EmperorNorton's Overabundance of Projects

[EmperorNorton]

Finally I have a few days off, but still I can't get anything finished, because I'm all over the place.
Yesterday I spent at least two hours trying to assemble the metal Steam Tank. At first I was really happy, because the first five parts I glued together (the sides and the bottom) fit perfectly. Then I tried to put on the top, which didn't fit at all. That meant I had to break apart the stuff that was already glued to fit everything together somehow. Meh.

Today I spent some time undercoating the vehicles for my Witchhunters:

The skeleton bone spray is not my friend. It has left a very coarse coat in a lot of places and some details are pretty much ruined or at least will take a lot of work to recover. I haven't seen behaviour like that in any other spray.

Still I love the colour sprays, as I hope that they will save me some time.
My Repentia were undercoated in fleshtone:


And here's a box of knights, undercoated in silver:

Somehow it feels more like varnish than a proper undercoat, though, so I'll have to see how it goes.

Since I got bored of the Teutogen I started working on some warmachines and a sorcerer:

Not sure how one is supposed to paint these sorcerers, though, because the robes are in the way to paint the front. That'll be...interesting.

[EmperorNorton]

The closest to being actually finished it my Forgeworld well:

The wood parts need a drybrush and a wash and there are some details on the roof I still need to do. And for the first time I'll try using a water effect.

Last week I got my new Hirst Art moulds. Here are the first results:


Bigger picture of the big piece from the other side:

Now I only need to get my Mordheim group together again.

[silverstu]

mmm.. don't think you got enough projects on the go

Looking good - you don't do things by half! Really like the scenery, the gunnery division and that huge pile of knights. Keep at it mate and you'll give Harry a run for his money!

[Wintermute]

I'm moving this thread to the new Random Project Logs Forum.

Wintermute

[EmperorNorton]

mmm.. don't think you got enough projects on the go

Good thing then that there are a couple more things I want to start.
I got Space Hulk today, as well as my first fleet for Uncharted Seas. And some stuff to hopefully turn into a Kislevite warband for Mordheim. And the Temple of Skulls.

Looking good - you don't do things by half! Really like the scenery, the gunnery division and that huge pile of knights. Keep at it mate and you'll give Harry a run for his money!

I'm afraid that I won't. While I know that I can't match his quality, I thought I could at least match him in quantity, but I seem to lack the sheer determination.
Case in point, of my grand plans for August, this is pretty much all that came of it:


One unit of Teutogen awaits finishing touches, which I hope will be done before the week is through.
Minimum for this month is to finish the second unit of Teutogen and 2 core units.

[EmperorNorton]

And the Teutogen:




Still need some work on the banner and some minor details.
I hope once they are based properly they'll look nicer.

[silverstu]

The Teutogen look great- good work on the varying beard colours[nice "red" beards in particular] and I love the freehand wolf on the banner. And the artillery look the part too- nice blue scheme working well.

[EmperorNorton]

The design on the banner is no freehand, it's part of the mini, although a bit hard to pick out.

Aside from my second unit of Teutogen, I'm currently working on some handgunners:

According to my plan, they should have been finished last Tuesday. Maybe I'll have the basecoat done properly tomorrow...

On the side I have been spending five minutes here and there on some more warmachines, so hopefully I can churn out some big points fairly quickly should the need arise:


Winter is coming, as my ole friend Eddard used to say. So I took the opportunity of a couple of warm and dry late summer days to prepare. About 120 brave (and blue) men of the Empire:

I thought using the coloured sprays would save me time, but I had to realize that painting the undercoat takes, I dunno, about half a minute per mini? Since my average is 2+ hours per figure that really isn't all that much.

And my temple of skulls:

This shows a bit of a downside to the coloured sprays. Occasionally I have some left over without any particular use for it, so random things get undercoated in unusual colours.
I have a birthday coming up and I hope I'll get an airbrush, which I want to try out on the temple.

[Siam-Tiger]

Is that the armypainter color spray? I have heard a lot of bad things about them, but they seem to work out fine for you.

