I'm going to cap the DE collection at 2500pts. Plus I've got approx 2500 pts of HE to get on with! Plenty to do! Looking forward to playing some WFB this year.

I've also got the DC squad I've been working on to do and I'm planning on painting an IG Vendetta in winter camo with weathering etc. These two side projects are purely for experimentation for now. I may build a DC list at some point but it'll be capped at a max of 2000pts. Big maybe on that one though.

Got some other more conventional modelling plans on the go too.

Zeek all I can say is I admire your energy!

Vet Sgt Ezekiel wrote:Thats me now finished a DE Ravager, Raider, 10 man Warrior squad with splinter cannon & shredder and 2 5 man squads with blasters.

They could be taken a bit further but i've got more stuff to paint yet and they're at a decent gaming standard for my tastes.

Archon, Incubi & another raider up next. Also planning on finishing the minor details on my Hornets in time for saturday (I'll be using them in a game).

The DC squad is ticking along when it takes my fancy and is looking good. They're now 90% done with details i missed needing sorted. Pics of them up soon...


Apologies for the iffy pics. I've been struggling with a new camera! EDIT : new/better ones added

Man, the new DE are really amazing! i'll gonna do something......soon i hope!

I've been working on an IG vendetta this weekend just for a change. I'm chopping back and forth between it and an Archon/Incubi squad.

For more info on how i did the vendetta see my blog link in my sig.

What branch of Ig you going for? Like ice warriors or somethin?

It's just a one off piece without any transfers. Easy enough to add them last and weather them to match the vehicle.

I just wanted to try winter camo with weathering on something fairly simple. I'll probably sell it when it's finished.

Getting there with the vendetta. A couple more sessions and she's done.....

Wow, thats impressive at the tail end of the 1st glance as my eyes 'neck' snapped.

I think, 'Plain and Complex' is the description!

Thats the idea really. I kept it plain to concentrate on the weathering. A lot of trial and error but I've learned loads.

Apart from the FW conversion kit (still not arrived yet) my Vendetta is finished. It'll only take an evening to sort the lascannons etc when they arrive and i'll post a final pic up then. In the meantime here's some pics:

Holy crap!..total awesome'ness! Keep up the fantastic work!

Bit of a curve ball this one but i wanted to learn how to do chipping with highlights on the bottom edge of the chips. I overdid the weathering on purpose as practise.

Easily the most I've learned from painting a single mini ever. Very interesting and I'll be doing another Imperial fist with much less weathering to refine what I've learned.

Excellent, as ever.

Looks ace to me!

Vet Sgt Ezekiel wrote:Bit of a curve ball this one but i wanted to learn how to do chipping with highlights on the bottom edge of the chips. I overdid the weathering on purpose as practise.

Easily the most I've learned from painting a single mini ever. Very interesting and I'll be doing another Imperial fist with much less weathering to refine what I've learned.

any chance of a tutorial on how you do the damage/weathering.it looks great to me.

shingouki wrote:

Vet Sgt Ezekiel wrote:Bit of a curve ball this one but i wanted to learn how to do chipping with highlights on the bottom edge of the chips. I overdid the weathering on purpose as practise.

Easily the most I've learned from painting a single mini ever. Very interesting and I'll be doing another Imperial fist with much less weathering to refine what I've learned.

any chance of a tutorial on how you do the damage/weathering.it looks great to me.

Its very simple:

1: Apply chips using a very thin brush using a dark brown paint.
2: Paint the bottom inside edge of the chip (where light would hit) with a highlight of the colour you've painted the chip over. The thinner the better and you want to divide the brown and the base completely i.e you don't want the same two colours both sides of the highlight line. You can see where this has happened on the mini above and its not very convincing on these chips.
3: If you want you can highlight the centre of the chip with a slightly lighter brown to add depth (I didn't do this but will in the future).

Remember, less is more. I will be doing about 1/3rd to 1/2 the amount of chips as a general rule in the future. The chips I've done above sadly hid much of my airbrush blending on the armour

Some Space Wolves.....

Usually Im not a fan of the space wolf blue gray, but I love what you have done with these models! Once again top notch work!

Vendetta looks awesome! If I may may a suggestion, some markings in a nice deep crimson or another color would really look awesome. Perhaps striped on the wings, airbrushed with tape to make the line perfect?

Still, really nice, I think you really achieved great weathering without overdoing it either.

Very cool!

Thanks guys.

