've recently started, as well as learning new.

It's also my birthday coming up, and me and a friend who has recently started Cryx have agreed to exchange PP minis as gifts to the value of £30, as neither our significant others, or any of our other friends would gift us with hobby gear! We exchanged lists of 'wants & needs' and I have purchased a Merc heavy 'jack, Broadsides Bart, and Dougal Macnaile. My list was a real mix of Skorne, and the few remaining Ret' miniatures that I am after, so we will see what comes of that.

Lastly, I elected not to get into the new Warmachine faction, but I do intend to buy the book once the PP digital app is released. I would rather concentrate on my Retribution collection, and get back onto my Skorne relatively soon.

Next weekend is a trip to London, and the weekend after is a family birthday, so it might not actually be until my birthday that I get time to do anything much, more's the pity. In the meantime though I'm going to be planning out my next few batches of purchases, in terms of projects & hobby essentials.

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Rocky Road

No, not the ice cream flavour. I'm talking about my experiences painting Hyperion.

The main thing I've learned is that I should have started painting before I knew about the event I'm getting ready for, and given myself far more time to spend on such an awesome miniature.

That said, it really has been a journey to get it to the stage it is at today. I've tried out some new techniques this time around, some of which will be visible when I post up completed pictures.

The first of which was pre-shading. I discussed this in a post a week or so ago, and to surmise, I decided that airbrushing detail really wasn't going to work for me.  I'll revise the technique & my method after a total strip down of the brush and a clean, in case this was affecting flow etc and see how I get on painting bog trogs.

The second method I've adopted that I haven't really done before is line highlighting. I had the intention of trying to blend my highlights a lot more on the large armour plates on the colossal, but I really haven't left a great deal of time at all for something like this, more 's the pity. Instead, I've been pretty satisfied with applying a reasonably fine light of a highlight colour to the edges of each section as a highlight, and a similar method to shade selected areas.  I also tried some edge highlights which came out pretty terribly if I'm honest, and I hope they won't stand out too much on the finished article.

I've felt pretty overwhelmed by the project over the past ten days or so of work, and it was only last night, when I was adding the glow to power lines etc, and had the base snow added that I felt like it was going to look great when completed. I'm taking tonight off to avoid burning myself out and not wanting to finish, but I ahve the afternoon off work tomorrow, and a late night planned to get the finishing touches (and Ravyn finished for hat matter) done and dusted. I've learned the hard way that the night before an event is a bad time to be waiting for paint to dry in order to pack models into cases, so Saturday will also be a hands-off day (busy during the day).

I'm confident that I'll be done in time, and confident that the final product will at least look half decent, as well as being fairly excited about getting some table time with the model :)
Definitely disappointed however with the rush I've imposed on painting such a great model, as well as a little bummed out about my visions of airbrushing being un-realistic.

A bit of a bitter-sweet post today, but I hope to be able to lighten the mood with completed pictures of Hyperion either late Friday night (early Saturday morning) or from the event on Sunday.

Until then, thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Northern Son

I'll be honest, I lost a little steam after the bank holiday on Monday.  I'm not sure the pre-shading has worked on Hyperion if I'm honest, and it looks like I will have a fair amount of work to do once it's base-coated.
I was also a bit dejected when I started work on my witch doctor conversion. The piece I had bought as a skull mask for him doesn't have a chance of fitting over his face without a lot of Dremmel work to remove the mass inside it, whichj i struggled to do with hobby knife/files.
I managed to salvage the skull into a Wrastler looking one which I will use on the base, and try to add some runes/OSL glow to the eyes maybe. Back at the drawing board for this one, and maybe I will try a different type of headdress.

So tomorrow and Sunday I will be pushing on with Hyperion when I get chance, and hope to at least get the grey base coat and metallics sorted so I can think about how to approach highlighting.  At the moment, I'm leaning towards using standard brushes to shade and highlight, which I'm disappointed about, but there may hopefully be chance to airbrush at least the white on the shoulders, if not some kind of stencil work to make it stand out as a centre piece.

Based on recent experience however, my current airbrush set-up really makes me feel like it will just be a tool for priming and base coating.

I've been looking at some of the convergence of Cyriss photos to come out of Lock n Load as well and I really like the aesthetic, and have been juggling potential colours schemes around in my mind this morning.  I have been pondering about a second Warmachine faction for a while, but I can never really justify it to be honest. I still haven't picked up any of the new 'jacks for Retribution, and I pretty much prefer playing Hordes anyway if I'm honest (I'd love to pick up some Trollbloods).

My first thought is that I can magnetise a Vyre 'jack kit or two (learning from my mistakes with the first Shyeel kit I tried to magnetise...), and grab the last 'caster is missing along with a solo or two I'd like and call it done, unless the next book or two drag me back into the faction.

For Skorne, there is very little I'd like to add to my forces, save perhaps a second unit of Cetrati at some point, but I have pretty much everything I like the look of etc. so I'm happy with painting them up for now.

