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.