Happy 2nd Birthday! (Oh, and we're back!)

Greetings all of you wonderful people. After a fortnight in the hellish wilderness of the land of Nointernetconnection I am finally back in the 21st century. To my considerable surprise this has also coincided with Pirate Viking Painting's second birthday!

Two years have certainly snuck up on me, the third year will be very, very different to what has gone before. From working on a folding table in a mate's living room to my own house with it's own purpose built painting area (!). Don't worry, pictures to follow. But talking about differences, what a difference between the first birthday and this. Last year I was wildly excited to have found 6123 unique visitors to the blog. Today that number stands at (drum roll please Mulder) 21,003! TWENTY ONE thousand of you generating 46,405 hits! Good lord, that's a lot for a random bloke in Cardiff painting goblins. You are all people of magnificent taste. Clearly.

We have quite a lot to do before we are fully back, I guestimate next Friday. But then there will be pictures and tutorials and news and all sorts. Until then...

TTFN

Sound the Impending Blackout Klaxon!

Well folks, the time has come with alarming speed to relocate the lair of the Pirate Viking. Mrs PVP and I are putting Mulder in his carry case (y'know, like a cat) and our stuff in the modern equivilent of tea chests.

Obviously this means that productivity is going to be non-existant for a few weeks and I am even going to be without internet access for a few days. I am really looking forward to creating the new painting area and moving stuff out of storage. Very exiting times. So I hereby sound the Impending Blackout Klaxon and place PVP on hiatus until further notice (I reckon two-three weeks before the next post). Hopefully I shall see all of you magnificent people again then!

TTFN.

The Female of the Species

Well, I'm back! As usual after an extended break I try to do a fast project as a warm up before launching into anything high intensity or intricate. As such I present this trio of lovely lethal ladies:

These were painted for a client as Dark Eldar (despite only one of them being an actual Dark Eldar) as the first models in a speculative army. Sadly the pictures haven't quite done them justice (the contrast between the dark turquoise and the black is much more marked in real life).

No such contrast problems here though. This is a Raging Heroes model masquerading as a Wych character. I wanted to create a very cold, bloodless look to the skin. Seeing that the new painting guides recommend Raketh Flesh as a base for Dark Eldar I tried its old school analogue, Dheneb Stone. A couple of thin coats later and I had a solid smooth base coat to work from. I then threw a wash of thinned Ogryn Flesh over the whole lot and let it dry. Highlighting started with thinned Dheneb Stone and then proceeded upward by adding white to the mix. Mucosal membranes (lips, nipples etc) were picked out with a very small amount of Vallejo Tanned Fleshtone added to the Dheneb Stone mix and then highlighted again. It's important to be subtle with this as it is waay too easy to go down the "hooker" look and bare skin plus cold air does not make for dark colouration!

There are a few things that annoyed me about Raging Heroes sculpting, one of them being the left leg. It looks good there right? It's non-existant. That inner part of the cloak is a solid, flat plane. I had to paint on the suggestion of leg and shadowed dragonhide. Thankfully it worked but would it have been so hard to cast the leg in two parts and get a sculpted 3D leg? They also have a problem with neck joins, the head only seems to fit on one side, the other side of the neck sticks out a little. These are small whinges but when a company is getting so much right then the knucklehead stuff gets on my nerves.

Weapons though, now weapons they do very well. The hydra staff is really nice and the dagger is classic Dark Eldar styling. I decided to paint all metalwork in an Orangey-Brown bronze as a nice contrast to the turquoise. It's easy enough to do this, basecoat with Dwarf Bronze, highlight with a mix of Dwarf Bronze and Mithril Silver. Once dry, glaze with Brown Ink. Done! The dagger colour I'll talk about later.

I wanted to try and get a "realistic" looking skin tone for the little dragon. I achieved this by first basecoating with Tallarn Flesh, shading this down with Devlan Mud and leaving it to dry. I then got the red colour I wanted by glazing the model twice with Red Ink mixed with Glaze Medium. Make sure you've let the first glaze dry completely before applying the second.

The second model was also a Raging Heroes offering, I dubbed her Malificent as she just screamed Disney villainess. Wonderful model, same problem with the neck join but ho hum. I went for a dark turquoise armour as this is a classic evil colour. My method, through some trial and error, is to start with a 3:2 mix of Orkhide Shade and Hawk Turquoise. Highlighting started with a 1:1 mix of Orkhide Shade and Hawk Turquoise, I then added increasing amounts of white to the mix up to nearly white on the edges. Finally the armour was glazed in a mix of Green and Blue Inks to re-establish the deep turquoise.

