On the table now - Living Saint and faces

I am working on the Living Saint and am trying something new. This is a beautiful mini and is a joy to paint.

Usually I just do simple faces when I am forced to paint them. Tallarian Flesh, Tanned Flesh, Dwarf Fresh, Ogryn Flesh wash, touch up with Dwarf Flesh. The flesh wash has some red tones in it but I do not typically use any other colors. In almost any advanced flesh painting tutorial, you'll see people mixing in purples, greens and blues into their fleshes.

I touched my toe into this pool by adding some color to the lips with a Mechrite Red base and a light wash of very thin red and some purple paint and wash on the eyes.

I am mostly satisfied with the results. I want to experiment more with this and the Desert Wolves army is a good chance to do that as many of them will be missing helmets.

On the table now - Grey Hunters and Blood Claws

I've started work on my Troops choices for the Space Wolves army. I am painting them in pairs with one GH and one BC at a time. Usually I paint in groups of 3 or 5 and all of the minis are usually very similar. I want all my Wolves characters into themselves and to this end I am trying to construct and paint each mini uniquely. 

I am trying to keep a few themes going. I want the Grey Hunters each to look like venerable and grizzled warriors. To this end, I have included lots of wolf tails, skulls and decorative shoulder pads. I want the Blood Claws to look like feral and savage young warriors. To represent this, I keep the stripped down with just the most basic wargear that they need. 

I am using a lot of bare heads in this army. The mix may end up being about 1:1. I find this is an easy way to give a mini a lot of personality in a simple way. Also to add to variety, I have tired to paint the squad markings on the right shoulder pad uniquely on each mini. This is hard because I want to use spikey lines as design elements and the variety is quickly exhausted. 

Mostly, I am really happy with how things are coming alone. I have two more on the table now and that means that I am close to having 2 fieldable units. That means I am just two minis away from a legal SW army. WOO!

A Couple of Articles That Don't Suck

Mostly, BoLS produces unreadable garbage. Even their photos are slipping of late. Goatboy makes awful cartoons. The rumors are as prolific as they are inaccurate. All in all, it is a far cry from what it was.

But lately there are a few diamond in this slag heap. Well maybe not diamonds but flawed garnets at least.

http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2013/04/hobby-painting-bronze-easy-way.html

First up is a decent painting article covering weathered bronze. It starts off well with a picure of what it is trying to recreate. It then lists all the paints you will need to start this project. There is a pretty good step by step as well. It ends with a showcase of models sporting the effect. A pretty good article.

I do not have much bad to say about it. I would have liked to see all the paints come from one range as most of the folks I know stick to a brand. The step by step could have been a little more detailed and the pictures could have been with the steps rather than in a block.

Really not bad at all.


http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2013/04/goatboys-model-review-kromlechs-orc.html

The next article is by Goatboy. I know that many of you may be shocked to see me write something nice about him and you will not be disappointed. The article is crap. Poorly structured and executed. If you are not a Goatfan, don't read it.

What is good are the minis. They are Mega Armored Nobz stand ins and they are awesome! I had not heard of this company but am going to take a closer look at them as I start my Orks.

While the minis he covers may be good, Goatboy's coverage is poor. He does not even link to the site where you can see more pictures of these minis or buy them. Thee is no real effort in writing a quality article or really covering the minis in a meaningful way. This is obviously an assigned article and he undertook it in his standard half-ass style.

Seriously though, gonna buy dem orks.

And two more Assault Marines.

 Ugh!

So I have those Assault Marines drying on the sideboard and I get to counting. I see that there are 16 of them and that makes two groups of 8. I thought to myself, "Man, if only I had two more then I could make two full squads of 9 each." (I keep my Sargents separate) Then I get to thinking that I did have two full squads! That's when I found these two stragglers in the foam. 

I've updated the costs on the previous post to reflect this. 

Blood Angles Assault Marines

I took my close combat boys out of their foam form some touch ups. I magnetized the backpacks so I can give them a ride at -35 points thanks to my BA codex. The down side is that the backpacks are damaging the shoulder pads and vica versa. I touched up the respective parts an then gave all the problem areas a coat of Microscale Micro Flat. That is the old school was back when wargamers had to hang on the coat tails the model train kids. 

Now they have to sit out for a few days to make sure they are super-dry. If I did not, then the sticky sides of the problem areas would peal each other apart. So they are riding the bench.

Every one of these models has loads of character. Each one has a unique pose and detailed wargear. I even went so far as to customize their grenades by hacking apart frag and krak grenades and making custom sets. They all have Assault Marine shoulderpads from GW. I have one guy with two axes as CCW with no Bolt Pistol. Just to even things out, I have a guy toting a pair of pistols and no CCW. There is a guy kneeling as if he just landed a low blow and is caught frozen in his backswing. 

But looking back, these are some broken old models. The primer on the older ones is way thick. the paint is sloppy. On more than half, the clear coat is so think, it makes them look like balloon marines. The heavy primer also ruined the grass by making it look like green glass spikes. 

I learned a lot from those broken old boys. How far we have come.  

Finished - 3 Obliterators

I finished three Obliterators and you can too! They turned out pretty well. I was working from some busted and incomplete old minis that I got in a trade so reconstructing the arms was difficult. there are a few plastic bits that had to be thrown in to fill all the little slots. 

Most noticeable is the swap of bare heads for Terminator heads. One of the minis that I got was missing a head and had an old metal CSM Terminator head in place. I could have made a stink about this but I actually liked the effect. 

Step by Step: Painting Chaos Daemons Bloodletters

This is my first attempt at a step-by-step painting guide. Some of the pictures did not turn out as well as I would have liked but the guide will hopefully not suffer too much for it.

After painting over a company of Blood angles, I am sick of painting red the conventional way. With the Bloodletters, I wanted to go with something a little different than what I've done in the past.