The Tale of Board Game Painters 2012-2013 - Month 1 & October WIP

[Jonahmaul]

herebedeagons - very nice looking spiders. apparently I forgot to comment last time sorry!

SD - Have commented on most of this in your PLOG but I actually think that the druid and his mate would look better with the nose painted. Starfire is looking excellent, it's a much darker broodier colour than the heroes and it really works. The painting is of course excellent as always too. I couldn't get the back left foot to stick in the rock and the body properly so I'm filling in the gap between foot and the rock, not sure how it's gonna look. May have to risk snapping it off and trying to heat it so I can reset the position a bit. I've been added to a late pledgers e-mail list according to Coolminiornot so they're gonna send me an e-mail in Novemeber (presumably when they e-mail you guys who have already pledged) so looks like I'm sorted to get them directly now. Thanks for your help though =) now I just need to convince myself I don't need any of the Relic Knights stuff as well.....


What does everyone else think on the Kobolds/Rex colour choices? Do they agree with Zark that the Kobolds and Rex should be the same colour? I see the logic with this but although I like the idea of purple for the Kobolds I'm not sure it'd work on the larger scale Rex which is why I was thinking of going to blue. Did everybody do their Rex's the same colour as each other as well or have two different coloured ones?

[robscott5598]

@Solun - Great SDE heroes. I am particulary fond of your Barbarian, I love the sculpt and you've done a great job with it. I also like the nice texture and feel you got with the Dwarf's beard. I will agree with HerebeDragons though, I think painting the Bear's nose a glossy highlighted black would make the face pop just a tiny bit more, also I would do the gums a pink color, but that's just my opinion, regardless aces on everything! Especially the high contrast and extreme highlighting on the Dragon. I doubt I could even pull that off at all, much less to such a high standard.

@Zark - Love the Reverse Flash T-Shirt. The moment I saw that the figure seemed more like a real person to me. Guess it's because he's wearing something I would expect to see on one of my real life friends or even myself, something along that line. I really like the choices you made in painting the details on the zombies. It's little things like the metallic colored jacket, the Nike swoosh, the logos, ect.....really nailed something that makes them seem like they were real people with a sorta implied backstory to them who have unfortunately become zombies, not just little pieces of plastic painted like bloody zombies.

I would however, suggest you doing something different with the bases. If nothing else paint the bases a slightly lighter gray in order to make them match the street tiles better. A light stippling effect and even one or two pieces of newpaper, or trash, or a coke can here and there across maybe every third or fouth base would also go very far in making those zombies' bases look as fantastic as the paint work you've put into the figures.

As far as the "runner's" bases go, I love the idea of the yellow street lines, it's extremely fitting, and I will be stealing that idea wholesale for when I get around to painting my copy of Zombiecide (which unfortunately is currently sitting in Texas with my Ex right now, otherwise I would be painting the $&%* out it right now too) The only thing I would just suggest is tightening the lines up a bit, as from the pics (maybe it's not true due to photo angles or whatever) but they seem slightly bent or crooked, and maybe even painting their bases as a darker assfault look like an actual street surface, since yellow deviding lines don't generally get painted on sidewalks and pedestrian throughfares, that should also help to make them instantly recognizable on the table top.

Personally I would drop the brightly colored edged bases on the characters as well. I feel it detracts from "realistic" look of the game you have going on in spades and "cartoonyfies" the bases. It also distracts from your characters paint apps and your paint apps for the characters are good, really good. If you focus instead on something like making all the hero characters having healthy clean skin tones, with one strong primamry colored piece of clothing they should be easily identifiable by their "character color" in addition to their unique sculpts. Then focus on the zombies all having slighty green, gray, yellow, or just general all around unhealthy looking skin tones you should have no issues with the characters getting lost in the crowd on the table.

Sorry if that seems like a lot of critical feedback, as it's not meant to be. Your work so far is very impressive and if anything I'm just a tinsy bit jealous and a lot reflecting on what I would be thinking and working on doing with these same figures if I was lucky enough to actually have my copy in hand, painting it, instead of it being loaned out to someone right now.


@Here be Dragons - Seriously the wolves are a super fast "wetblending" drybrush experiment. I had to get them all done really quickly for the D&D game the next day.
I basically sectioned off each mini in my head into 3 main parts. The lower "main body" section up to about the muzzle and shoulder haunch, running back towards the flanks and tail got a quick base coat of ivory/sandstone color.

Then I basecoated up from there a color called "cinammon apple". It's a very orangy brick red color. Then I did the very top most color as Vallejo model air color. It's not labeled with a specific color name actually but it's a very dark inky brown.

