A little progress

Well I managed to get a bit of painting in, not that much progress to report though.

I tried to do non metallic metal on the silver coloured sword and armor, I found that its quite tricky to get the blending nice and smooth.  I must admit the back is better than the front, I did the front first using mostly dry blending and then tried the back with wet blending which was a bit more successful, I think I need to add a bit of drying retarder for the wet blending, if you get to a stage where the paint is nearly dry then everything seems to get a nasty grainy texture.  I will probably go for one more set of highlights and then finish of the rest of the figure, just got the plume, beard and gloves to do...

More work in progress...

I've managed to spend a bit of time working on my dwarfs last week. Instead of using my own colour scheme I decided to try and copy the scheme rackham used:

Heres a picture of them after a base coat with a medium dark wash to bring out the details. 

The picture looks a little washed out compared to the actual colours in real life, I still havent figured out the best way to take photographs yet.

Instead of working on all three at once I decided to focus on one at a time, heres the results so far:

I have shaded and highlighted the main armour and painted in all of the other base colours.  The hardest part so far were the eyes, it was really fiddly painting in the pupils!  I have added some blacklining around the grey areas to bring out some depth, yep I know its a little messy but I have to add highlights anyway so it doesn't really matter :).  The layers on the main armour are not as smooth as I would like but hey its my first go at painting for years so hopefully things are going to get better. I need to make sure the paint is thin enough and to let it dry properly between coats, Im really bad for rushing ahead!

Progress has been a little slow lately and I have been really busy working on programming stuff for work so I never got much time for painting this week, hopefully I will get some more progress done soon.

Work in progress...

Well its not much but here's what I'm working on at the moment.

 I have actually painted some of the base colour on the dwarfs and quickly washed them to bring out a bit of detail. I'm updating this blog a day behind at moment so I will take some more photos as I go on...

It feels like I have forgotten what to do painting wise, I have used various techniques over the years but my tried and trusted method was always as follows:

• Base colour
• wash
• repaint most of base colour
• add highlights

I wanted to try out more of the layering approach, like what you see on the rackham paintings but I was unsure where to start.  It doesnt feel quite righ using ultra thin layers that dont make much difference until your on the 12th layer, maybe its just me...

New miniatures

Here is a pictures of my recent purchases from www.ludikbazar.com. I bought a total of 9 packs, I love Rackham miniatures, its a pity they have stopped producing the lead lines. I got some goblins, dwarfs, and orks. At the bottom is the free miniatures I got from www.15mm.co.uk be sure to check out the special offers, I got the fantasy set and the laserburn set. The first miniatures I ever painted were laserburn although I didnt know what the were called at the time!

I have prepared three of the dwarfs that didnt need any assembly, and all of the laserburn miniatures, it took ages to remove all the flash lines. I managed to get them undercoated ready for painting too.

New Paints

As I mentioned in my last post I have got a new set of 38 paints. I got the paint from SnMStuff as they do a wide variety of Vallejo Model Colour sets from 6 to 48. I spent ages trying to figure out what colours I might need to start painting but finally managed to come up with 38 including the thinner and glazes etc. The closest I could find was a set of 36 but not wanting to decide which 2 colours to drop I emailed them and asked if they could do me a set of 38 and they agreed! So they put a custom item on their website for me. That's what I call service! They arrived very quickly too so I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone, they were very friendly and helpful.

Here's my new paints in all their glory!



I painted a colour swatch sheet too, well my wife Lynsey kindly painted them in for me!



I think I got a pretty good selection of colours. There may be a medium blue missing from my set but its nothing I cant mix.

Next time I'll post the selection of miniatures Ive bought.

First post...

This is my blog on painting and modeling miniatures, yes its a little sparse, the banner is too large and the colours are not quite right, Ill get to that, eventually... :)

I started painting when I was about 12 or 13 maybe younger, I'm 34 now. It was back when Games workshop used to be a more a independent company rather than the beast it is now, when all the figures in a squad or regiment were different, when the prices were reasonable! The first game I owned was Laserburn which was written by Brian Ansell, it was the precursor to Warhammer 40k, this was quickly followed by blood bowl, Warhammer Fantasy battle, Traveller, Rune Quest, Call Of Cthulhu, and Warhammer 40k, I mainly painted the 25mm Citadel miniatures which are now long out of production, I also had a small collection of 15mm Traveller and Laserburn figures which I fondly remember.

A few years ago I sold of all my paints as well as most of my old games and most of my miniatures but recently I have been thinking about starting again, I finally succumbed and ordered a set of 38 Vallejo paints, some Rackham Confrontation miniatures, and got a set of 15mm Laserburn figures.

Ill post some pictures of all my brand new paint and miniatures. Then Ill have to get to work on painting them!