Quick and easy power weapons with Tyran blue

 When the Gulliman Blue glaze was discontinued, I was lost for a way to do bright blue highlights. I limped by with Drakenhof Nightshade but that one was way too dark for how I did easy power weapons. With the new Tyran Blue shade, I think we are back in business!

1. Black base

2. Iron Hands Steel 

3. Runefang Steel

4. Tyran Blue 

5. Drybrush of Runefang Steel

6. You could also so some small hard edge highlighting on the very edges with a white or light blue.

Presupported Mess

 I don't think I mentioned it here, but I got into resin printing a while back and love it. It is so long between updates here that I'm on my second resin printer. I started with a used Photon S and moved on to a new Mars 3 pro. I love it. The Mars is 8x faster than the Photon. I am not sure my eyes are good enough to notice a change in quality to a mono screen though. 

Resin printed increased my need for file storage by 10 fold. GW takes down files in waves. There was already a great Thingiverse purge and now 40k files are very hard to find there. They seem to be picking at Cults now with obvious IP infringements being taken down. I've moved on from scraping Cults to telegram channels. There is so much free stuff there and it is blowing up my hard drives. I went from a 1 Tb hard drive to a 2 and now I have every flash drive I can find loaded up. 

I lost my files a while back. I had a flash drive in a USB hub and was backing it up. The backup shorted out and then the main one did too. In a second I lost months of downloading and organizing. I paid a company to restore it and it was like $1000. They did not even recover all the files. It was not worth it in the end but it taught me a lesson about backing stuff up. I spent a few days learning 7zip and burning all my 40k and fantasy stuff onto CDs. 

I've bought a few files here and there but most of them are free. Thing is it takes so much time to sort them. Yes I could download on demand what I wanted but with files getting taken down, I save anything that I ever might want to print. Which is a lot. 

I ended up buying MARTINLETIEC's NEKHRON IMMORTALS because they looked pretty good and came pre-supported. I threw some in ole Lychee and like half of the prints failed. Lots of the failures were in the middle of the plate so I thought it was a loose FEP. I tightened all the bolts and tried again. Still about half of them failed. I added some lighting effects to a pre-supported tesla gun and had to support the lightning. Time after time, the lightning prints fine but the gun fails. 

That's pretty damning so I added three copies of the same model to the slicer. One was pre supported, one I just hit auto supports and the other I supported by hand. In every case, the pre-supported model failed. The auto-support model failed half the time and my supports worked all the time. 

Pre-supported models are nice and they save time, but if it is worse than auto-supports then it ends up costing more time. This is why I typically like to do my own supports. I know my printer, my resin, my setting, my temp. I know what works and what does not. I see failures on tiny things and iterate until I can get the smallest details to print and the supports not to leave damage. 

Drybrushing Test

Recently, I've decided to up my drybrushing game. I've been painting since 2002 and back in the day we were told to use a shitty old brush to do our drybrushing after we walked up hill both ways in the snow. It worked fine and we liked it mostly because we had no other option. I assume some mad lad grabbed a makeup brush after watching their girlfriend drybrush their face. I also assume that people have been grabbing the expensive artist brushes but I've never heard of it. Only recently, have there been specialized dry brushes from GW and Armypainter. 

I grabbed a bunch of these different brushes and went wild on some fire that I need to paint for D&D. Here are the results!

Finished - Skyrim Dragon Priest Mask Volsung

 Been a while. Again, am busy despite not blogging about it. Don't play much 40k anymore or paint any. Considering selling off the massive backlog. 

Started brewing and distilling so maybe I'll write about that here too. 

I've also gotten back into making props. Working on my finishing techniques and am getting pretty good. 

I finished this dragon priest mask from Skyrim. It printed in 4 parts and glued up pretty well. After lots of sanding and dremeling, I got rid of most of the layer lines. Learned some cool things too. Noteable is that dremels are speed tools not torque tools. Was running it low and slow but that causes chipping and jumping. Once I turned the speed up, things got smoother. 

I even made a wall mount for it too. Planning
on doing more cool props like this. Up next is a giant Deathclaw skull from Fallout. 