It's a similar story with Gatormen, I have Rask now to put together, and with the exception of the witch doctor/shamblers unit in the new book there isn't anything I'm after greatly so, again I'm happy painting up what I have.

As far as Cyriss/Trollbloods go, I think I'll wait until at least the end of July (after my birthday) and see how I feel then. I don't play at all hardly any more due to various reasons, so it's difficult justifying any large layouts at the moment, so we will have to see where the future lies

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Sleep on it

Managed to get Hyperion pre-shaded & Zenithal highlighted yesterday with the airbrush, and the mask works perfectly, so I will be doing plenty more airbrushing in the future.

At first, I was a little scared that I had 'ruined' the areas I was trying to shade, with a steady hand and not great control of the airbrush requiring me to go back in with a brush and tidy up some areas with the grey primer colour, and the white which I was spraying down from the top didn't really seem to have coated too well. This was assuaged a little this morning though once I opened my drawer to inspect my handy work. I feel a lot more confident now that it will look ok once I have painted on the mid-layer. Hopeful it will pick out the shades and highlights too. If not, I have  a plan to re-shade with a mix of the darker colour and the mid-layer through the airbrush.

I'm reluctant to show any WIP of this process to be honest as it really doesn't look great so I'd rather show the finished item, if I need to fix a load of stuff, or even start again if the methods used haven't worked.  Once the armour is painted though, I'm going to add battle damage with a sponge, paint the metallics, and then try to OSL the power channels and orbs with the airbrush.

I think this may be a little ambitious for my first real use of the airbrush, but I'm pretty sure I'll love to tell the tale :p

Ravyn and the Arcanist are being added to whenever I get a moment between Hyperion layers, and I also finished Calabans base, and eVyros' base as well. Calaban shown below.

I'd like to add in a link here to a forum I found recently which is an amazing resource of guides and tutorials for painting miniatures and bases.  I spent an entire evening/night pouring through these well-written articles, and I really felt like I learned something. Despite the focus on Warhammer fantasy, there is a lot to be learnt here, so I suggest you go and at least have a look even if you feel you don't need any help :P

Hopefully some progress with Hyperion mid-week

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Intermittent Tone

Well it's been nearly two weeks since I had chance to post anything. It's been that busy.
I did get a bit of painting done a week or so ago, nearly finished Ravyn finally, and some extra bits on a couple of other models. I was at a festival for the Easter weekend too so that was a write off for modelling. I did however pick up eVyros that weekend and literally just put away his base and sub assemblies until later, as I really don't have much time today.

I'll hopefully be able to get back into a regular hobby/blogging cycle soon, once things calm down. However, the theatre company i'm involved with has a production soon so I'm quite busy with that. I'm also training for a 10km obstacle course this year (sponsorship posts to follow :P) but that's usually during lunchtimes at work so that shouldn't interfere too much.

What I'm really itching to do at the moment is get my airbrush set up and go to town on Hyperion, so hopefully I can make that a priority for the next window of opportunity.

A pretty lacklustre post today, so I'll end with an apology, and a reassurance that things will calm down soon and I can start to post results more often

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

The Gap of Ravyn

Another busy week I'm afraid.  It looks like it might be this way for some time as well unfortunately. We are looking into mortgages, and houses etc. which is a pretty full time thing, on top of other social commitments, and the fact that I've picked this time of year to start running, madness right?

I've manage to put some of the Destor mounts together this week, and I plan on doing a full write up of the kit at some point, but for the moment I'll just say that I don't like the kit.  The gaps on the horses are consistent and massive between the two halves.  It will take a lot of GS to fill the gap, and for someone whose manipulation of modelling putty is as poor as mine, the join will look glaringly obvious aster painting. I'm quite disappointed with the mounts for sure.

I've also got a couple of layers done on Ravyn, who is my last caster to get any paint (baring Ossyan who I don't own yet).  Mark (our illustrious PressGanger) has ordered Hyperion into our LGS for me to use my regular player discount and my raffle voucher (£20) on, so I'm really stoked about that, and once I've got a decent respirator for use with the airbrush, I'll be trying to get as much done without using a traditional brush.

Last but not leasts, Movember is upon us again, and I'm in the fledgling stages of this year's charity moustache. Please feel free to donate to prostate cancer awareness as supported by Movember on my page (or any other) here

Hopefully I'll have a better update next time, but thanks for stopping by :)
Lofty

Tentacle WIP

I finally had some time to use my airbrush this weekend (just now in fact).
I really like the way the blues have come out, though I think they're a little lighter than I would have liked.  I base coated the entire thing with VMA blues, and then began to dust lighter colours from a sharp angle from above, leaving the base coat on the underside & in the recesses.  I really like this effect, and all I think I'll need to do (in addition to detail work) is a wash of the darkest base layer to bring the tone back down a little.

