Flecktarn lasguns

Eyup folks, just a quickee today. Those of you who follow Today I've Mostly Been... (or indeed use our Twitter feed or Facebook page) will know that I've finished all the Flecktarn-garbed Imperial Guard. Still got the exciting specialists, command and characters to go but I thought I'd share this image of the progress so far:

They hang together quite nicely don't they? I still need to apply the white transfers to the shoulder pads for unit markings, but decided that I would do that in a mass batch and a haze of fumes from the decal fixing chemicals. You'll notice that they are made from a variety of componants from a wide variety of sources. The paint scheme helps them look uniform and the variety of parts give them an independent and varied tone.

There'll be more soon, the Flecktarn project ought to be finished this week with luck. As always, photos to follow!

TTFN

Inq28 - Ogryns and friends

Greetings shipmates! While I continue to plod on through the Flecktarn guard (45 lasguns should be finished by the end of the week) I've had time during the considerable drying times involved with so many heavy wash layers to finish a couple of lads...

First off the drawing board, so to speak, is Mung the Ogryn with his whacking great multi-laser. You can see details of his construction here and here. I'd decided that I wanted him to be very much a civilian Ogryn. Not some ex-guard serviceman but a genuine civilian. His backstory will be up on Beard Bunker eventually but for now, lets focus on painting!

One of the things with large figures like Ogryns is that the huge areas of skin need careful blending to avoid really harsh contrasts... Then you stick it under photographic lights and it strips through the thin blended layers. Grump. I assure you that the shading is far less stark on the actual model!

His backstory has him as a bouncer for a nightclub so I figured a band t-shirt and jeans would be the win image-wise. The band is Genejack which is a deeply oblique reference from Eisenhorn and refers to the 41st millenium equivelent of heavy metal: Pound. The denim was an enjoyable challenge to get right. It is a very specific colour, in this case Dark Reaper and Thunderhawk Blue mixed and shaded with black. There was no sculpted pockets of seams on the model so I added them just with paint effects. The trick is to supply contrast. A line of darkened basecoat to be the ridge of the seam or the fold of the pocket. Then a highlight along the lines of the pocket or either edge of the seam gives the three dimensional effect. I finally added a couple of very thin lines of Jokero Orange to the seams to be the classic orange stiching. You can barely see them but their presence says "denim" to the brain.

Like any good biker-syle bouncer Mung needed some tatts. A quick google search gave me a nice islander style faces to put on the left arm and just went for simple barbed wire on the other. Just like when painting stubble its important to both add some flesh tone into the tattoo colour. Once finished you can also glaze it with a few layer of appropriate flesh tone. This knocks the tatoo "under" the layer of skin and gives it the right tone.

To help keep Mung in line I finished off my Inquisitor's still unnamed Interrogator. This is his apprentice and a fairly new one. I wanted to show an operative in transition from the pampered nobleman that he was into a hard bitten Throne agent. Hence the powdered wig and scarlet waistcoat working alongside the tough brown leather coat, the very practical bionic with no aesthetic adjustments and that weapon! I've always loved the Tomb Kings Khopesh's, really nice sculpts and a superb weapon. They are evil designs intended to be used for hooking and tripping limbs and then transmitting a very severe blow due to that long curved edge maximising the force. I figured that this was a fairly recent acquisition and again has a stylish yet practical aire. Painting wise, he wasn't anything remarkable. Even the metalwork was just a mix of Val Liquid Copper and Rich Gold then glazed with Agrax Earthshade.

So with that we are done once more. I'm off late tomorrow to help my brother move house but should have the lasgun Fleckies finished first. See you next week folks.

TTFN

Tutorial - Flecktarn Camouflage

Greetings shipmates, while painting the latest batch of the Flecktarn Guard I mused "wouldn't it be useful to just take a few photos as I went so that I can show people how to achieve this sort of thing rather than just telling them". Then I grabbed the camera and went for it! Hence, here I present Pirate Viking Painting's guide to painting Flecktarn style camouflage. Note that I said "Flecktarn-style", this is not intended to be some kind of historically accurate guide to recreating a pattern. Rather it is intended to show how to achieve a reminiscent pattern.

image from Trident Military

First things first, you need some reference material, this is an image grabbed from google. Between that and the small library of books I can usually find what I need for reference material! The next stage is to really examine how the pattern is put together. In this case it is a pale green/brown/grey with three different browns printed over it. So the easiest way to accomplish the effect is to try to replicate the printing with paint.