Finished - Roboute Guilliman

 

Finally finished Bobby G. He was be sitting in his box for months now. I admit, I was intimidated by the size and the detail. I got over that After painting Abby and then this didn't seem so bad. 

I accepted that this was going to be a "good enough" situation because I was not going to blind painting the detail. 

The blue was a solid base of Altdorf Guard Blue (or Ultramarine Blue as it is named in my heart), then washed it with Guilliman Blue. I brought it back up wiht another drubrush of Altdorf then a light dry brush of Calgar Blue. I was not going to highlight each armor panel so this was going to have to work. Blue done. 

Thank the Emperor for Retributor Gold. I would have killed for a base/foundation gold paint back in the day when a decent gold took 5 layers. This gold had to cover the blue in one go because I was not going to paint all that filigree twice. There was no wash on it, just a little Runefang Steel highlight. 

Sword was white, yellow, two oranges, red, brown and black in overlapping layers. Not thrilled with how it came out but it looks good from arms length. Fire is just flipping hard. I saw a thing on painting flames with contrast paints. I bought the paints then chickened out at the last second and did it the old way. Maybe later. 

The mini cost me $60 and the paint is worth maybe $50 for a replacement value of $90. 

Finished - Krieg Bust

 

I'm into busts lately and other non-playable minis. 

Had fun with this even though it will never see play on a table but that goes for most of my armies too. 

Tried to learn some new things from this but I did pretty much standard for my colors. 

I will say that at larger scales, it makes you think more about light and shade but also gives a wider margin for errors. 

People really seemed to like it. Maybe I'll do more busts in the future if I can find good ones. 

Finished- Abandon the Despoiler

This project has been sitting on my to do list for maybe a year. I loved Abaddon in the previous editions and even did my own conversion out of the Terminator Lord kit and the old metal Abby. Turned out pretty good if I don't say so myself back in the day. Put a picture of the old one after the jump.

The armor is black base with a solid coat of Dark Reaper. Washed it black and Agrax to try and darken it down but that second wash didn't do much. Then I touched up the Dark Reaper and then did a highlight of Thunderhawk Blue on the hard edges and in the weird places that we highlight on pauldrons. Then on the areas I wanted to pop, I did a highlight of Ahriman Blue. It doesn't take much, bit it is effective. I think I could have taken it further around the Chaos star but I kinda like the subtilty. 

This was my first big project painting blue as black and I loves it. It turned out just how I wanted. I think I may go back with some more blue and make it pop more. I may use this and highlight with grey for any further Deathwatch minis. 

Finished - Void Dragon

This mini cost $90 from GW or you can print it for a few dollars if you have the files and know how. Imma let you guess which one I did. 

No idea the rules for this bad boy. Never seen a Codex with rules for it and know almost nothing about him. I had to print this mini. It was challenging. I used presupported files and that was a mistake. I don't claim to be an expert at supports but I find if I put them on then the tend to be easier to take off. After printing it was pretty tricky to paint and assemble this beast. The mini is basically supported in a web of delicate lightning bolts. 

I painted the mini in the same theme as my Necrons. I kinda phoned in on the skin. With the other C'tan, I tried to give them colored metallic skin but this guy just got some Agrax over Iron Hands Steel and a dry brush of Runefang Steel. The body really isn't what draws the eye. I could have tried some OSL or at least some glowing effects in places but didn't. 

It has been so long sing I painted and posted about a mini that I've forgotten how to do a TMM CV post. The point of it was to document what I had invested in 40k and minis incase of fire or robbery to that they could be replaced. I am unsure how to value printed minis so let's just use retail which is $90 for this bad boy. The paint job was maybe 10 hours and I'd value it at about $70. 

Cyberpunk 2077 Review

 I am about 40 hours or so into Cyberpunk 2077 and have completed maybe 10% of the game. I feel like I am just scratching the surface but have seen enough to know what I like and don’t like. There are going to be some spoilers in her, so beware. 

Let’s start with the pros before I get into the complaining. This is a beautiful world. The textures and architecture are stunning. There are little nooks of detail everywhere and you can always look closer. Hardly any space is blank or feels unused. Even areas where little action takes place have lots of details like hobo hovels and feel lived in. 