I love the blue colours here, and think they are a great contrast to the murky greens in the rest of the force :)

I also based/primed the Witchdoctor and Calaban, but unfortunately I only got round to adding sand to the Bonestorm today so it wasn't ready for priming. I did however get the base colours down on the Swamp Horror's base ready for painting in the week. This should give you a rough idea of what it will look like :)

That's about all for this week unfortunately, there's been a blight of social activity recently which is keeping me from hobbying.  I'm up against it a little now, as Maelok still needs finishing, as well as the Witchdoctor and this beasty.  Hopefully I'll make it, but if not, at least my main list is fully painted, with the exception of labelling up the Gatormen to allocate damage

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Airbrushing: Paint review (Blog Week post4)

I picked up the last of my orders of paint yesterday from the post office, and rushed home eager to try it all out.  I'll start off by saying that (funnily enough) for airbrushing, Vallejo Model Air paints are an absolute dream.

So amongst the new paints etc I ordered, I decided to pick up some Vallejo thinner, and grabbed some of their cleaner whilst I was at it (damn you Amazon).  I'm very glad that I did.  I mentioned in my initial airbrush post that Windowlene is a good medium to thin paints with, and to clean the brush between colours.  For a beginner though, the branded thinner is fantastic, comes in a dropper bottle so it's easy to add to the mix, doesn't need to be pre-mixed with water and is ultimately made to be used with Vallejo paints so it naturally works well with their formula.

I decided to test things out on some bases I've made recently, so I fired up the compressor and loaded by brush with the Vallejo grey primer I picked up when I first purchased my gear.  This is actually the only stage I had trouble with last night, I couldn't manage to get the primer to flow well at all, it was thick, and seemed to be coming out onto the paper very clumpy. I added thinner, and even a little of the cleaner which I had read might help.  I was ready to dissassemble the airbrush to find out what was wrong with it (in a sulk I might add) as I think I may have altered some of the needle screws which control how the needle and trigger interract before realising a i don't have a clue which way of a screw turhn adjusts what... I happened onto a YouTube video where the painter thins the primer pretty heavily (10:1) so I decided that my heavy handedness/eagerness was to blame and washed out the primer.  I decided to try out one of the VMA paints to see if I had any more luck before blaming the hardware (a poor workman, right?).  German Grey steps up to the plate, couple of drops of thinner stirred in with a wet brush (saturated with water) and knocks it out of the park.

Fantastic coverage
Fantastic consistency
Awesome colour/tone

I can't begin to describe how impressed I was with the VMA paints to be honest, it made using the brush as easy as it appears in some of the YouTube channels I watch.  I decided to bust out a second colour to make sure the grey wasn't a fluke, and it certainly wasn't. I don't remember the name of the brown colour, but it was just as much of a joy to use.
There wasn't much time to thin down any regular paints I've purchased from the VGC range, but I did have a quick fuss with them on my trusty elf spearman-colour-test-guy, and they're great. Good coverage, good pigmentation etc

Conclusion
I definitely learned some valuable lessons in my short airbrush session yesterday;

- Thin paints, multiple layers. As the paint dries so quickly, it's really no hardship to add multiple layers of paint to the model, and the amount of frustration saved with thinner paints (better trigger response, less chance of clogging) is massive.

- Time. I'm beginning to think that airbrushing would be better suited to the weekends.  This isn't because it's an overly arduous set-up/pack-up process, rather because by the time I'm back from work/work&gym, helped to prepare/consume an evening meal, washed the dishes and helped with lunch for the next day it's not far from 21:00 so I would feel a lot happier taking more time at the weekend to use my airbrush, and not feel rushed/constrained with time.

- Practice. It will definitely take some practice on paper/test models (poor spearman) before I feel like I can apply something more than base coating to a model I would not want to ruin.  To be honest though, this works out great for me at the moment - base coats on a few models at the weekend combined with a few hours practice with the airbrush leaves with me a load of base coated models to 'regular paint' in my short evenings during the week.

The more I use the brush, the more pleased I am that I took the plunge and bought the set-up.  It's definitely a steep learning curve, and not without it's frustrations, but in the end I'm sure it will be worthwhile.

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty

Airbrushing: Setup (Blog Week post2)

A previous comment enquired about the size of the entire rig, presumably with a view as to how it would affect existing workstations.

The short answer is that it fits in really well with my current set-up. The compressor goes to the left of my chair, in front of the left side of my desk, and near the window in our study room.

The brush rests in the cleaning pot just in front of my left desk speaker when not in use. Neither item takes up a great deal of room, or causes any great fuss to move around.

The pictures below should help to put this all into context. The lovely Ravyn appears in the photos to provide perspective to the items.

My desk is pretty chaotic at the best of times so it's great that all I need to do is shift the airbrush holder around to be accessible.

I'd like to cover the process of painting with/general use of the airbrush in future posts so I won't go into that a great deal at the moment, but I currently use an old magazine/newspaper to spray down onto, as well as a sheet of plain white paper propped in front of my monitor/over my keyboard to protect from any stray colour.

I'm off to the post office tomorrow to collect what I hope to be the rest of my paints & the thinner/airbrush cleaner that I ordered, so I can blog about the process end to end, maybe including cleaning time permitting later this week.

I hope all this is still useful

Thanks for stopping by
Lofty