Insomnia!

Not only an amazing song but an annoying affliction. Steadily over the last two weeks my ability to sleep has drained away until I'm staying up for a couple of days in a row. On the second day I'm quite grumpy. This little sleep has left me with a dilemma; I've still got studying and so on to do and exams. But, if you've ever tried to do quantum mechanics with your brain functions 100% you'll understand why doing this with no sleep was less than appealing, and even less productive.

Some people might be able to see how much trouble I'm having writing normally. I'm trying but linking words together feels like my brain pulling out syllables through treacle and wedging the sticky mess together. The way my brain is running a lecturer could just yell 'And jabberwocks did it!' and my brain would nod and go 'omg makes so much sense'.

You know what I can do, though?

I CANT PAINT.

I picked up my airbrush and models for the first time in about 5 months last week, and I've been a painting MACHINE.

My ork bomber looks totally amazing so far. I'm really looking forward to finish everything and seeing what people think. Also my friend collected his DA that I had mostly painted. Unfortunately didn't have time to finish painting the army before he needed them for games and so on.

Here's some shots: click for big!

First up is the land raider. It's only a few steps past the basecoating stage. I'd just used oil paints to define  all the edges, rivets and indentations and started with the hazard stripes on the front. The metals were 99% finished on it. I'm annoyed with the pictures of the rear engine because in real life it looks really good: grimy, used, oily and smokey over the stacks.

Here's the other DA tank that I did finish, and then frosted with matt varnish :(

And finally some ork planes pictures! I've actually done a hell of a lot more work on this since the photo was taken, but this will do for now!

A Blog of Blog-Thrones

This post looks long but it's mostly pictures demonstrating the works of the painter I'm talking about and linking to. Just skim through until you see pics you like and click associated links if you don't feel like reading anything. 

Time for another post! I haven't died fair maidens and/or greasy cheeto breathers. I've been monumentally busy recently. Thankfully my schedule has been ironed out a bit now that I've settled into the new university year, and I've had time to do some painting and modelling. Which is lucky, because I have sod all money and a massive pile of miniatures and paints. Before I start doing photos of what's on my table/floor/bed/in my bath in various stages of paintedness I have slowly been putting together another post to cover for my own crappy update schedule.

It is... a blog post of blogs! An inability to update on a regular basis seems to be a painter thing - there are lots of excellent, prolific painters out there who also can't update more than once a month. Makes me feel a bit better about my own update schedule, but then annoyed me because I wanted to know what these cool cats are up to and how they do their stuff.

So what I have done is collected together lots of the blogs of established painters and modellers and collected them here to allow people to peruse them at will. I did a lot of digging about. Hopefully some of these are new to you.

Sproket

I'll start with my current favourite painter, Sproket. He's got a really clean, but fantastical painting style. Featured are a couple of images from his current works in progress.

This amazing piece is the base for a diorama he is looking to enter into a golden demon competition. It is Dark Eldar themed and going to be a mount for some of these guys;

I really like Sprokets semi-pastel palette, and the way his transitions are so smooth over very small areas. There's something very different about his style. He has both a WIP thread on CMON;

http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums/showthread.php?47321-Sproket-s-Dark-Eldar-diorama

where he posts pictures and answers questions, and gives details about his process and steps, and a blog where he gives more pictures and details as to what he's planning/thinking and how he's achieving things, as well as his little experiments in making snow bases and cobwebs, etc. He explains how long things have taken him to paint and at one point uses his beard to paint something...

http://sproketsmallworld.blogspot.com/

It was from this I learnt that I paint alot better, and am alot happier painting, on a very smooth, heavy basecoat. His step by step pictures look amazing even with the minimum amount of detailing because of his dedication to having a solid foundation to paint up from.

I think this guy is seriously one of the best  painters going, certainly my favourite. This is what he decided to paint as a 'break' from his golden demon entry;

 

Bohun

Next in the line up is Bohun. This guy is known by pretty much everyone: he has done a couple of tutorials for Miniature Mentor that were both excellent, and consistently puts out 9+ work on CMON. He has a really bold, unique style. His strongest, most defining characteristic seems to be his ability to paint amazing contrast into his models. He uses a combination of warm and cool with highlights and shadows and produces some of the most amazing non-metallic metal I've seen.