There is lots of variety in the game. There is an endless variety of people and even so I feel like I see familiar faces sometimes. I pass cliques of sex workers hanging out near their favorite streetfood vendor when I am going to and from my fixer. There is a small-time gangster slapping and stomping someone that wronged him in an alley (I stole his car when he was busy). I see gangs that are hanging out and committing crimes with their shiny rides parked in a believable tableau. When I go to the nicer parts of town, it is a lot of corpos walking around and looking at their devices. The world feels random and yet also hand crafted. I can admire how hard that was to do. 

Finished - Potpourri

Since very much awesomely fixing the hatchet handle I actually HAVE done some painting. I finished a couple of Black Plague heroes, about half of the Black Ops heroes and an experimental mini that has been sitting half-finished for ages. 

Initially, I got to work on Lady Grimm and Glynda Battlestout with the same 10/0 detail that I approach most minis with. Frustrated at my chunky paints and fraying brushes I reached for new ones of each. While doing so, a corrupted version of an old axiom "don't let the great be the enemy of the finished." I knew it wasn't right but with the years of backlog I have, I can't take a week to paint a single mini. Let's get some colors down, a little detail on the faces and let's get them done. 

I finally have two of the very many Zombicide boxes finished in their entirety and that has me jazzed to finish some other boxes like special guests and Heroes boxes completely. To do that, we gotta get paint on minis. I am far from batch painting but I've stopped doing three stare highlighting and going blind with fine detail brushes. Part of me regrets this because I know I can do better but... but let's get things finished while we have spare time. 

OTT - Close Combat Weapon

Doing a little woodworking on an old busted hatchet. Mostly I am working off of this video. My hatchet handle has an archaic teardrop shaped opening and my hardware store only has round short handles. So I am going to shoehorn a longer ax handle into the opening then cut it shorter. Or maybe I'll leave it long and have an ax that looks like zippy the pinhead. Who knows.

I used a saw blade on the dremel to rough shape the larger teardrop into a smaller teardrop hopefully without ruining the taper. I already need some sanding discs to do the more gentle shaping of the handle so I am at a stop. 

This is an ancient craft of joining wood to metal and it is an honor to learn it. I really hope that I don't mess it up. 

EDIT: And here is the finished product. I intentionally left the extra material at the top to give it that ancient look and also because I don't have a saw that can cut it flush (yet). I ended up having to scrap my plans to use a cut down ax handle because it took too much work to sand down. This was much easier and I agree with the tikki torch-owner in the video, it looks better. 

It was really a sinch with a pre-shaped handle. A little sanding and it slid down pretty easily. I put some nice dents in the deck pounding it in but that is my bad. I should have known better. After that, it was wedge and glue, bang bang. Two metal spikes, bang bang. And my baby shot me down. 

I sharpened the edge too with a sharpening disc so now this thing is lethal to fauna as well as flora. I really want to throw it at something but the partner forbids it. 

It was fun and grubby turning my hobby skills to something like this. I also had to replace a shovel handle but after seeing how much work it was and that the price difference was almost nothing, I just bought a nice shovel. 

Finished - Invader Core Survivors

These finely detailed miniatures combined with the last post means I have the whole core box done. I learned a lot and now have a killer recipe for bone white armor.

This is historic in that this is the first Zombicide box I have ever finished. Black Plague will be the next once the commission zombies are finished. Currently sourcing a painter for Green Horde and that will be done. 

Then it is all the flipping stretch goals and guest boxes. At the speed I paint, I have years worth of painting to do. The speed painting and contrast paints helped me finish all the aliens from Invader but that won't work on the heroic Survivors. Gotta do detail painting.

Finished - Zombicide: Invader Swarm

So I am an elitist snob when it comes to painting. I know this. I think that people that use airbrushes as a final step are cheating themselves. Army Painter is for people that seem intent on ruining models.  Agrax Earthshade is a tool in your toolbox and not a Swiss Army knife. And Contrast paints are for people that don’t want to learn how to paint properly and are ok with meeting the basics of table top painting.