Then I gave all the models a very waterdown wash of Devlen Mud to try to add some sadows/shading, and tie the colors together a bit where they meet.
After that it was just all about dry brushing. I added some of the cinnamon apple to the ivory sandstone and blended the two colors together along their edge. I added some cinnamon apple to the vallejo brown and drybrushed into that edge. Then I used some satin off-white/ivory sandstone mix to dry brush the whole lower lighter section of the wolves, and slowy added that color to both of the affor mentioned mixes, building up greater and greater quantities of off white into the mix to progressivly lighten the dry brushes.

The main thing that works so well with them is that most of the drybrushing (minus the final almost pure white highlights) is all what i guess you would refer to as "wetblending" really as opposed to drybrushing. At no time was any one coat of paint allowed to completely dry before fresh paint or "wet" color was thinny added to the model. It allows for a very natural and smooth blend of colors and transitions between shades, and you can move colors around and sort of push and pull the color across a model if done correctly. I am still experimenting with this type of technique and far from mastered it, especially with these nerve damaged & shaky hands. It just happened to be something that worked really well this time, probably because I didn't have time on this project to worry about it too much and second guess it, it just needed to get done fast so I didn't have any time to overthink it.


anyways.....I'm building a board game form the ground up, completly from scratch for one of my October projects. Zombie Plague is a free Print and Play board game which is actually really fun. I think it perfectly captures a specific type of feel, which is not represented in any other Zombie stlye board game, and that's the entire feel of the very first "Night of the Living Dead" movie. That feeling of frantic fast paced action and split second decisions by a group of complete strangers trying desperately to survive a single night in a random house, with hoards of zombies closing in from all sides. "Do we baracade up the house and hope to weather in out? Or do we search for the car keys and make a break for it? Can we lock ourselves in the celler? Is one of us a traitor willing to sacrifice everyone else to survive?"

and here are my first few pieces done towards finishing the whole thing...


the survivors themselves, which are just random heroclixs and horrorclix figures (I'm doing this on a budget unfortunately) repainted and rebased to be ordinanry people struggling for survival in the aftermath of the zombie apocolypse.



and some modern style zombies, also made from mostly horrorclix figures. We have some zombie cops, a zombie clown, some zombie hookers, even a zombie prisoner who apparently died in the electric chair, and who doesn't want a zombie ventroliquist.



and since I need 6 zombies for my Warhammer Quest expansion tables, I whipped out a few less modern specific zombies. These are the fantastic plastic zombie kit pieces from Mantic. Can't possibly recommend these highly enough.



throw the two groups together and I'm quite a bit closer to my needed goal of 24 or so zombies, which has to be finished by this Saturday if we're gonna game with 'em



and since everything is print and play style you have to make your own counters for the game as well. These are my "Barricade" tokens. I wanted something that obviously shows the 3-D concept of trying to board up either a door or window with cheap Ikea furniture asap, without having something too "standy" to disrupte the game play across the 2-d board. I think these are a nice compromise.



So that's where I stand right now, along with a few other "SpooOOooKy" projects I have scheduled for the month of October.

[steevn]

"comments"time

@steevn : i've noticed the lines on the powerfist from the dead guy aren't straight

@emperornorton : i love your smooth highlights and the blooddrops, the eyes in the helmets and the serg's face are really good, maybe it's the pictures but the purity seals and gold details seem not to have a lot of depth/ they appear superbright

@daemonslave : great choice of reds, superbe shield. you shouldn't have said a thing about them, they look good, i wouldn't have noticed it. nice bases !

@robscott5598: damn, those wolves, thanks for the instruction. would a wash on the dragon fix it for you? Ettin's skin is gorgeously done. can i have the recipe for your koboldcloakpurple ? . thumbs up !

@jonahmaul: good idea, getting them all cleaned up and ready, i don't have the courage for it? can't wait to see your paintjob ideas on them. nice PLOG

@solun decius : nailed it ! from the base colours to all the details, hats off

@zark the damned : details (FLASHtshirt,tatoo,..) great, makes them special ! i second the idea of adding some more detail to the basic grey bases. the thingie is called a CAT ? so my cat stole the CAT, funny, but no problem i've found it.

@herebedragons : consistent quality over 12 models, nice bases

@solun decius again : ok, now i see your second row of pictures... when everybody thinks your models are done and beautiful you seem to find a way to improve them... i hate you i'm not sure on the bear's nose (i actually read beer first, the comment didn't make sense) because now it all blends in nicely, if you do the nose i'd do the tongue also

@robscott5598 again : zombies look fantastic, the clown is my favourite

[Daemonslave]

Right, I’ve finally got some time to write some comments.