I didn't want the robes to be the focal point of the models as any future army would be deep turquoise armour not cloth. As a result I used German Grey as a basecoat and glazed it down with a few layers of Badab Black. Highpoints were hit with German Grey again to further define the folds, done.

An interesting challenge was minimising the amount of metal present, I wanted to enhance the alien feel by using only bronze and - what I eventually settled on - green stone. This was supposed to look kinda like coloured flint or something. I started with a basecoat of a mix of Scorpion Green and Orkhide Shade. Regions of shade were achieved by wet blending in increasing amounts of Black to the base shade. Lighter areas were made by painting pure Scorpion Green and then adding a little Sunburst Yellow and white to the mix to create a yellow-green highlight. Finally I added thin lines of white to the edges and little catchlights on the sharpened edges. A glaze of Green Ink intensified the colour and finished the job.

Last on the list is an old Dark Eldar Lord. Before I mention any painting considerations I would just like to take this opportunity to beg Games Workshop never, ever, ever to allow Gary Morley to sculpt anything again! There are so many weird parts on this figure. The hands to begin with, they are longer than the entire head. The right hand has fingernails like talons, the left has none, the arms are sculpted bare from the front and armoured at the back (unless Mr Morley thinks triceps look like flat plates glued on). Finally the staff is connected to the back of the warrior for no... good... purpose.

 
Seriously, I use polearms from time to time and I cannot think of a single reason to do this. It just makes no sense at all. Grrr. The only real differences in painting this model was to add some blue eyeshadow with Asurman Blue wash. This was to diminish the effect of the weird eyebrows. All in all I am actually fairly pleased with happy with how the model looks, the paint scheme seems to work despite the sculptor's best efforts. Using the same green as the stone blades as power cells on the staff and the pistol helped to bind the trio together.

That's all for now folks, some more models soon! We move house in 11 days though so I imagine there will be a certain blackout period then. I will though after that have my purpose designed painting lair. Buah ha ha ha haaaaa!

TTFN

Colour Theory for miniature painters

Today's post is all about the thing above this text. The colour wheel and how it can make you a better painter with virtually no effort! Now, hopefully this should be going up automatically as Mulder, Mrs. PVP and I are all on holiday:

Mulder doesn't pack light...

So, on with the show. The colour wheel is a method of determining which colours work together. Essentially it is a circular rainbow with the colours evenly distributed. I bought one for reference but you can make your own by using the primary colours blue, yellow and red. Look at the blue and yellow section of the colour wheel above. The green directly between the blue and yellow is a 50:50 mix of the two colours. The turquoise next to the blue is 2/3 blue, 1/3 yellow. The yellow-green is the reverse, 1/3 blue, 2/3 yellow. This is true for all of the colours in the wheel. These are the hues of the colours. The lighter colours of each - extending into the middle of the wheel - are the shades. A shade is essentially adding white (technically called a tint) or black to the base hue. I don't recommend doing this to mix colours though. It's flaming hard to get right. Anyway, this isn't about mixing colours, it's about choosing them. The colour wheel has several ways to pick colours. Let's start at the easiest:
 
Analagous Colours

Analagous schemes are the easiest to work with. Essentially any two colours adjacent on the colour wheel will work nicely together. Technically you can use up to five colours in an analagous scheme but I would recommend that the outer two be tiny spot colours. In the example above you can see a nice green triad where the turquoise would be an excellent choice for edging and jewels. The red-purple pairing is classically what is used on Fire Dragons. This is easy but sometimes struggles to create contrast between areas of detail. That is where using the third colour as an edging between areas of detail works nicely.

Complementary Colours

Complementary - sometimes called contrasting - schemes use the colour directly opposite to the base shade to create complementary but highly contrasting schemes. They are used everywhere, take a look at a row of movie posters at the cinema sometime. I guarantee that the blue/orange complement will be used somewhere. This is an easy way to create very striking colour schemes for an army but you need to take care. These are such classic combinations of colours that a lot of them have very strong pop culture associations. The most obvious being the red/green combination. Unless you are very careful your army can look like christmas elves. This is where the more subtle version of Split Complementary (see below) comes in.

Triad Colours

Triad schemes are chosen evenly around the colour wheel. Usually they work best where one colour is a spot or edging colour and the other two are the main scheme. Care should be taken to avoid the primary colours as otherwise you will have that pre-school paint set look. Compare the two examples above to show that particular problem!