Then I had 100 aliens to paint and I didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the last two Zombicide games and have to conscript out the bulk of the painting. I ran across so one that was painting the Workers with Contrast paints and got good and fast results. I picked up some contrast paints and was done with my first 5 before I knew it. A few weeks later they were all done. I haven’t completed a base set of Zombicide yet and this one was done in a blink. 

Here are the lessons I learned at my old age for batch painting:

1. No fancy basing. Be basic. Even the 5 step process for the Mars bases is better than the 3 colors with 3 stages each on top of the clay bits for wood and stone. 

2. Three colors is too many. Think big swaths of color. Don’t paint more than 2 materials different colors. Who cares if he is wearing a brown suit and hat. 

3. Learn to love dry brushing. If I ever start edge highlighting a horde again, shoot me.

4. Use washes to make different tones of color. A corollary to point 2 above, I used washes to make shading and add more color to these models rather than painting a different color.

Goodbye Space Cowboy

I did something for the first time in my almost two decades of painting and playing 40k. I sold a whole army. Tau were my first in 2004. The guy I played with most played Blood Angels and wanted to get out. So I bought his army and started BA in 2005. Somewhere around 2007 I started Grey Knights as a small auxiliary force that grew into an army. After that I started Chaos, Necrons, Space Wolves, Orks, Genestealers, and Knights. Never sold an army.

Until now.

Finished - Zcide Invader Workers

Been painting quite a bit of Zombicide stuff all over the place. Black Plague, Green Horde, Invader. I even outsourced painting of some of the Black Plague zombies to a commissioned painter for money and some printing. I used clay, rollers glue and a lot of time to make textured based for all the flipping zombies. Learning my lesson from that, I just wanted some simple Martian soil for the aliens and save the complex stuff for the survivors.

I found a pretty good tutorial for using the red crackle paint and painting red ground and it worked pretty well. I was skeptical about needing to base things brown, but the crackle pulls up the layer of paint below it and lots of the white primer shows through.

Aside from the bases, I decided to dip into contrast paints in the interest of getting all the Invader enemies painted unlike all the other Zombicides that sit waiting. I based the Workers Grey Seer though I would have liked to use something with a little more color. After that, the whole model gets a wash of Apothecary White. When that dries, the head and hands get a splooshing of Voluptuous Pink. I do a halfhearted blending of the areas by wiping my brush off and stippling around the edge while it is still wet. It is an amature technique with limited results but it is better than hard drying lines. With the base colors done, the bottom nails get painted with the Voluptuous Pink and no fading. The whole model gets a dry brush of Grey Seer to make it pop.

It is not my best work, but I have finished 5 of them in half the time it took me to paint any other mini. Sometimes I have to put quality on the back burner in the interest of getting stuff done.

On The Table - Ender 3 Enclosure

 Part of raising the new baby that is a 3d printer is building it a crib. This will reduce cold drafts, give more consistent temperatures, improve buildplate adhesion by reducing curl, massively reduce dust build up, reduce noise. Lots of advantages but the main two are improved printing in ABS and being able to move the electronics outside the enclosure.

I'll get to some of the details in a bit but if I had to do things over again I would have gotten this or ideally this enclosure and not build my own. Then, if I had to build my own, I would have not tried to cut corners and just done the Ikea Lack enclosure that everyone else does. In the end, I am still satisfied with how it came out because, despite the setbacks, I could build it precisely how I wanted to (with a few compromises).

The damage for the materials alone was over $100 which is more than enough to get a premade enclosure or a couple of Lacks.

1x1 for frame $11
Acrylic plastic for windows $56
1/4" plywood for lid, floor and back $20
Adhesive vinyl tile for lid and floor $11
Screws, bits and bobs $15

Home-made Wine: Hobby Fuel

The COVID-19 pandemic has us all stuck inside. Some people have said this would be a good time to pick up some new skills (even if they did it in an unpleasant manner). To that end, I though I would learn how to make wine in my Instant Pot. I used this recipe to get me started.

First thing you need is yeast. I knew bread yeast was not going to cut it so I got this Red Star wine yeast. I did not realize that all wine yeast is not created equal and this appears to be white wine yeast. That would explain the sour and tart flavors I got at the end. In retrospect, a variety pack like this would have been a smarter purchace.