One of his very famous versions of the nurgle dreadnought. He made the cobwebs using cotton buds - a similar technique to how Sproket did it on his egyptian type diorama above. Bohun's blog also contains WIP's, tutorials and little how to's. I have his tutorials from miniature mentor and I did learn alot from watching his him. 

The battle damage on his models is fantastic as well. He doesn't post very often on any forums but he does have a website he maintains fairly regularly that has a good collection of WIP shots and very well presented tutorials.

http://bohunarts.yum.pl/

Trull

Trull's website features alot of WIPs and Tutorials on how to build scenery, bases and buildings. I use a lot of superlatives when I write: I'll take a break on this one and let the photos do the superlativ...ing.

The blog is available in a number of different languages: English isn't his native but it's all still readable with just a few wierd mistranslations here and there. The WIP documentation is quite thorough and very interesting.

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Ffantastische-welten.blogspot.co.uk%2F&langpair=auto|en&hl=en

Ana

I have featured some of Ana's work on here before. The main thing that has always struck me about her miniatures is the freehand work.

I find her approach very different as well: the above free hand is all drawn in black and white as you can obviously see. In the end the model ends up looking like this;

I can't think of anyone else I have ever seen do freehand this way. I've only ever seen people basecoat then detail over the top, not use a monochrome base with transparent colours over the top.

Her blog isn't updated very frequently but there is a backlog of posts to go through including many WIP shots of some very sophisticated painting and many discussions of varying topics.

http://paintingmum.blogspot.co.uk/

Arsies

A rather unfortunate name for the english speaking - this blog is presented in French and English. There are a number of interesting articles on this including the using WIP and tutorials. 

  
The author also displays some of his work that has been used as the boxart for miniatures, and talks about that kindof stuff. 

Can you tell I'm flagging while I write this? I had a long list of blogs in front of me but as I went through them to check I wanted to put them up here I discovered that not many were as interesting or useful as first thought.   Here's a few more with pics for you guys to check out;

http://volomir.blogspot.co.uk/

 And last but not least are some goon blogs! They deserve more of a write up but now I'm tired and watching James Bond having his manly bits be whipped by Le Chiffre. It's fairly distracting.

http://hammertime40k.wordpress.com/

http://www.richyp.com/

http://sigismunds.blogspot.co.uk/

Inspirational Viewing!

I haven’t written for a while. I decided what I needed was inspiration to write about something new. I wracked my brains and then realized that people have the same problem when painting – so I will write an article about some inspirational models and new techniques that people stuck in a painting rut can try! 

OSL

OSL – Object Source Lighting is considered an advanced technique that adds more depth and realism to a piece. It is when you use a point on the actual miniature/model as a source of light and paint the rest of the model as though lit up by that source. It sounds simple but  is very difficult to achieve properly, especially since most people apply OSL using a coloured light source rather than a white light source. Below are some of my favourite examples, including some links to tutorials and explanations as to how it was achieved. 

http://handcannononline.com/blog/2011/08/05/tutorial-advanced-object-source-lighting/

This first one is a tutorial demonstrating the technique from start to finish on the necrotite (green) sections of a Cryx model. I really like OSL using blue and greens and the tutorial is well presented. 

http://handcannononline.com/blog/2012/08/20/a-beginners-guide-to-heat-and-light-part-2-fire-and-osl/

http://fromthewarp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/hobby-focus-object-source-lighting.html

This is another good tutorial that gives more consideration to mistakes that are easy to making when trying out OSL. 

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1106-painting-lighting-effects

In this article the author talks a bit about how they did the lighting on two of the more famous miniature dioramas.

 Victoria’s Page - http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/victoria?browseid=2534624

http://blog.brushthralls.com/?page_id=1916

Another really neat OSL tutorial. 

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1288-glowing-eyes-by-cyril

A nifty glowing green eyes tutorial

Cyril doesn't have a CMON page I can find, but here is his personal site http://neomodel.free.fr/

It's mostly in French but still useful since there are lots of pretty pictures :3

He has also won a small set of Golden Demon awards (France) which you can see here 

http://demonwinner.free.fr/peintre.php?id_peintre=63

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1691-twilit-skeleton-guide

This isn’t strictly an OSL guide but it’s a nifty lighting tutorial. 

