I'm alive!

I am actually forcing myself to not be lazy this evening and do a proper update. Boy have I gotten and done sooo much new stuff since I last posted properly. I'll start with a rundown of the new goodies first with a brief description of how good I've found them.

Warning: I have yet again failed to take pictures with any form of lightsource. Taking photos during the day seems to be... difficult, for me.

First up - loads of paints! I bought all the Vallejo liquid gold paints (I think all of them). That is, from left to right, Rich Gold, Gold, Old Gold, Green Gold, Red Gold, White Gold, Copper. Oh, I lied, I didn't buy the silver one. All 35ml bottles for £3.50. The standard 17ml bottles are £2.30 and GW 12ml bottles are £2.30, so I'm very chuffed with the price.

I haven't actually been able to use them yet. They are metallic flasks in alcoholic solution. Due to it's weight most has sunk to the bottom and I haven't found anything yet I can drop in their to agitate the material. It has been suggested to remove some with a little toothpick into a palette and to make it up in there to use it. This sounds like a plan, but I want to be able to mix it up to use it in the pot as well, as I have seen other people do.

The colours are gorgeous, and the best golds I've seen. To see them actually being used, since I don't have an example, here is a link to Czechoslovakian Tom Hanks using them to paint some Sepulchural Stalkers.

Sepulchural Stalkers

I also wanted to get more variety in my browns and greens without having to mix them up all the time because I use them so much; orks, bases, clothes, dirt and so on. I picked up a box of Flames of War paints that were on sale in hobby craft - ~£8 for 6 paints. For those of you who don't know, Flames of War paints are made by Vallejo, and fall into their Model Colour range. 6 17ml Vallejo paints for £8 is quite a nice deal!

I think I picked up the soviet box set... Some nice darker greens and a couple of browns and khakis. Very nice addition to my other paints!

Finally - bought my first P3 paints! Menoth white base (they didn't have white highlight or I would've bought that too) along with meridius blue, arcane blue, and under belly blue. They were just all too pretty and well matched not to pick up.

Soo... away from paints, and onto mediums! And inks!

I have a nice selection of Daler-Rowney inks to use now, straight or to make washes. Burnt umber, sepia, raw sienna, dark green, black and white. I've made a couple of washes using them and they are perfect - just as good as games workshops' but much cheaper and you can alter them to your preferred consistency. I very much recommend learning to make your own washes. There is a little initial investment, but it far outweighs the cost of replacing devlan mud all the time!

I will do a little update on that sometime soon.

Hobby craft were having a sale on their Galeria mediums. I bought sand texture past, black lava texture gel and medium grain gel. Going to be using them in making my scenery as well as basing and painting models. Lots of ideas on how to use those.

Speaking of scenery - I have start building and basing things like crazy. As shown in a previous update I found loads of basing and scenery materials back at uni. I couldn't fit it in my bag coming back home so I went out and grabbed some different stuff today. Giant tub of snow, couple of packs of long grass/reeds, and some ballast. Looking forward to playing with fake snow.

As a note - Modelzone is cheaper for scenery stuff that hobbycraft. Up to half price for some things, actually.

I bought hundreds of microart bases. They are all fricking awesome and I thoroughly recommend them. Boyfriend bought a dragon from mantic to stick in his Chaos army. It's a surprisingly nice model and we got it 20% off.

Couple of giant foamcore boards on sale in hobby craft too!

Hmm... I'm sure I bought some models... My friend gave me a few of her grotesques to paint up and they are coming swimmingly. Found at the moment that painting a few things at once helps me keep going. Got some space ork nobz on the go too from the black reach set and a couple of terminators.

I have actually managed wet blending on my grotesques! I'm working up from warlock purple to liche purple or whatever stupid names they've been given. Purple to pink! Annoyingly the matt medium seems to make the paints a tiny bit shinier than usual, oddly enough. I don't think it shows up too well in photos, especially since I had to take this one with flash because it was dark.

Progression from basecoated to... slimey?