Before I get too ahead of myself like annoying food blogs do, here is the recipe as I did it with notes on how I would do it differently in the future:

On The Table - Orc Abomination

I have wanted to paint an albino big monster for probably 2 years now but have not seen a technique that I liked or believed. GW has a recipe in their painting app for Pale Flesh (that looks more like parchment than skin) and Varicose Flesh (that looked a little too pink for me. Initially I wanted to try the Pale Flesh variant as I was trying to paint pale... flesh but it called for being shaded with Reikland Fleshshade. At the last moment I decided that is going to look too natural and I wanted something more pink. Varicose Flesh starts with Rakarth Flesh and to be washed with Carroburg Crimson. I was still skeptical but through I could always strip it if it looked stupid.

After washing I did think I looked stupid but pressed on anyway.

The recipe then called for Flayed One Flesh followed by Pallid Wytch Flesh. I did a test patch and didn't hate it so pressed on.

The more I painted the more I liked it. It has good depth, shading and tone. It is also surprisingly hard to mess up. Everything that is not streaky paint looks great. It fades and feathers nice. Even stippling does not look out of place. I aint even done the next stage of highlights.

If I had to do things over, I might go easier on the red shade. This is going to be my go to when I get around to doing my Ork Warboss.

Update:

I finished the Albino-Abomination and it turned out great. Next time I am going to go a little easier on the shading as it is overly dark for me.

I am especially proud of the eyes. I used solid Wazdakka Red for the pupils.

Further Update:

I tried the "pale flesh" recipe on a spare Abomination for Black Plague and it makes me glad I chose the other style. All told it is pretty solid slightly pale caucazoid flesh. It really lacked a variety in tone so I had to use some Carroburg Crimson in the deep parts. It might be good for speed painting lots of bare chests or bare arms, but it is no good for large patches of bare skin or faces.

It comes off pale but not albino. Now I have this pasty, naked mole rat of an Abomination in my box but at least I know now.

Finished - Ossunilur Broadpike (D&D mini)

My regular D&D group of years is on hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic but I finished the mini for it. Blogging should be up but it is not. It is hard to stay motivated on lockdown. Despite that, lots has been finished since the last entry. Just have to write about it.

For modeling, I swapped the dagger in the left hand for a hammer from WFB and shaved off some of the Chaos icons. The belt scabbard was empty, presumably with the dagger that was in the left hand, so I replaced it with a cut down hilt from a plastic weapon. I built the base up with some shale flakes and sand.

Painting was pretty standard. Black, gold and silver were painted in my standard "base, wash, touch-up, highlight" style. I did an extra blue wash on the hammer to make it look magical. I washed some of the gold with Agrax Earthshade rather than Gryphonne Sepia to make it look older.

Buckle up for some "let me tell you about my character" below.

I started with the idea of a character whose actions were at odds with his stereotypical racial background. I dismissed the idea of a demi-human passing for human (especially the very trite surface-Drow that is done to death) as that would require lots of racial intolerance to be built into the GM's world. Most D&D games function in a race-blind world where gnomes, half-orcs, elves and humans all get along for the most part and are subject to much prejudice. The "go along to get along" mentality is high.

ON The Table - Death Watch Bucket And Visor Installation

Well the dark grey is sanded with 400 grit and triple coated. There are still little drip marks and imperfections but I think only I would notice them. I masked off the areas that are to painted blue in the picture. The babushka is to cut down on tape.

The masking went great and there are only a couple of little errors where the blue paint got under the tape. Again, not noticeable.

The only other major painting left to do on it is the light grey or silver on the cheeks and this bad boy is done. I will likely do some weathering but that is a project for later.

The next step is visor installation. I am working off this guide on the MMCC boards but was not able get precisely the things they listed. I am glad I went to my local hardware store and got help because the things I was going to order would not have worked.

I ended up getting some vinyl spacers and rubber washers to go with the short screws and t-nuts. I have the visor on order, so we'll will see how installation goes.

There is also padding that goes in the helmet that should be here this week. I know that I'll eventually put speakers, a mic and fans in there, but that is for later.



$10 Spray paint: Blue, Dark Grey
$20 Various hardware for mounting visor
$20 Visor
$12 Padding

Total $128