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That looks 100% Badass! That beast will be glorious when the paintjob is complete.

That is simply awesome,cant wait to see it finished.
I want three of em!!!

Cheers guys! I'm happy my frankenflyer is being so well received. ^_^ I growing its lines so much myself, I wish I could mass-produce it. But sadly I have neither the time, the equipment, nor the skill to cast the custom parts in resin or such. Hmmm on a blue moon perhaps a collaboration with someone? I'll have to ponder on that...

In the mean time, I was going through some boxes and to my big surprise I rediscovered these. Oldskool vehicles ftw! There are some of the first vehicles I ever painted, with Rhino #7 being the absolute first. I guess that puts these vehicles somewhere between 20-23 years ago. It's very funny to see my early attempts at weathering and infatuation with etched brass details and early attempts at conversions. I'm feeling tempted to give at least some of those vehicles and update, and maybe even finish that razorback after twenty years, lol.

So, without further ado, some vehicles from the depth of time. Enjoy!


Oh, and look what gradually evolved on my table over past week while waiting for my mate with the colour laser printer. The honour guard squad for the new army! Right now they just received a wash of thinned oil paints and they're ready for some cleanup and finishing. It's amazing what one can do on a week of being home on doctor's orders.
Comments and crits are welcome as always. And yes, there are some mold lines that were glanced over by laziness and lack of zoom-o-vision. ^^

Love to see those old vehicles Meph... and your painting and modeling of them was pretty darn good for the era! Love the little extra details you snuck here and there. The barbed wire spool especially.

Honor guard looks great.. love the gold and the metal swords (I should remember to do that once in a while.)

Cheers mate! Yeah, it was a trip down memory lane. ^^

More Hone Guard! Just some minor cleanups needed here and there, and basing.

Particularly like that first guy. Simple yet embellished.

Very nice gold! .. Aparently I still need to work on my oil weathering . Thanks for providing me with great examples to compare.

SL

Cheers guys!
SL, always glad to be of assistance. If you have any question about oil, don't hesitate ey.

Here's some progress on the Death Company. The photos are not that good as I was losing daylight very fast and the veranda light didn't offer much solace either. I'll take some better ones soon but here they are. The marines just had their oil paint wash but they need some cleaning up. Some red area's I'll go over with a fine cotton stick damp with turpentine and polish it up here and there.
I went with the same limited palette as the rest of the marines and it suits them nicely I feel. Bronze, metal/silver, green for detailing, muted grey-green for the loincloth.

Nice . love the darkened look. They have a very cast Iron feel. Heavy and hard hitting.. The greeen works well. never thought about doing the braiding in any color other than red.. nice.. give me new options.. humm

Sl

Beautiful work Meph... really takes skill to get them to look like that without relying on a riot of colors like most of us do.

Cheers! Coming from you guys that means a lot.

As someone on another forum was interested how I did the black and the red metallic, here's the how-to.

[RANT] First I mixed up some paint alchemy-style, I don't know the exact ratio's anymore but it's some bronze, some metallics like Boltgun Metal and some silver, some dark red, some Blood Red. I thinned it with red wash and red ink as well as some thinner. I think I also added some Vallejo's metallic medium. It was really just trial and error, slowly mixing little bits together to get the right tone of red metallic and then adjusting again because as soon as you add non-metallic paint you tend to matte it down quickly, which you want to avoid.
I highlighted by taking some of the base mix apart and adding some silver. In this case, you lose the red shade very quickly and it turns pinkish. I balanced that with a wash or two of thinned red ink, highlighting again and re-shading with some very thinned red ink with a little bit of yellow/sepia ink.
At one point, I also applied a glaze which I made by mixing Blood Red with a lot of water. Using thinner to make washes and glazes with add a milky sheen and kill the transparency. Actually, best water to add is demineralized water, as used for ironing (take ye basic unflavoured kind of course). Dead-cheap and the lack of calcium is better for the airbrush as well keeping your home-brewed paint mixes in little pots for later.

