Giant Mechanized Fighting Robots I

Now here's something truly ancient I came across when going through the many old projects I documented but never posted about. It dates back to when I was living in Hawaii--so 2015 or 2016.

My friend Karl over at CSW let me know that Hobbylink Japan was having a sale on these plastic VOTOMS action figures. I think they were less than $5 apiece.

I have a hard time passing up a good mech under the best of circumstances. I bought 5. 2 were to be in active poses for use as gaming pieces, 2 were to be in resting position with cockpits opened as pilotable objective markers, and one I chopped up to represent the debris of a destroyed mech.

These are some pictures of the build process for my favorite mech, above.

I cannibalized some guncannon bits I had left over. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever posted here about what I did with most of that guncannon kit. I'll have to rectify that...

Guitar strings are the best, obviously.

The unused guncannon head became a trophy for the base. 

Still one of my favorite, if not THE favorite model in my collection.

I'm Painting My Damn Leadpile II

I feel like it's a bit of a trope at this point of hobby bloggers setting ambitious goals for lofty projects before, comically, going completely dark for long periods of time--or forever.

I try, generally, to avoid tropes here but boy did I run smack into this one.

Anyhow, after a healthy and normal length break, the good new is that I sure do have a lot of content for any of my readers who happen to still be out there after all this time. It's gonna be heavy on the (years-old) pics and light on the text though, as I have to acknowledge that my life has gotten far too busy for the kind of detailed posts I used to do. So if you have any questions, let me know in the comments. I'm happy to go into details if I know someone is reading and cares XD

First up are some treasures from the leadpile, classic Jes Goodwin Eldar sculpts including harlequins. I painted them mostly using liquitex Azo, Quinacridone, and Cerulean. And white of course.

Here starting with a general glaze of the yellow, and then back with the white to establish the values for the OSL.

Cerulean for the glowing energy weapons...

...and highlighted with a quick and dirty white drybrush.

Magenta glazes for the shadows

And some metallic highlights? I don't super remember tbh...I took these photos years ago now.

Here's that unit of Quar from the last post. I got myself some better oil paints and did a test model.

Working on glass with white paper underneath makes both mixing and cleanup easy. Since the oils take a while to dry, I just cover the palette with a bell jar between sessions so I can keep using the same colors for several days.

These are some examples of how the oil paint workflow for blending happens. Basically, you apply highlights, midtones, shadows very loosely and roughly where they are supposed to go, then you use a blending brush to make them smooth. I find that I prefer this MASSIVELY to layering with acryllics.

And here's the rest of the Quarmy ready for priming.Years later, I would return to the primed models still stuck to their priming stands with double-stick tape and half the bases would simply pull off. I don't use superglue to adhere metal models to washers anymore as a result.

And here's a WIP of the hovertank that I scratchbashed from a World War Toons Chibi-Churchill and lots of other bits. Kind of going for my own take on a Ma.K-style hovertank.

Extra points if you can spot where the gun barrel came from. Double extra if you can identify the white sensor array piece in the above shot.

I'm Painting My Damn Lead Pile: A Project Log

 

It's time. I'm going to paint all my miniatures. Or at least, I'm going to paint as many miniatures as I can before I get bored of it again. 

I have a group of around 140 that are more or less based. The first half of these are a mix of scifi and fantasy figs either recovered from my childhood Eldar and High Elf collections or haphazardly collected based more or less solely on the rule of cool. They include some space marines, some werewolf bikers, some of my favorite Bob Olley reaper sculpts, some classic Jes Goodwin Rogue Trader Eldar, and all kinds of other minis that struck me as both cheap and individually cool or interesting in some way.

 

The other half are a small Quar army from ZombieSmith minis. 

...and I have another probably 80-100 or so that are not yet assembled. 

The plan is to experiment and improvise as much as necessary to keep it interesting for as long as possible. I would like to challenge myself to experiment a bit more drastically with methods and approaches, and I don't really care whether I have a highly polished final result in the end.

The inspirations I'm following right now are: 

1. the many underpainting and glazing techniques demonstrated by Dana Howl, Delaney King, and Marco Frisoni
2. Marco's excellent oil painting methods
3. Marco's method for colorful spray can gradients.

Here's where I'm at so far.

Lingering Projects

There were a few minis that had already been greyscale underpainted and then colored with oils last year. They just needed some finishing touches, like a few washes, a couple highlights, teeth, eyes, and a drybrush of silver ink.

This wraithguard was mostly painted by my friend as a learning figure. I just did a couple final details and the base. The guardian was done using Dana Howl's Cyberpunk Necron scheme, except using glazes mixed with metallic inks instead of color changing paints. Both of these models received a zenithal splatter of gold ink to provide a more pronounced, shimmery texture to the highlights.

First Batch, step by step

Next I selected a small group of models more or less at random to try out a spray paint gradient using Montana Gold acrylic spray paints.

I sprayed these with deep purple red from below and shrimp from above...

...followed by a zenithal drybrush of white ink.

In preparation for the oil washing stage, I give any detail areas a value sketch in greyscale. Then I establish any OSL gradients using white ink glazes, and basecoat any metallic areas in silver ink. 

At this point I mix up a few different oil washes--a dark purple-black, a magenta, a warmer brown and a cool brown--and apply them thickly all over the models.