This awesome photo makes the painting look shit!

It doesn't look this bad in real life... macro function is a harsh mistress :(

But formy first attempt I'm pretty pleased. I'll be getting some proper photos tomorrow taken under the sun (unlikely). Only the first layer of blending too so hopefully it will look super snazzy by the time they are done!

I will write something productive tomorrow, I promise.

Blending! (In grey!)

I spent a few hours sat down today filing my metal sisters and removing various flash from their models, and painting a few of the finished and based ones. I started with five, working on their cloth.

I really like bleached bone for cloth at the moment but I've decided to try outside some cooler grey shades on these for now. I started with some shadow grey for the basecoat.

Basecoat: 1:3:1 Paint: 10% flow: matte medium

Two layers

By the time I'd finished painting the last one, the first had dried so I got onto the first layer of shading.

I used shadow grey and space wolf grey as my two extremes, and for the first layer just used a 50:50 blend of them wedged between my palette.

I did my blending by lining the deepest part with the shadow grey, and the remaining 2/3 with the medium coloured. I blend the line together using very very tiny circles through the two colours. If one colour goes too far over I just get the tiniest bit possible on the brush and push it back abit.

I do this with two paint brushes; one for the light colour one for the dark. The paints are about the consistently of milk, and I have very little in my brush. If I can see the paint in the brush, there's too much and I dab it off on my palette.

As I blend on the model I regularly wipe of the excess paint so I don't just end up with a huge patch of intermediate colour.

I think it went quite well. I'm finding painting very relaxing and engaging at the moment. I'll try and get some better photos up soon, I've started using a proper camera so that's something new to learn as well!

Pointless!

I've actually spent a good few hours painting the past couple of days, but I haven't done anything I feel is photo worthy other than stripping my sisters. I need to finish scrubbing those guys off :(

At some point I will have enough blending failures to post a photo update on the past week. Thus far about blending I have learnt;

Incredibly thin paint. Thinner than you've used for anything else. Makes a very big difference, but does feel like a waste of time at first.

Not so much medium ratio to everything else - makes it a bit gunky for blending. More liquidy the solution the better.

Let stuff dry before I start doing the next layer. This links into the medium I was using to thin my paints, as well though. I'd get impatient doing one model and start trying to do the next layer blending onto a half dry under layer. Queue lots of gunky-funkyness.

I know wet-blending is slightly beyond me since I only just got back into painting, but I'm still having a lot of fun doing it even when I'm doing it horribly wrong. At some point I'm going to base some sisters in black, some in white and sit and force myself to paint at least their base colours from head to toe. At the moment my models are a victim of 'first colour placed perfectly second colour spilled all over it' syndrome. I'm too impatient!

I grabbed a new sketch book and set of sketching pencils today to sit and practice some drawing.

I've been exhausted for about a week now, and not having the happiest few days. More will be added to the blog when my head is screwed on a bit more methinks. At least I'm updating everyday!

Exhaustion

I am so fricking exhausted today. I went to paint around 4 o clock and I was so tired by that point that I couldn't get my eyes to focus on the tiny elf mans backside. I managed to do about and hour or two of painting and then gave up because I was falling asleep. Practiced some wet blending - went really well. I'll get some pictures into this post tomorrow, I forgot to take them and I'm too comfy in bed to go do it now!

I took the dog for a massive hour and a half walk with her doggie friend, a labrador poodle cross. Then after that I decided to do a 16 mile cycle to hobby craft to buy some more stuff. Picked up a really nice brush holder - holds like 40 brushes upright and only cost £4. I also got the Winsor and Newton matte and gloss mediums. I used them today and they make a wonderful difference to the textures and feel of the paint! I shall post comparison pictures of how the paints look using different mediums and consistencies soon.

There are a couple of new pages added to the site - one a tutorial resource and one a guide to equipment to get started. They are both very rough and not very well organised, and not finished, but I work better by building things up and correcting them as I go.

Have another dog photo to make up for any relevant ones.