@steevn

Oooh, I’m looking forward to seeing a Ravenguard paint scheme on the Space Hulk terms. Your first two look good and I like your choice of having a very dark blue Librarian as it fits the army overall colour better. Keep ‘em coming!

@ EmperorNorton

A cracking start. Your models are painted lovely, in a nice crisp clean style and will look great once the whole set is completed. Can’t wait to see your Genestealers too. Excellent effect on the serg’s power sword – Keep up the good work.

@robscott

I love those Wolves. Fantastic colouring, a scheme I’m going to have to borrow when I get round to painting some for ‘Quest. The dragon is also looking fab, I don’t think I’ve seen an albino dragon before, but it really does look good, especially combined with the source lighting effect you have going on there. The Giant is good and I like the Kobolds too. These SDE minis really do have a nice quirky feel to them. Ooh and more zombies! Can’t wait to see your horde.

@Solun

Although I’m not a fan of anime, you really get these models looking perfectly like the style they are intended to be. Each pic you take looks like it could be from an anime cartoon and I can’t give you a higher compliment than that! I mean the shading on the chained bear is really excellent yet not hyper-realistic which would spoil the desired effect. I bet you’ll be having many a fun game with these guys!

@JonahMaul

I did briefly look into the possibility of casting my tiles but it just wasn’t really feasible. The cost of the resin for doing the basic corridor piece was around £5/10 and the silicone was about £20 which normally gives around 50 odd good pulls, but not in this case as the cracks ruin the fine bits really quick. I even chatted with Ed from Trollforged about it (who is a master at doing cheap stuff like this) but even he thought it was a no go.

@Zark

Is that the new Zombicide game? What’s it like? The models look good and you’ve done a cracking job on them. I love the little details like the fat guys tattoo – stuff like that really brings models to life.

@HerebeDragons

Nice to see you finished your spiders. I’m glad you stuck with that colour scheme, though I still think the back/body parts still needed something just to break up the bits of black. Still, a nice painted unit ready to web any warriors that get too close. And yes, you do need to get some work on your tiles, I want to see some of your ideas to, err, borrow...

[Jonahmaul]

robscott - loving the zombies and intrigued to see what you come up with for the game.

steevn - thanks! I've let it fall by the wayside recently so will probably start a new one with a more inviting name!

daemonslave - that's a shame, would love to get some of them. Will have to get my ass into gear and start buying my own stuff and learning how to cast! Luckily I have a mate who does a fair bit of casting so he's gonna be helping me out (he doesn't know yet..... )

[Solun Decius]

Good job commenting on each others work everybody!

@Jonahmaul: Thanks man! yeah, I always meant to paint the bear noses. I'll do that in the same session as I'll finish the last Spawn Point and Boo Booty, probably tonight actually.
NOT buying Relic Knight is going to be a hard sell, hahaha!
The Dragon was a pain. What I ended up doing was sticking everything except the rear left leg (I think). Then when I stuck that on I glued the parts and then just forced it into position and held it for a few minutes until everything was stuck.
I should have heated more of the parts as I glued but I kind of worked my way into a corner and then had to do it that way. Came out nicely in the end though.

@robscott: Thank you very much. I appreciate that! I'm very fond of the Barbarian myself. She has by far the best eyes and I think the best hair too. Those things really are attention points so to me she grabs the most positive attention. I'll paint the noses, yeah, but i think I'll leave the gums. It's sort of a ghost bear anyway.
The Zombie Plague stuff is looking amazing. This whole scratch built/print'n'play thing is making the tale extra interesting

@steevn: Thanks man. yeah, I finished them better and also wanted to make proper finished photos Still seems like there's always something left to do

@Daemonslave: Thank you so much. Fun games is actually my project now that I've finished painting. To get more games of this i think I'll head on down to my FLGS and try to introduce SDE to the crowd there
Your compliments on my SDE painting style are really well appreciated. It's nice to have gotten the intended feeling across.

Middle of the month now dudes! I trust we'll have an equally good or better show next month. This tale is taking off well!

[Zark the Damned]

@Solun Decius - Khorne hoodie? I believe you'll find that's Fenchurch Loving the Dragon!

@Robscott - cheers for the feedback - it's been a lot of fun trying to come up with 'real world' clothes for the survivors and zombies. I agree about the bases, they need something else. Am planning to try something different for the next row of Zombies, and so on until I get it right then can go back and do them all the same way. Regarding accessories, I like the idea. I am thinking of having something vaguely related to each survivor on their base, like a chemistry textbook for Sheldon Dave. The odd Zombie may have something generic like tin cans or newspapers etc. Great work on your own Zombies and Survivors, the barricade markers are neat. Hope you manage to retrieve your copy of Zombicide soon!

