Limited Edition Death Korps Quartermaster

Avast shipmates! Remember these? They were part of my last Death Korps commission, two years ago. How time flies. Today, I've added to it:

Yup, this fine fellow is the fantastic Forgeworld event only Quartermaster. He, along with about thirty miscellaneous buddies are being added to the client's original commission. Take a moment and see how far I've come with both painting and photography in those two years by checking out the older post. One of the problems though is that none of the colours I used to paint the previous incarnation exist anymore! Fortunately, by judicious use of online comparison tables I got everything close. A few things just got swopped straight out. I used to mix a particular shade of canvas green (the mask and the puttees around his legs) which turned out to be Val Grey Green. Who knew?

It's actually made me more confident that I could match older paint schemes if I had to with the new paints. Still haven't achieved the same tone for my Blood Angels as I used to but they were a hench army to begin with. Don't think I really need to add much more in the way of infantry to that...

So with this fellow finished some of you who read "Today I have mostly been" either through the Tumblr or the Facebook/Twitter feeds will realise that I solved my brush quandry. I feel I ought to give a qualified shout out to Lawrence Arts who were the only people online in Britain who seemed to have a stock of the Raphael 8404 brushes that I prefer. Seriously, they're brushes. They take up no space whatsoever. How can people run out of them and not be able to restock for a fortnight in the 21st century? Sheesh. Anyway, Lawrence Arts are more expensive than my usual supplier and had a high P&P but by the gods they deliver fast. 17 hours from order to door. Not too shabby. Sadly, I now have to switch from the "Just In Time" supply chain for this sort of thing and move to having a backup of all my brushes so that when they wear out I'm not crippled by supply issues. This might seem a "duh" option but frankly, when brushes last 8 months to a year and take up no space at all you kinda expect them to be available to buy! Paint, yes, I have backups of that, spray too, but brushes. Grr. Never mind, expense over with... or so I thought.

Proving that these things come in threes (my 0 and 00 brushes simultaneously dying and the stockists being rubbish being the first two) take a look at the picture above. The sequin sized componant just above the brushes and magnified in the inset is the beautifully machined, precision nozzle for my airbrush. Without it it will not work. This morning while I was checking for any dirt/paint ahead of continuing work on the Titan it sheared clean off it's screw thread. I managed to extract the screw thread from the brush thank the gods but this now needs replacing too. A quick order on The Airbrush Company's web page found the part (0.35mm nozzle with O-ring if anyone cares) which comes to... Fifteen pounds. FIFTEEN QUID? It's the size of a grain of rice! (thinking about it that's probably why it's expensive Jeff, chill out).

Anyway, I've had quite a day so it was very nice to be able to have those brushes turn up right as I was in mid fury at having all productivity stopped by circumstance. A run around the block and a few cups of tea later I was calm enough to paint again and the DKK Quartermaster was a fun and rewarding model to spend the afternoon on. Aaaaand relax. So, looks like mostly DKK for the rest of the week until the new nozzle arrives. Ce la vie right?

TTFN.