Frustration!

 I was trying to paint some more on the Malifaux Ice Golem and mixed in one of Games Workshop's new paints for a highlight and some color transitions.

 This is the first I've used this Ceramite White since I bought it about a year ago - turns out this generically-labeled white paint is essentially a brush-on primer. I've used thick white paints before - VMC White, for one, and Ceramite is something completely different. It even separates differently w/ my thinner mixtures and everything. Wishing I had never bought the crap.

 Unfortunately, I used it as the white base I added light blue into, and then spread to a few other palette wheels. If I wanted to paint with, say Elmer's Glue, it would've been nice to know I was about to do that before I did it. Oh well, it is what it is.

 Guess who's relegated his wannabe Gen Con MHE Painting Competition entry back down to a regular tabletop figure?

Pfft.

Malifaux "Children of December" Ice Golem II

 Here's phase two, after adding in more color to the Ice Golem. The photos don't do it justice IMO (do they ever?) in that it's actually more of a teal-ish blue than an outright green.

Comments and suggestions much appreciated! I'm painting him up for tabletop use, but since the Malifaux crews are so small and the figures are so awesome, I'm painting them up to as high a standard as I can manage and then I'll just seal the heck out of 'em. (Ought to be easy, as I plan on leaving the Ice constructs semi-glossy anyhow - not sure if that'd the be whole figure or if I go in and add gloss to just the flat ice parts, I'm still undecided.)

Malifaux "Children of December" Ice Golem

 I'm making a serious effort to get the 'Children of December' gang for Malifaux painted up, ideally all of them before GenCon 2014, but I'll take what I can get. I'm starting on the big Ice Golem first, and I've finally got a color progression that I like and hope will work out nicely in the end.

 That said, does anyone have any suggestions on painting something to look like translucent ice (or how to get the dark and sinister vibe of the crew box set cover, which I love)?

Two colors in from white primer on the Ice Golem, suggestions/comments appreciated! ( I haven't painted anything serious in a good six months or so, so be gentle...)

Painting Aged Parchment

 I'm in the middle of a slow-but-steady process of migrating all the pages and images from my old hosting to a new custom domain for my painting page. I thought I'd post a slightly-revised tutorial - it feels very odd referring to paints that no longer exist in terms of step-by-step directions, but such is life.

Painting Aged Parchment

Gen Con MHE Painting Competition Rules are up!

So the rules are up for the Gen Con MHE Painting Competition over at http://www.genconminipainting.com/

  After some deliberation, I think I'm going to put anything I finish into Open and let the cards fall where they may. I entered a few things in last year - a Reaper figure I painted up specifically for the comp turned out less well-done than I would've liked, whereas the GW Chaos Lord that I've been using for my 40K (wannabe) Chaos army and put in just for the hell of it - near as I can tell it made it to the final cut.

  I realized I was in way over my head in terms of the sheer quality of stuff put in, but at least this time I have an understanding of GenCon's apparent "painting style" and competition format. All I've entered previously was Games Workshop's Golden Demon competitions a few times (granted, winning a few trophies, but still... apples and oranges standards-wise from what I can tell).

  Now I just need to finish some stuff between here and early August!

When Is A Red Sable Not A Red Sable?

I'll come right out and admit that for the longest time, I was a Games Workshop fanboy. I grew up when the only Games Days and Golden Demon figure painting competitions were in the UK, as well as the majority of the shops, and I daydreamed about visiting them and participating in them vicariously through issues of White Dwarf in my tender years.

I'm much, much older now. There's no longer a White Dwarf magazine that offers store coupons, publishes D&D rules, or offers quality painting articles for an up-and-coming young wannabe. Oddly, it might be the case again that the only Games Days and Golden Demon painting competitions would be in the UK, but I digress...

For a great number of reasons that I won't go into here, GW has lost its luster for me. It just so happened, however, that for a 2013 Christmas gift I received a GW gift card. It took me more or less until May this year to muster up the tenacity to go into the store an hour's drive away, endure the annoying attempts at camaraderie and salesmanship of the resident sales weasel, pick up a few brushes and a novel (gift card gone!) and make a hasty exit.

Everybody in my little online painting community has been talking about the Red Kolinsky Sable hair brush embargo here in the U.S., reasonable substitutes due to the lack of those quality brushes, what's so good about a Red Kolinsky Sable hair anyhow, etc.

I just thought I would post a few pictures as I tried out my new GW Detail Brush in comparison to my at-least-5-year-old Winsor & Newton Kolinsky Red Sable #0 brush, and leave folks to ponder a little bit. I am!

 

 

All things considered, they handled about the same today - a W&N Series 7 #0 Kolinsky Red Sable with thinned Vallejo Model Air paint versus a GW Detail Brush w/ the same paint applied to a figure. Granted the W&N brush is over 5 years old and the GW brush is new. Could it possibly be a Kolinsky Red Stable brush imported from the UK by way of simply moving stock internally in a product shipment, thereby avoiding customs issues? No idea. I gotta say, though, the brush hair appearance and color are a pretty even match, the hairs have the same individual shape, they have the same body so far as maintaining overall brush shape during use, and load the paint about equally. Hrm. Reasonable price, too. I'm fairly impressed!

GW Bad Moons Ork Nob

 Apparently I've never posted this figure directly on my blog. It's one that I'm actually very proud of, despite the fact that it's not necessarily painted to a display standard and I didn't go all-out with him in terms of difficulty of paint job or anything. This was one of the "free figures" that came with an issue of Games Workshop's White Dwarf magazine way back when as a promotion for an upcoming rulebook/figure combo boxed set - Orks versus Space Marines coupled with an intro to the Warhammer 40K 5th Ed. rules. I traded away all the Space Marines in return for a boatload of Orks - my plan is/was to have an Orky mob that was a throwback to Ork-related books and art that GW put out towards the end of the "Rogue Trader" era - several collections of Ork backstory, with awesome art by, well, just about all of the cool GW artists at the time.

 Anyhow, this Ork Nob figure was painted as a test to see if I could do homage to the "bright 'n' blingy" bright yellow armor and clothing of the Bad Moons Ork clan back in the day while: 1) making it grungy and rough looking, and 2) making it easy to paint and replicable across a whole Ork mob for the purposes of cranking a playable tabletop 40K Ork army out.

 I succeeded with my two aims for this figure... it was painted almost completely with washes of thinned paint over white primer. I started with the lightest color, and painted progressively darker wash layers into the shadows and then towards the deepest shaded crevices. I finished off with a layer of "grime" as a wash over the armor and clothing. The metals were painted with a solid basecoat of mixed metallic paint and dark regular paint, and then just bumped up a bit with a minimum of highlights. I tried some new materials (for me) for basing, essentially some innards from a cheap wind-up alarm clock, and cork - the base was painted with basecoats and washes as well, topped off with a few highlights.

 I think the figure turned out excellently for what it was intended to be - a test piece for an easy color scheme to use on cranking out a tabletop army. Unfortunately, when the time came to paint some more friends, I made decent progress on a batch of 5 with the same scheme... and then got sidetracked by some other "new and shiny" release. Ah well.

 You can vote for him here on CoolMiniOrNot!