This tutorial including UV pigments and paint in painting OSL

http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/tutorial-using-dayglow-colors.html

 Here's a few more examples of great OSL. 

By Shawn R L - CMON Page http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Shawn+R.+L.?browseid=2652542

He has a number of well painted pieces featuring outstanding OSL. 

This is by Ana, who's CMON page is here http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Ana?browseid=2652606 

She doesn't have many pieces with OSL on though.

Non-Metallic Metal

NMM is the technique of painting something to look like a metallic surface using non metallic paints – paints without bits of mica, metallic flakes or pearlescent pigments in. It requires an advanced level of blending and very careful consideration of lighting angles, viewing angles and surface shapes. It’s very difficult to make any kindof metal surface look realistic scaled down, but NMM is often a favourite amongst advanced painters. 

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?aId=13300001

This is a set of examples from the GW site. Most are quite good and worth looking at.

http://archive.brushthralls.com/painting-techniques/nmm-tarnished-bronze.html

Another brushthralls! This is a method of painting bronze, which I haven’t come across before. It looks really easy. I will definitely be trying it out soon. The final effect is different from any of the others I've seen - it really pulls together at the end.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1300-nmm-by-cyril

An article on NMM written by Cyril Abati, translated from French to English by a CMON user. It's not the best article but it could be interesting to see more into the approach of a GD winner.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1054-my-thoughts-on-nmm-updated

Here’s some more on the theory behind NMM. Quite long, but interesting and nicely presented outside of CMONs ability to ruin any formatting.

http://www.necrotales.com/necroTutorials/tut_streak_painting_02f.php

A different approach to NMM than all the others.

Here’s some of my favourite NMM.

By Silphid, CMON Page here http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Silphid?browseid=2652747
This guy has a few great paintjobs and a number of award winning models in his gallery. Doesn't seem to be the most prolific painter though.

Done by Brokenblade, CMON page http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Brokenblade?browseid=2656917

Dk suwit, CMON page here http://www.coolminiornot.com/artist/Dk+suwit?browseid=2657006

And a little extra – this guy shows how he polished up the metal of the model itself. I really like the final effect.

http://www.coolminiornot.com/articles/1199-polishing-instead-of-painting-metal-ie-real-metal

Battle Damage/Weathering

There are a number of ways of achieving battle damage and general weathering. It is one of the best methods to add realism and style to a piece, as well as extra depth to its visual story. 

This tutorial from chest of colours shows a nifty way to achieve chipped paint and rust runs.

http://chestofcolors.com/rust-and-chipped-paint/

This is a very in depth tutorial including some more traditional techniques such as oil paint weathering.

http://ultrawerke.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/painting-and-weathering-tutorial-part-i.html

Here are some Mig tutorials. Mig Jimenez is one of the leading historical and war miniature painters, and his tutorials are very in depth and involves lots of techniques used at the same time. Even if you are only interested in fantasy/sci fi miniatures or a small portion of the techniques employed these are still worth reading all the way through.

http://www.migjimenez.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/sponge-chippping-and-rust-stains.html

http://www.migjimenez.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/caterpillar-engine.html

http://www.migjimenez.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/tiger-i-148-winter-camo.html

This one is my favourite tutorial for battle damage

http://handcannononline.com/blog/2011/07/25/tutorial-advanced-that-one-hurt-painting-battle-damage/

Outside of online tutorials I really liked the first Forgeworld Masterclass book, especially for weathering and damage techniques. It’s £26 but very worth getting, I think. I should be doing a review of the GW/Forgeworld books soon and I’ll obviously go into them more then.

These are the three main things I’m excited about in painting and looking to start trying on all my new models! Are there any you can suggest? Anything you want to try out but can’t find any inspiration for? Just leave a comment!

Finished Screamers!

Very proud of my first properly finished airbrushed models. The new plastic models kits from GW are so nice. I'm going to pick up another set of these models and take photos of my process. Hopefully they will sell on ebay - fun to paint but I don't play and don't have space to store them - and go to a loving chaotic destructive home.

Tzeentch Screamers

Haven't got a long post for today. I've spent my last couple of painting sessions working on some of the new plastic Tzeentch Screamer models. Here are some pics early in the painting process. I'm hoping to sell them on ebay.