I am a little bit confused about the blue empire soldiers, does that work out? especially for metals or skin?

[EmperorNorton]

Yes, it is the armypainter spray. There are some problems with it as it occasionally gives a rough finish. Some of my Empire guys suffer from that and especially my Sisters of Battle, but it's okay for my standard of painting. You have to shake the can a lot and clean the nozzle often to minimize the risk of getting a rough finish and I don't think it can be completely prevented, so probably not something a painter with higher ambitions would be happy with.
I've had the most trouble with the Skelleton Bone spray (regrettably the one I use/need the most) and some with the Blue, no problems to speak of with Necrotic Flesh, Human Flesh or Army Green. The Platemail Metal spray is probably best used as a very thin coat over a black undercoat, not as an undercoat itself.

Using Tallarn Flesh makes painting the skin over the blue undercoat easy enough and metals should be okay with two thin layers as well.

[Dino]

Like the Empire stuff. Cannon and mortar look good. Really like teutogen guard. Can't wait to see the wizard.

Hope to see more soon.

[Elazar The Glorified]

Wow! You've got a lot of interesting projects on the go. Have to say I'm still feeling slightly disturbed by that female Orc with the Goblin in a headlock for your bloodbowl team! Hehe
I really like your Teutogen Guard but I've commented on them in the ToFP thread so will point out the other things I really like. Top of that list has to be what you've done so far on the Marauder Giant. Love that old mini and yours is looking very good indeed.
Like the colour scheme on your Sisters of Battle as well, looks really nice. You don't see a great many blue undercoats on Warseer but looks like it will be a great time saver for getting all of your Empire painted!

Keep up the good work!

[EmperorNorton]

Finally something that looks like an update (well, when the light is right and you squint your eyes a little...)

I did indeed get an airbrush, but I don't seem to be able to handle it properly (which makes it remarkably similar to an ordinary brush), but I try.
So far it has come in handy experimenting with some scenery:


Regrettably the airbrush clogged before I could finish these, but still it was quite a bit faster than painting these trees with a normal brush.

One thing I tried and I'm actually happy with is my first fleet for Uncharted Seas:

Still have to paint the cannons and the sails, which I started airbrushing, but will probably finish without it.

My second fleet luckily has no sails:

Not sure if I should use the GW metal paints with my airbrush, though.

Not shown are a bunch of things that I tried to airbrush, but which didn't turn out well, for example a unit of Flagellants, which I wanted to spray the skin colour on. That was quite a mess.
Because of that I decided to not airbrush these bad boys:

Problem is I'm terribly afraid of ruining them (which, one could argue, I do to most of my minis, but at least most of those are easier to replace than the Space Hulk minis) and since they are so detailed it'll take me forever to get them done.

[Gargobot]

Problem is I'm terribly afraid of ruining them (which, one could argue, I do to most of my minis, but at least most of those are easier to replace than the Space Hulk minis) and since they are so detailed it'll take me forever to get them done.

I know how you feel, for the same reason I've never had a single game with painted Heroquest minis.
But I've yet to see you ruin a mini, so I've no doubt you'll do them justice.

[N0th1ng c4n b34t 3lv3s]

A lot of stuff. Good stuff.

As for the fleet, it does look good, but don't let it escape without some colour! Historically, ships (especially naval ones) often where minor shows of colourfullness with green and reed fields, markings of all kinds etc. No matter which era or culture, most ships didn't leave shipyard without something to spice it up. One can't look at wood all the time, eh?

Arabian trade dhows might be an exception, as well as viking longboats, but generally large ships looked far from monotone. There's someone else on Warseer that has done a human/Imperial Uncharted Seas fleet, and the colour spots really bring the ships to life.

Just a tip and a thought.

[EmperorNorton]

A lot of stuff. Good stuff.

As for the fleet, it does look good, but don't let it escape without some colour! Historically, ships (especially naval ones) often where minor shows of colourfullness with green and reed fields, markings of all kinds etc. No matter which era or culture, most ships didn't leave shipyard without something to spice it up. One can't look at wood all the time, eh?