First, the model gets a nice solid basecoat of Val Grey-green (I), this is very pale but will be dulled and browned by later processes. Once dry - and it is worth noting that Vallejo paints dry much darker in tone than the wet tone - patches of Val Flat Earth are painted over the Grey-green (II). Try not to make the patches too smooth edged or it'll look like a fresian cow. Next, another layer of patches, this time in Val Chocolate Brown (III) making sure to overlap some of the Flat Earth. Very few camouflage patterns have hard edges and clear, high-contrast demarcations. Makes it a pain in the bum to photograph which is why you end up with the typical Cadian schemes. The last stage of the patches are painted in Val German Camo Black-Brown (IV). These need to be smaller patches and trying to leave some Val Grey-green showing. Don't worry too much about this though as the next stage will add a fair bit more Grey-Green into the scheme again.

The next steps in the scheme are to use the same colours as in steps I-IV again. But this time you just put small dots of the colour on the other patches. Each time apply a fewer dots so you end up with lots of grey-green dots (V) and not many Camo Black-brown dots (VIII). This is technically finished but there is no differentiation in shading across the cloth. Regular highlighting will cause insanity or blindness, trying to highlight each tiny dot or patch across folds in the cloth? Life is too short. Instead I opted to just use a glazed shading wash.

Before I apply the wash I paint all of the colours that would need a brown shading wash (IX). Gaiters, belts and pouches in Val US Field Drab, ropes in Val Deck Tan and so on. Then you give the whole thing a very generous wash of Agrax Earthshade (X) which corrects the tone of the Grey-green and also adds shading and contrast. Once all the other bits are finished the camouflage forms a nice textured backdrop to the other regions.

So there y'go! How I paint this scheme. Hope it proves useful inspiration for someone. Granted a ten stage cloth painting scheme is not for everyone but can provide a nice effect if you have the patience! Until next time folks.

TTFN

Inq28: A grenade launcher and a kilt...

Greetings one and all and first I simply have to say: 200 Followers! Good Lord. Seriously, three years ago when I started this I didn't think there would be half as many people interested in the random wurblings and paint daubs of a hairy bloke in Cardiff. You are all clearly people of impeccable taste, peerless intellect and I'll warrant devilishly handsome too.

But now, on to the real matter of the day, some painting! This chap was finished last week and is another in the line of Inq28 models I am doing.

This grizzled veteran is a member of Inquisitor Vandemar's warband, I talked about his construction in an older posts. He is a ex-guardsman demolitions expert and bombardier. His story will be up on the beard bunker before long. He's a professional looking soldier and so I wanted to keep his colour scheme subtle and subdued with one important exception:

The kilt! Tartan isn't easy to do but with patience and a determination to put every line properly into place you can get some really nice effects. Anyone from my family reading this miiight recognise the pattern:

Its the Duffy tartan, which I'd be entitled to wear from my maternal grandmother's side of the family. I thought I'd use it for this model as for almost every other tartan kilt on models they will have regimental tartans. This one didn't so I jumped at it!. Looking at the image above I'll talk you through the process I went through. First I applied a solid basecoat of Caliban Green. Look at the image, the white lines are the delineating feature of the pattern. As a result I painted the white lines first. Then darkened and lightened the appropriate squares. Yellow lines were painted next - sadly not the nice double line but I valued my sight - with green lines either side of them to cut them up. Its the constant crossing and cutting of the lines that is the crucial feature of tartan designs. If you have a clean line with no cuts on there then it will start to look odd and unreal.

As far as the rest of the model is concerned, the cloth was all Val Grey Green, the backpack and weapon sling Val English Uniform, shaded with Agrax Earthshade and highlighting with Val US Field Drab. This gave a pleasant canvas look. The grey-green gave his shirt and gaiters a very military look.

The autogun and it's underslung grenade launcher were given a very spare, utilitarian paint job. Simple green composite furniture and dulled metal fittings. Its got a nice military feel to it.

So there we go! Another in the line of Inq28 figures. I was going to publish him later in the week but 200 followers was too tempting to celebrate. Back to Flecktarn Imperial Guard now!

TTFN

Flecktarn Guard - it begins!

Hello folks, back to work again! Managed to get through the weekend with a bare minimum of injuries but there's a certain intensity to the fighting when you are all the enemies the players have to face! After taking tuesday to recover I'm back to work and finally getting a march on with the Flecktarn Imperial Guard commission.

I seem to have guessed right, a batch of five can be knocked out in a day's work whereas the mass-batching of such an involved scheme I was initially attempting would have resulted in blood running from my eyes! The colour scheme is the same as the original squad, but I've changed Vermin Brown for Val Flat Earth and Charadon Granite for Skavenblight Dinge as, well, they don't really exist anymore!

Something that is working very nicely are the variety of different backpacks the client has used. Gives them a nice soldierly air. Certainly, if I was to be doing an Imperial Guard force of my own again this sort of level of equipment and webbing would be what I was looking to achieve. I know that procedure is to dump heavy equipment somewhere fairly safe before an attack starts but it sort of "feels right" for soldiers to have equipment!

Much like the DKK project, I'm not going to be posting a picture here of every individual lot of five lasgun armed dudes that I finish. That would just be boring. They'll be going up on Today I've Mostly Been though and I'll do a group shot of them when all 45 of them are finished! Until then (or until I finish a drying time project)...