@Daemonslave - Yup, tis the new Zombicide. Got in on the kickstarter pretty early It's pretty fun, but the first mission is hard as nails, not finished it yet! Gonna give the second mission a go sometime.

---

Progress update: The second row of Zombies plus Machete El Cholo are now painted, except the bases. I plan to work on those tonight and see if I can get an effect closer to the street tiles. Will likely be doing all of the accessories for the set in one go at the end of the project as it will involve printing, and I don't want to waste a while sheet of paper for a tiny poster.

[steevn]

leaving for spiel in essen (germany) in a couple of hours, i might find some new boardgames with nice models in them to paint... my wallet has been crying for a week in advance

[Solun Decius]

Cool steevn!
Good journey and good luck!

EDIT: @Zark: Hahaha, ok! In that case I change my original comment: "The only thing I can criticize is that the lines in the Fenchurch logo on the red hoodie don't curve quite smoothly enough. If it were a Khorne logo it would be perfect though" ...

[HereBeDragons]

@Daemonslave: lol I'll do my best, but unfortunately I've been trying to build SDE this month so I'm gonna struggle just to get models done!

[Jonahmaul]

@Daemonslave: lol I'll do my best, but unfortunately I've been trying to build SDE this month so I'm gonna struggle just to get models done!

I feel your pain! Took me bloody ages to get them all put together, was a proper pain in the ass!

[BTJ]

I feel your pain! Took me bloody ages to get them all put together, was a proper pain in the ass!

I hear that a lot, but I made my LGS's demo copy and I think it only took an hour, managed it in a break between lectures. Only annoying bit was the Dragon, but even then he only took 5 minutes tops

EDIT:Also, only painting three minis a month is a pain in the ass. Kept putting it off and putting it off, net result is two terminators with no more than a base on the armour, and one with half an undercoat(stupid running out of spray paint). At least they're terminators, so bigger brushes aren't as big a risk, so I should have something to show on thursday(hopefully)

[Jonahmaul]

Did you clean up all the mold lines as well?! Assembling wasn't an issue (dragon aside) but cleaning the mold lines off so many pieces took ages along with having to GS some of them after they had been put together (mainly heroes, the big stuff and bizarrely the Gougers!). If you can do all that in an hour I want to hire you!

You could always paint more than three miniatures I've not even started my stuff for this Tale yet so need to get my backside in gear. Will hopefully finish my TO40KP entry this weekend so I'll probably finish these after the start of the month but before the 7th deadline

[BTJ]

Didn't have to, the lad who was supposed to paint them said he'd do it before undercoating them. And I could paint more than three, but it does mean when I finally get round to it, I've less to do :P. Also thought the deadline was the first, the seventh is much better

[Solun Decius]

We put each month's thread up on the first (or thereabouts) but we expect photos of finished minis to be posted in the first week. After that we start commenting and posting WIP (and cluttering up the thread ), but no one will protest if you post finished stuff whenever really
You don't have to split your set into batches of 3 minis, and you can set whatever number of months as your goal too. 10 monthly batches for Space Hulk seemed a nice estimate for many painters who don't have too much painting time, but if you feel better painting bigger batches and either finish faster or interleave months differently or something, that's all cool.

[Jonahmaul]

No, I will object, it's outrageous! Why do we have rules if they can be so willfully cast aside! Just kidding

BTJ - yeah, gluing them is easy and takes next to no time. It's the cleaning them up to get them prepared for painting that takes FOREVER!

[HereBeDragons]

Im not sure if the mold lines are worse then on say a WHF figure, or if its just doing it on 52 models at once that I'm not used to? Maybe the plastic being harder makes it worse...

[Jonahmaul]

I don't think they're worse the any other miniatures per se. It's doing so many at the same time as you say and also the fact they come in so many separate parts. Done now though! Although I just put my Ironscales on my painting table and have seen that there's some gaps that I really need to fill so need to do that then re-spray!

[HereBeDragons]

I think I'm definitely going to green stuff/spray as I paint them, and not all at once. It'd kill me. That way I can leave all the others in the box and stop them depressing me I didn't think the models were too bad for gaps until you mentioned it. Now Im seeing them everywhere!!

[Jonahmaul]

For most of them I just clipped off the little tags that you put into the main body of the miniatures and that solved the problem. And if there's just really small gaps they tend to get covered by spray but not so much joy with the Ironscales!