I'm sure I'll be able to streamline the mixing and workflow in the future as I intend to expand the DC but it was fun experimenting with it. I found out very early on that if you add too much light gold to lighten the red metallic it tends to go back to a bronze-ish colour very fast, and with just silver you go to the pink side immediately. I really wanted to keep it as red as possible, hence the experimenting.

I used an airbrush to spray on the washes to get a more even coating. And all washes were also heavily thinned with water, easily 1:5.
So this was done after I made the red highlights for the black. I drybrushed black with a little bit of red and maroon brown, then with more red added, the some orange and finally with almost pure 'Ice Yellow', which is a brilliant colour btw for many a colour. Between every consecutive lighter drybrush, I sprayed the model with black ink, mixed with red ink, thinned with water, roughly at 3:1:4.
the reason I did it like that was to blend in the highlights with the black, emphasize the red tint, but try to preserve the 'lightness' of the highlights. Using unthinned inks would darken the colours way too much and obscure the underlying tints. Layering it up like this allows to give tint and depth to a dark colour without negating the added colours too much. the aim was to get a really deep black with a red sheen, and not a dark brownish-red with black shading.

The spray on washes for the metallic red were done over the entire model to this helped to enhance the reddish tint on the black. Although I do think I did sneak in one very light drybrush touch-up on the armours edges between the washes.[/RANT]

I now consider them to be finished. The bases will follow at a later stage, as I'm not fond of the act of basing. Tedious...




And a high res piccie of the lads together.
Tadaaa

The pictures are not that great sadly, as the weather is freaky... sunshine, cloudy, rain, sunshine, hail... Sadly the lack of space prevents me from setting up a decent indoor light box.

Wow, these look great. You should bottle up your red metallic mix, very awesome.

You planning on taking pics with their backpacks/jump packs?

Hehe, done! I'm keeping in a airbrush jar and I'm going to keep that mix alive as long as I can. ^_^

Yeah, one I get round to painting backpacks, I'll definitely take some new pics. They'll be low priority though, I think next up I'll paint up the sang. guard or the land speeder squadron.

So here's the pipeline minus the Stormraven.
Probably about a few months to a year's worth. ^^ And there's definitely going to be a Contemptor Dread to be added, and a Stormeagle, maybe a librarian, and a chaplain... so many ideas, so many ideas...

Hmm, now I'm wondering, which unit would you guys pick to paint next?

-The all Heavy Bolter Dev squad
-The Sanguinary guard
-A Land Raider
-A 5 man terminator squad
-A Rhino/Razorback/Baal Predator
-A Land Speeder squadron

Take yer pick. ^^

The Gold base on the guard, please do tell!

Actually, pretty easy. I mixed up a bronze made up off of Vallejo's Tinny Tin, Bright Bronze, and GW's Burnished gold to a ratio of roughly 2:1:1 so you get this:



Then just smother it in thinned Vallejo's Smoky Ink. (That ink is usually a bit thick).
And finally I just drybrushed them with every gold variant that GW has, just consecutively progressing through the lighter tones, ending with a light touch of silver. The main key here was to use a very, very dry drybrush so you see the dust flying off of the edges.

And then you end up with this.



tadaa


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, apparently I did some extra steps as well. Here's a copy-paste from the original post on page 1:

The base coat you see in the previous post is a home-brewn mix of the Vallejo tin colour and some golden metallics. I then applied layer of two, three of ink. First smokey ink thinned with Klear and a bit of water. Then I did one layer of thinned sepia ink (the one from GW) with a little bit of brown mixed in, thinned with klear & water.

After the ink was dry I just gradually drybrushed the whole lot with a rather large brush and basically went through all the standard shades of the GW golds, ending with a very gentle drybrush with mythril silver. The key here was a very, very dry brush.

Do the Sanguinary guard. You've got such a nice start on them already.

Sanguinary Guard.

And damn you with your awesome custom blends!!!