Arabian trade dhows might be an exception, as well as viking longboats, but generally large ships looked far from monotone. There's someone else on Warseer that has done a human/Imperial Uncharted Seas fleet, and the colour spots really bring the ships to life.

Just a tip and a thought.

Thanks for the tip. I didn't know that, but after looking at some pictures of ships I have to agree that something not as monotone looks nicer.
Not sure if I'll do it, though, as the appeal so far has been that it was easy to very paint them. I guess a bit of colour could be added at a later point, though.
And I totally have to look for that log with the Imperial fleet. I saw that some time ago and in fact it's what got me to try Uncharted Seas. For that the guy deserves my thanks.

I know how you feel, for the same reason I've never had a single game with painted Heroquest minis.
But I've yet to see you ruin a mini, so I've no doubt you'll do them justice.

Either you haven't been paying close attention or this will be a first...

Vallejo, whose paints I usually prefer, have a line of washes that they put out some time after GW made theirs, among which they have big pots (200 ml) of their Black and Pale (that's brownish) washes. As I go through the respective GW washes quite fast I ordered these, because they are quite a bit cheaper. The pots are big enough that you can dip minis in them, speeding up the process.
I tried this with my Uncharted Seas Iron Dwarfs and it turned out okay:

(Still need to go over the metal parts and paint the cannons bronze.)

At the beginning of the month my friendly local gamestore closed, to my great regret. While I got some minis for cheap in their closing sale - the next one shown among those - that clearly doesn't make up for the loss, and the first problem came about sooner than expected. I ran out of black primer and since I can't just drop by the store to get a new can now, I'll have to go without until I order something online, which will probably be late November at the earliest (Skaven, yes-yes).
Hence I sprayed my minis white and dipped them in the black wash.

Again, worked out okay for this guy:

WIP, obviously. Since I somehow need to get 800 points of Empire done in the next ten days I'll paint up some characters (which, of course, will lead to problems later on, as I won't have time to paint lots of troops then, either, but I'll worry about that when I come to that point).

Then, and here is where the ruining starts, I did the same with my Space Hulk Genestealers:

And for whatever reason the wash, although I tried my best to shake of any excess wash on the minis, dried as a thick, rubbery, cracking, detail garbling, crappy mess.
It's disheartening. I don't know what to do with them, nor can I think of any colour scheme that could help with masking the problem a bit.

[Gargobot]

It's not over 'til it's over!(?)

Actually that looks like you attempted the Alien look with your Nids, and that could be a way to bring this to a happy end. Maybe if you'd use some of the wash with a brush on the places where it's still a little bright and later apply varnish, you'd end up with the Alien look. (I'm not so sure about this, because I've never done it, but certainly there's a Warseerite not far who knows more about it.)
Or you could strip them.

[EmperorNorton]

That's what I thought before the wash dried. When it was still wet it looked quite a bit like Giger's Alien. I'd like that, so I'll try a test piece with some more careful washed.

As these are plastic, how would I strip them?

[Elazar The Glorified]

I think Gargobot could be right, you could put some gloss varnish on them and maybe get a real Giger Alien look from them.
As for stripping plastic models, there are lots of schools of thought. For stripping all of my models (metal or plastic) I put them in a bowl of quite hot water and washing powder mixed up and leave them to soak for an hour or three. The chemicals in the washing powder are brilliant for loosening the paint and then if you get a stiff bristled brush (I use a scrubbing brush) and give the minis a quick going over the paint comes away quite easily. Then I'd give them a proper rinse with clean water just to remove any residue from the washing powder.

[GomezAddams]

Theres a few things for stripping - simple green, fairy power spray - but your in germany so any suggestions might be a little wasted...

I use an airbrush for color undercoating, mainly because I got fed up of army painter letting me down in its consistancy. Can I ask which airbrush you have and what sort of propellant/compressor you use? I might be able to help out a little bit as I had similar problems early on.