Split Complementary Colours

This is one of the more sophisticated options available and my current favourite. Instead of choosing the direct complementary colour to the base shade you use the colours either side of it. Essentially you are combining analagous and complementary schemes. You need to use both of the split colours though. Look at the example above. The "A" example has the turquoise/orange contrast and the blue/orange contrast above it. Now the turquoise/orange sort of works, but not quite. The blue/orange works much, much better. Now check out B, even using the pinkish red (a lighter shade of the red hue, see you did need to know the difference!) as a spot colour it just makes it work. This creates some lovely and unexpected schemes that are different but pleasing to the eye.

Tetrad Colours

Tetrads are hard, they essentially are formed of pairs of complementary colours. They can create very busy schemes with a gaudy look unless very carefully handled. Frankly I would leave this one to the interior designers and stick with a maximum of three strong colours on the model.

Well, that is the basics, there are many more elements. Balancing warm and cool colours on a model, using neutral shades to break up schemes. Contrasting textures, using metallics as colours. All sorts. I'll expand this guide in the future to include these options. But for now, we are done! Try using these principals next time you paint. I guarantee it will help you be happy with the finished result!

TTFN

My First Sherman (awww)

Greetings all, as promised, here is a shiny new model!

I'm off on holiday next week so I gave myself a Friday afternoon treat and decided to do some armour modelling. This is an M4A1 Sherman in Canadian service. Your first job is to guess how big it is, expand the image and take a look then guess its size:

If you guessed very, very small then you are correct! The model is a Plastic Soldier Company 15mm Sherman from their excellent and ever expanding range of WW2 plastic vehicles (so, so happy they are bringing out M5 half tracks as the cost of the Battlefront ones are nasty). I love this range. The detail is as crisp as you can expect a 1:100 scale model to be. Certainly much better than the cast metal ones I've seen. Assembly is fairly straightforward (although watch out for the "handedness" of the tracks, they only go on one way and it is not immediately apparant which!) and the variety of turret, mantlet, glacis and gun options make having a varied look to a squadron a breeze. This is kinda important where Sherman tanks are concerned as their uniform green doesn't do much for visual interest.

My Sherman is part of the 4th Canadian Armoured Division, specifically 4th Brigade, 21st Regiment. This is indicated on the tank by the green rectangular mark with the yellow maple leaf (the 4th Division insignia) and the white 51 in the red square (paradoxically indicating the 21st, go figure). The black 30 in the yellow disc is actually a bridging mark indicating the weight of the vehicle (the Firefly varient of the Sherman has a 32) which was used by the MP's directing traffic to determine at a glance the weight of the vehicle and thus the maximum number that could cross a given bridge without it collapsing!

The stowage on the back is my first attempts at 1:100 scale scratch building and I have a long, long way to go! Hopefully by the end of the regiment I shall have it sorted! Painting wise, the Sherman is actually very straightforward. Basecoat in Russian Uniform Green, give it a glaze of a mix of R.U.G. and Black-Green ink with a dollop of glaze medium. Once this has dried, lightly drybrush the tank with a R.U.G. and Rotting Flesh mix. Tracks were picked out in Vallejo Track Primer (brilliant colour), washed in Badab Black and then the many, many decals were applied. These are from Dom's Decals available from Maelstrom Games and were a lifesaver. They really made the scale appearance of this vehicle as I couldn't have even attempted to freehand on the vehicle name let alone the service numbers!

Finally I attacked the sherman with a whole range of weathering products, Forgeworld weathering powders, AK Interactive rain streaks and fresh mud for the tracks and yet more powders to give this mud some bulk. I'm going to do a full look at these products when I've had a touch more practice, don't want to pretend I'm expert just yet. Still making rookie mistakes!

This Sherman was the first of the above army. It has been designed to be part of the Armoured divisions that relieved my Paras during Operation Market Garden. As you can see there is a long way to go! Thankfully, with the reletive cheapness of the Plastic Soldier Company tanks and the fact that I can paint one in about 4 hours it shouldn't be too much of a chore. Anyway, I've got a post set to go up next week (that is assuming that Mulder can be trusted to push the button) and I shall see you all week after next.

TTFN

Bargains Galore take 2

Important: I am on Holiday from 

23/04/12 - 30/04/12

Don't expect answers during this period!

Yard Sale take 2! I've edited down the list to remove the Sold stuff (easier browsing), I've also added a list of the stuff on the webstore that has been pretty deeply discounted. Next post will be back to pretty models, promise!

Who let Mulder drive?