Gitsplitta wrote:Do the Sanguinary guard. You've got such a nice start on them already.

This. I can see such great potential in that base... let's see it Meph!

Oh Lord peebzguy... your little banner makes me laugh so much!! Well done man! *applause*

Sang guard.. blown away on how " rich" that looks as a base.

Awesome.

SL

Gitsplitta wrote:Oh Lord peebzguy... your little banner makes me laugh so much!! Well done man! *applause*

As much as I would love to call it my own, alas, it is not. However, I fly the banner with pride

Hah! 'tis a good banner indeed. Cheers you up, it does.

Sanguinary Guard it is! Although I also finished putting the last speeder together. I can't magnetize the weapons yet as my hand drill broke and the drill bit that's the size of the magnets is way too big for my pin vice. And I'm not going to use the Dremel for a job that requires about 20rpm. ^_^

For the Sang. Guard I think I'll leave them as golden as possible. I'll just paint up the seals & parchment, pipes, armour joints, and some weapon details. I want to keep them as statuesque as possible and if I start colouring all those lovely details it'll turn into a cacophony for sure.

Sang guard

Great work. Had to read every bit of it. Thank you very much! Very inspiring Stormraven.

Those Death Company marines are really nice and dark, it makes the eyes really stand out. Great stuff.

Cheers fellas, have a beer, stay a while. ^_^

The Sang. guard post-oil paints and ready for final detailing. I wanted to keep them pretty minimalist and statuesque so maybe I'll just paint up some blood drop gems here and there besides the eyes. What say you?

Beautiful work, love the green and the gold.

Bad ass man. Needs a little more color for some contrast for my taste, but the armor is sick.

I'm intrigued about the use of oil paints, please can you shed some more light on why you use them and how you apply them.

Thanks

Thanks guys!
Yeah, I'm hoping that one the eyes are painted in together with the occasional gem that it will balance the look. If needed, I can always add some minor detailing here and there.

As for oil paints, I've done a few rants on it before but as dakkadakka doesn't seem to allow for direct linkbacks to specific posts.

The simple workflow:
-Seal your model with varnish
-apply oil paint mixed with turpentine
-correct if needed using a brush or cotton stick damp with turpentine. At this point it can also be removed completely if need be.
-Fixate using varnish

Here's a copy/paste of two of my earlier posts combined:

After that I sealed both the pilot and cockpit using a spray can of GW satin varnish. And then I made was with black oil paint and turpentine. I just madly applied it over the lot of it and as you can see the oil paint neatly sucks itself into every bit of texture it can find without tinting the underlying colours too much. I took some before and right-after pics to show what it does. I'll let that dry out for now and see if it needs any correcting after but it looks like it's not going to need much.






I just bought the colours I needed off of Ebay from random webshops. My experience with oil paints is that most of them are quite to very good. A general rule of thumb to buy them would be is to buy a true arts brand or high quality modeling. It doesn't hurt to go for the medium-high priced stuff as it's not that expensive anyhow and it will last forever. And you want a paint that has a decent oil medium and high quality pigment, quality does show. Mine cost somewhere between 3 - 6€ a piece.
In general, oil paints are just basically an oil based medium and pigment so there's not much that can go wrong with them. Also handy to know is that the colours names are universal as the paint has been around since hundreds and hundreds of years. The oil paint Burnt Umber for example was first used in 1650...

-Top one is from Bob Ross, the afro'd painting pixie. Actually this black is one of the easiest to thin oil paints I've had so far. Dissolves very smoothly with turpentine.
-Middle one is from a 'true' artsy brand. The colour shade is universal, Burnt Umber, absolutely perfect for grease stains and for rust when mixed with weathering powder.
-The bottom one is from MIG and is 'Shadow Brown', I used that over the whole of my vehicles for shading. Made a wash with it and brushed over the whole lot except the silver metallic detailing.
-The lighter is fine produce bought from a nocturnal Pakistani entrepreneur.