Next, I clean away all excess wash using cotton swabs, bringing back the original value near the highlights but leaving the washes in the crevasses and blending them out. I go back with more intensely colored washes for some areas, including the OSL on the warlock's sword and eyes.

Unfortunately my oil paints are breathtakingly cheap and the pigments are not intense enough to easily provide much coverage, so I switched back to acrylics to do some touch-up on details and highlights, plus some finishing touches like a last, gentle dry-brush using some of the various lightest tones remaining on my wet palette, some silver dry-brushing, and a very light zenithal gold splatter.

Upcoming Batches

I thought this group might look good with a greener gradient--signal blue from below and malachite from above followed by a couple successive drybrushes of yellow (liquitex yellow orange azo) and white inks.

I'm finding that drybrushing with translucent inks like yellow can lead to some incredible filters on the vibrant spray paint colors. The translucency can be modulated with the white ink (liquitex titanium white). 

These quar demonstrate this really well. I went signal blue from below and shrimp from above, resulting in a somewhat jarring blue to orange gradient. However, a few quick drybrushes served to desaturate the orange and filter some of the blue shadows to a really lovely green. This results in a lot of smooth tonal variation and definition on the figure with very little effort expended. I haven't had to apply multiple coats of anything, or lay down a single basecoat and these already feel almost table ready to me--but I know if I take a few minutes with oils I'll be able to easily add spot colors and reinforce the darker values to create even more visual interest.

Finally, I have another group of Eldar that are mostly underpainted. I'm going to go back to value sketch the gems and OSL effects, then try some more variations on the Cyberpunk Necron method.

 

Hopefully I'll have some more for you soon. Take care out there.

Um?

So I've come to hate this particular model. I didn't like it much to begin with, but it came in an ebay lot with several citadel demonoids and broo-folk that I loved, so he wound up in my collection. 

I thought I could paint him up to look more like a demon than an unreflective mish-mash of effed up colonialist ideas—which, though generally regarded by even the modestly informed as completely effed, still for some reason persist in our fantasy renderings of certain creatures—but all that I accomplished was to hate this model increasingly the more I looked at it. Clearly you can't polish a perverse systemic problem any more than you can polish a turd.

Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe I'm being too sensitive, I don't know. Maybe you feel differently and maybe that's fine. Maybe there are possible treatments that can make something like this acceptable. All I know is that I don't like looking at this figure and I don't like displaying it on my shelf. I wouldn't even put it up here if I didn't think it was important for me to express my feelings about it.

I'll be selling it on as soon as I can be arsed. Maybe I should have mentioned that at the beginning of my sales pitch.

The Grub

Has it ever happened to you where you're minding your own business while checking out an unexplored Jovian moon, or the strangely spongy ground out back of a sorcerer's tower, or are maybe, like, taking a leak near the sight of a still-glowing meteor strike, and then out of a suddenly-rumbling nowhere comes the devouring maw of the uncanny other, which may bite your head off or simply get shot to pieces by hicks or obfuscated and then denied by obscure statist agencies, but will certainly change your life forever? Isn't that just the worst?

That's why I think this is such a great game piece for the narrative-minded gamer. Also why I bought it. Can't wait to jump it on some beaky marines or some unwary wasteland denizens.

Of course I had incredible ambitions for this figure that led to me setting it aside for nearly a planetary cycle...its one of those models that could be stunning if painted with the proper discipline and patience. But in the end I opted for having the figure finished without spending a week agonizing over the paint job. You know.

Please have your comments erupt unexpectedly from the box below. I promise I'll act surprised.

Necromancer

...Because I'm back from the dead, as the tired old blogging joke goes.

This figure was actually part of my Chaos Cup swag bag the year before last (?). It's supposed to be a the necromancer for an undead team (since they can't have apothecaries) but I think it'll do just fine in fantasy skirmishes as well.

All in all, I didn't find the figure particularly inspiring...but I think it's because I got to it at the tail end of a pretty big batch and was too tired of painting to bother to correct the too-rich purple robes and the too-low-contrast pale skin tones.

Let me know what you think. If you can *raise up* the enthusiasm.

Oh yeah. I'm killing it.

Desperate Men

Desperation is one of the more discernible flavors in the sour mélange of material I’ve come up with for the Wyrdwold over the last year or two. I think that’s because, from a narrative standpoint, desperation is often the only motivation that makes sense out of the actions we choreograph for our little men.

Because what we fetishize with wargaming is pretty dark. Violence, murder. Desperation. We don’t always notice it because it is buried beneath layers of strategy, or fantasy, or artistic expression, or abstraction, all of which make this such a rewarding hobby…but we serve no one if we ignore the kernel from which it springs.

Paltry Grist

Which is why, I guess, when I found myself at Games Plus in front of the Wall o’ Reaper with some money burning a hole in my pocket, I was drawn to these sculpts. 

Even in the bare metal, they communicated to me such a sense of raw fear.

Titus Slake

I don’t know if I managed to bring it all through in the painting. Don’t really care to be honest. I found them uncomfortable to paint— though not because there was anything wrong with the sculpts.

Rather, I found myself contemplating what could be in front of them to inspire such fear, such desperate violence.

Let me know your thoughts.