Yup! Soon, Mrs. PVP and I are moving to new digs (we've been living with friends for the past two years!). In order to raise a few quid and - more importantly - save some space I am having a yard sale here on the site. Essentially I am giving you, my loyal readers, first dibs on the sale items. Eventually they will go up on the webstore but for now it is all you! (The webstore has also been very deeply discounted). If the Blogosphere could help out by promoting this I would be grateful.

Postage will be calculated depending on how much you order but will mostly be £3.50 and under (unless the blaggards at the Royal Mail have raised their prices even further). If you want something, contact me with the button to the right and let me know and I will send you an ebay invoice. I will strike through anything that is sold. Check out the stock here (there is also a stupidly rare Balrog on ebay):

Webstore List (go here to purchase!):
White Dwarf 30th Anniversary Figure - £20.00
Classic Imperial Guard Hellhound - £12.50
Painted Ork Warboss - £8.00
Painted Classic Imperial Guard Hellhound - £12.50
Painted 8 Classic Ork Stormboyz - £10.00
Painted Empire Great Cannon and Crew - £8.00
Painted 15 Classic Grotz and Runtherd - £8.00
Painted 15 Empire Halbardiers - £8.00
2 Classic Ork Deff Dreads - £18.00 each
Painted 27 Empire Handgunners - £12.50
Painted 27 Empire Spearmen - £12.50
Classic 5 High Elf Dragon Princes - £12.50
Painted 27 Empire Free Company - £10.00
Classic 13 Dogs of War Pikemen - £15.00
Painted 5 Ork Tankbustas - £10.00
Classic Empire Hellblaster - £8.00
Painted 15 Ork Boyz - £10.00
Classic Metal Lammasu - £10.00 (STORM OF MAGIC TASTIC!)
Painted Classic Killa Kan - £8.00
Classic 12 Ork Stormboy conversion pack - £8.00
Painted Ork Meganob - £5.00

Warhammer 40,000

Classic Techmarine - £4

                Unavailable Space Marine Techmarine

Classic Grey Knight Terminator - £4

                Unavailable Grey Knight Terminator with Psycannon.

Hydra Russ - £25

A converted and customised Forgeworld hydra turret (normally £43) mounted on a Leman Russ chassis to help balance the size of the turret, nicely represents extra armour.

Warhammer

Gyrocopter (one new, one old) - £10 for both

                A new gyrocopter and his classic wingman!

Ogre Maneater (pirate) - £8

                Badly painted model, needs stripping and repainting

Ogre Maneater (arabic) - £8

                Badly painted model, needs stripping and repainting

Hunter and Sabretusks - £10

Badly painted models, needs stripping and repainting

Tyrant - £10

                Badly painted model, needs stripping and repainting

Gorger - £8

                Badly painted model, needs stripping and repainting

Ogre Rhinox x2 - £15 each

Forgeworld Ogre Rhinox riders, normally £30, not great paintjob, ideally need stripping and repainting, reflected in price!

Classic Chaos Warrior Shields - £5

                8 Sprues of classic Chaos Warrior shields. Ideal for customising a unit of chosen.

LOTR

Haradrim Army – £45

Mumak with commander, 36 Plastic Haradrim Warriors, 2 commanders (foot and mounted), Sulliman (foot and mounted), Banner Bearer.

LOTR metal dwarfs – £10

                20 Classic metal dwarves.

Metal Uruk-Hai - £12

                16 Metal Uruk Hai, Lurtz and Vrasku. Badly chipped, need stripping and restarting.

Mouth of Sauron - £5

                Foot and Mounted model

Metal Warg Riders - £7.50

                5 Metal Warg riders.

Numenor Army - £50

Elendil, Isildur, 27 Numenor warriors with sword, 30 Numenor warriors with spears, 16 Numenor Warriors with Bows. That is 75 models, mostly metal for just £50. An ideal starter army.

Elendil and Isildur, alive and dying - £7.50

The two mightiest men of the second age along with the “about to get crushed by sauron” diorama.

LOTR Metal Orcs - £7.50

                15 Metal Orcs

Saruman - £4

                Metal Saruman with Palantir

Galdriel and Celeborn - £6

                Metal elf characters

Mounted Aragorn - £4

                Mounted Aragorn the Ranger.

Gamling, Theodred and Eomer - £7.50

                Three mounted Rohirrim characters (includes plastic horses for Theodred and Eomer)

Specialist

Epic Necrons - £5

Approx 30. Technically these are Chaos Androids but they would make perfect Epic scale Necrons.

Karloth Valois - £5

Long out of production Special Character Necromunda Wyrd.

Telepath Wyrd - £4

                Long out of production Necromunda Wyrd

Scaley with Scatter Gun - £5

                Out of production Scaley with scatter gun.