TTFN

You've got red on you...

Arr me hearties, happy Friday to one and all. Well, as usual with the start of a new project the first few days consisit of assembly, fixing problems, removing mold lines and the like before mass base coating. Given that this would be far, far more boring to read about than to do I haven't shared any pictures of it! Instead, I'm going to show you all a model I've been itching to share but haven't been able to until now! (Because it is being entered in a WAMP contest and you have to post it in the competition gallery before it is shown anywhere else).

For those who aren't immediately familiar with this chap, this is Simon Pegg as Shaun from Shaun of the Dead. Again, this is a model with no real purpose in gaming (though I'm sure I'll find one eventually!) that I'm drawn to painting. I'm calling the series Cathode Ray Conquerers and you'll find more TV and movie-land characters under that tag. He is a Hasslefree miniatures sculpt and another corker: HFA052 Dynamic Ray. I've also got an "Ed" model converted to have a spade ready for some paint to join him. Oddly enough, this is the second time I've painted one of Hasslefree's Simon Pegg look-alikes (PC Nick Angel being the last one) that I've painted. Kinda hoping that there will be a third model in the Cornetto Trilogy...

First, I've got to say, this sculpt is brilliant, the pose; the weight distribution; the likeness; all are fantastic. But now to painting! Unusually for me I started from a white undercoat - as I knew the cricket bat, the flesh and the white shirt would all be happier for it! When you are trying to replicate a specific colour scheme for a project like this, reference material is all important. For things like face and hair colouring almost any still from the films will do, but it is often trickier to get a full length shot. So here is my top tip: action figures. These days almost every film (that would merit induction into the Cathode Ray Conquerers) gets collectable action figures, meticulously researched and nicely photographed. Like this one!

They really are a godsend for reference material. I toyed with painting him covered with blood but decided in the end (largely due to the pose of the Ed model) to set him in the garden right before the first zombie kill. If anyone knows of a "Mary" zombie let me know and I'll totally diorama this up!

Painting started with everything that wasn't white getting basecoated and shaded! Sadly, I didn't make notes on the paint colours used for everything and I painted him a few weeks ago so I can't really give full details. I can say that the shirt was painted with my new favourite white technique. A solid basecoat of Ceramite White is shaded with Val Pale Wash which is a very thin, sort of Fortress Grey colour. You can then very easily rehighlight and be left with a very clean, very straightforward white. Now to try doing those pesky Napoleonic British webbing straps again...

Little details like bothering to paint a watch face make a big difference in this sort of work. He's so simple a colour scheme that all you can really do is get the shades right and pick out small details to make him stand out. So, there y'go, one Shaun, very much not of the Dead. I'll stick Ed up when I get him finished. If you happen to be a WAMP member come on down and rate him would you? I'd quite like to win this one! There'll be Flecktarn Guard up soon so until then

TTFN

I don't want to set the world on fire...

Eyup folks, after a slightly frustrating day I needed a quick win, a nice simple paint job to give me that warm "I did that" feeling and restore dented mojo. Casting around my boxes I found a "Nuclear Sandlot Robot" from Brother Vinni out in Russia. That'll do me!

Given that I am a big fan of the Fallout universe and games I noted at once the remarkable similarity (cough) between the robot model and the Robco Protectron robot from the series. A lot of Brother Vinni's stuff is in this bracket and I would not be at all surprised if he isn't gently encouraged to cease and desist before too long! Get your models sooner rather than later if I were you.

It may surprise you but this model is only about 2 hours of painting. Seriously. The weathering is what does almost all of the work in this and it was done with nifty purpose-built enamel paints. To start with the whole model was painted with AP Plate Mail and then shaded down with slightly thinned Val Black Shade. Val US Dark Green was then painted on to the painted plates. I chipped the edges with a fine brush and a sponge - where I could get in to use it - using the Val US Dark Green lightened with Nurgling Green. This was followed by Val German Camo Black-brown, perfect for this, to be the dark metal chips through the paint. I added some AP Plate Mail Metal to the very edges to be the polished bare metal.

Then the fun quick weathering. AK Rust Streaks was painted over all the bright silver sections. Once dried a little I used Odourless turps to move the rust colour around until happy with it. AK Fresh Engine Oil was painted around the joints and the mechanisms at the back. Its thin enough that capillary action pulls it around the joints nicely. Finally I added AK Streaking Grime to the gaps between the panel lines and then drew it out into nice streaks with more turps.

I think he turned out alright for a couple of hours work. I've no intention of doing a huge number of these post apocalyptic types but I've got a few totally-not-Brotherhood models and a not-really-an-Eyebot that I ordered with the Protectron. Anyway, he had the desired effect, frustration and dented mojo repaired. Huzzah!

TTFN