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Continuing to hold my title of world's slowest painter, I finally (mostly) finished some space marine scouts a couple of weeks ago. Only took me about 3 months, but I do seem to spend all my free time coding dakka rather than painting so I'll use that as a feeble excuse

The scouts are pretty much done but need some army symbols. I'm waiting to paint a few more first as I use custom transfers and dont want to print up half a sheet when I can wait and print up a whole sheet, doing them all at once.

I also took some pics of my painting area which is in our guest bedroom. We just had people over so I had to clean it all away, but now they are gone it is set up again, but is deceptively clean so it seemed like a good time to take a picture. That is just a web browsing and music recording computer, dakka development occurs on a different machine.

nice smooth paint job with good bases. i would like to see something on the shoulder pads but that sjust my opinion. well done

Good clean paintjob. With all the other details that are so nice, though, I second Squig_herder's thoughts on wanting to see some squad or army markings on the shoulder pads.

Note that he mentioned he's waiting on shoulder markings ^_-.

Lookin good man. Now if you could just be more original and not completely steal my colors!! ^_-

Really looking forward to seeing them once you've got the army symbols and weathering finished. I understand that's like 2 years from now, but I'll be around.... >.>

BTW what is your army symbol? If you say a reaper, I swear.....

Nice scouts, they look good and clean.

Also, nice guitars.

Doh - helps if I actually read the post...

grey_death, I was using a 7 point star as shown here:

But I am starting to lean towards another design... something more reapery perhaps.

And thanks for the comments everyone. A clean, decent tabletop style is what I was aiming for, so it is encouraging to hear that is what people think of them

i think the white on the pants looks particularly nice. i also like the basing, sadly i can never get static grass to stand up straight like that (i have a flockbox for it but it still comes out sideways, so i dunno)

Im also a big fan of your SG, reminds me of spinal tap

Nice, Clean job there!

I did some greenstuffing today which took forever to dry, so I used the opportunity to take a few more photos. Here are my nids (so far). I have 4 more bases of rippers, 2 carnifexes, 1 hive tyrant, 1 more tyrant guard and 3 warriors to do still, but I chose this colour scheme for two reasons. Firstly, it is very fast to paint (spray, paint, wash, drybrush for the skin, then paint and 3 layers for the carapace). I wanted a somewhat natural look and thought I would try and do a sort of desert world camoflage/colour scheme, as I like the idea of a stealthy, sneaky load of alien monsters stalking people across open desert plains.

Also attached is my necron lord from a slightly different angle. You can see my whole (small) necron force in my army profile. The paint is a bit thick on the chest and head of the lord, but I painted it before I got a decent acrylic thinner.

Finally, my space marines whirlwind. This is the same, unnamed chapter and again, weathering and transfers are still pending. The army symbols will be going on the red parts, and I still need to neaten up the purity seals on the right hand side a bit too. This was a very experimental bit of work as it was my first plastic tank in many years, and was also my first time working with forgeworld resin (the extra armour), which barely fit and was not much fun to use. It has a custom rear door as well, which also required a lot of work to trim and fit.

Love those Nids great color scheme
Lord and WW are nice and clean paint jobs
Can't wait to see the finished WW

HFN

Finally for today (and for a while), here are some better photos of my entry for the 2008 Q1 dakka painting challenge. The model is an Ork Meganob which I painted in deathskulls colours. I used to be a fan of Snakebites, but when they got rid of Zogrod Wortsnagga, I switched over to deathskulls. The deathskulls are tough to do well as they have a huge number of colours that prevents the models from looking very consistent (blue + green + clothing + weapons = noisy). I went for a bronze/brass complement to the blue of the deathskull and tried to minimise the usage of green where I could.

As with many people in the painting contest I used it more as an excuse to try out new techniques and ideas so I'll explain what was new for me here...

The exhaust piping on the back of the ork was where I tried out Vallejo Smoke for the first time. For those of you who have not used it, it is basically a greasy, thick substance which perfectly simulates the crap that you get accumulate around an exhaust and I can highly recommend it. The colour is a sort of brown/black/grey mix, a little like the new brown wash, but much much thicker and more fun to use.

I tried to use vallejo model color paints wherever I could on this model (basically everything except the metallics), and they were very smooth and nice to work with compared to most citadel paints. The one thing that really stands out for me is the black - compare how smooth the black base rim is with the tyranid rippers in my previous post and you will see the difference between chaos black and vallejo model color black... waaay smoother with vallejo and that is now my only paint for when I have to paint things black.

I had not really painted simulated textures on metallics much before, so on the jaw I tried to do that by painting a crosshatching of lighter metallics on the silver part, then blended the brass to look more worn around the metal teeth. They look good in real life, but this is quite a difficult model to photograph as it is quite dark and the camera does not focus on it very clearly.

I used a resin base along with small chips of slate just to see how it worked and it came out alright but was nothing special.

Finally, I washed all of the blue and metal with a black/brown thin wash as an experiment to see how much it would bind the colours together. I then layered edge highlights on top of this and it came out quite well in my opinion, stopping the blue from overpowering the rest of the model too much and binding it all together.

There were quite a lot of mistakes I made too which I have learned from. First of all I dont like the green skin, I should have used a darker base colour and less yellow toned greens. The bronze/brass highlighting should have gone a bit further and the highlighting on top of the gun is too overpowering compared to the rest of the model. The black flames on the shoulderpad are too ugly and should have been skinnier. The wires should have been shaded and highlighted more to make them look less like they are just painted over black. Finally, I should not have rushed to finish it in a hotel in las vegas, and then taken a bad photo in poor lighting for the contest as that made me place lower than I think I might have otherwise!

nice nids are the swarms the forgeworld ones or di you just pile a tone on a base?

fnc821 wrote:nice nids are the swarms the forgeworld ones or did you just pile a tonne on a base?

Yeah, they are the forgeworld resin ones. A total pain to clean up and paint, but they look good when they are done at least!

legoburner wrote:grey_death, I was using a 7 point star as shown here:

But I am starting to lean towards another design... something more reapery perhaps.

And thanks for the comments everyone. A clean, decent tabletop style is what I was aiming for, so it is encouraging to hear that is what people think of them

I think you should use DA models so they have robes and hoods, that'd look sweet (cut down and file one side of the Thunder Hammer and replace with plasticard sythe blades?)
Sounds like great themeing for reaper army

Holy Moly, I LOVE that Tyranid paint scheme. I'm gonna start a Nid army of my own soon, so care to spoil a bit of the scheme?

How much was the paint set on the right of the second picture.

Everything is lookin' good!

Everything is also looking old, this thread is from 2008.

Oh my! So much for "Recent Posts"!

Indeed. Necro'd. Some of the paintjobs here are so old as to be embarrassing now

Anyway if you liked the tyranids, there is a whole thread dedicated to the full army:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/267133.page

and if I dont specify the colour schemes there, you can find them in my user article.

We seem to be having a rash of new users joining up specifically for the purpose of necroing old threads.

Google has been feeding them to old threads this month and some are ignoring the necro popups. I cant imagine how bad it would be without the warnings!

Well, the Fender Jaguar looks cool anyway. Or is it a Jazzmaster?

The second scout to the left looks like he is saying, "eewww what the hell is that!?"

Nice work