MajorTom11: Yeah, red marking would've been spot on. I ended up selling it 90% complete with no markings or weapons and an untouched base. Good old eBay. It basically meant I got to practise on a Valkyrie/Vendetta for free, which as I'm sure you'll agree, is full of win.

I seem to be going through a very experimental phase with an emphasis on the mental. I have however re-booted my 40k brain in favour of collecting a Space Wolves army.

Very cool stuff here, it's kinda funny though how out of all the chapters of Marines on the Imperial Fists are usually modeled with chipped and damaged armor.

I'm impressed by everything in this thread!

l33tninj4 wrote:Very cool stuff here, it's kinda funny though how out of all the chapters of Marines on the Imperial Fists are usually modeled with chipped and damaged armor.

Yeah, the pale colours help with any weathering plus the IF are plausible as you can imagine them being involved in a protracted engagement like a siege.

The other ideal one is pre heresy Death Guard.


Thanks for the kind words guys!

I basecoated, shaded and highlighted more SW Grey Hunters this afternoon using 5 different shades. I'll probably make another highlight stage on the uppermost areas now the back packs are on (I did them separately to shade in between the body and back pack).

The second mini in from the left shows the effect best due to my very mediocre picture. You get the idea though. Bear in mind the light source for the pic is right in front of the minis not above. Therefore all the shading you see is paint rather than a shadow from an above light source, Its very subtle but in normal lighting its more pronounced and looks better too.

So this evening I'll do a final highlight and start basecoating the details.

Found this through google. This has been a big help reading how you did this for Alaitoc Eldar. My brother decided to do an Eldar army. He was trying to create his own color scheme but it wasn't turning out well. Fortunately the base color is Regal Blue so I decide that we would go with the Alaitoc color scheme instead of stripping it all down and starting over. I hadn't thought of using an airbrush. That looks like it takes a lot less paint and definitely a whole lot less time, especially on the larger pieces.

Hey VSE -

Amazing stuff, I knew you had to be a military modeller, glad your blog confirmed it for me!

Question, unless I missed it, you do not specifically mentioned masking in your method, how did you approach the engines and other metals? Were they painted earlier and liquid masked, were they not glued in and removed for painting after the white was done?

When you refer to 'pin filters', I assume you mean an oil wash around rivets and such? Also, why do you not use oils for the entire wash, and not just for the 'pin(?)' method?

Thanks, your advice would be greatly appreciated as I am about to tackle my first vehicle with using an airbrush and military style techniques, I am pretty confident as I have studied up quite a bit on how to do it, but when I see great results like yours I still like to ask questions!

MajorTom11 wrote:Hey VSE -

Amazing stuff, I knew you had to be a military modeller, glad your blog confirmed it for me!

Question, unless I missed it, you do not specifically mentioned masking in your method, how did you approach the engines and other metals? Were they painted earlier and liquid masked, were they not glued in and removed for painting after the white was done?

When you refer to 'pin filters', I assume you mean an oil wash around rivets and such? Also, why do you not use oils for the entire wash, and not just for the 'pin(?)' method?

Thanks, your advice would be greatly appreciated as I am about to tackle my first vehicle with using an airbrush and military style techniques, I am pretty confident as I have studied up quite a bit on how to do it, but when I see great results like yours I still like to ask questions!

As far as masking goes I just use Tamiya masking tape. I only really masked off the squarish sections on the outer edges of the front part of the 'wings' on the grav tanks. Everything else was done freehand. I wanted to have a contrasting dark\light line to help those panels pop a bit. The valkyrie was freehand.

I did a pin wash on the panel lines in a brown oil paint wash. This provided another contrast to help divide the panels up further. I simply diluted the oil paint so it was very thin and let the capillary action drive the oil into the recesses from a loaded medium sized brush. There was a fair bit of excess needing removed afterwards so once it had dried a bit I dampened a cloth in turps and wiped off the entire model. THis left the oil in the recesses.

OIl dot filters are the multi coloured dots in oils over the vehicle followed by dampening them and dragging the paint down the model to provide weathering in the form of fading and streaks. I've yet to do this technique on a model as I prefer to use AK Interactives streaking enamels and MIG productions filters.


I did the metals and other details last. They were covered in overspray etc so i simply painted them black then the chosen metallic colour. I used black ink mixed 50/50 with Klear floor polish as a wash on the metallics. I prefer this method to the Citadel washes as they leave a matt finish whereas ink leaves a satin/gloss finish.

The metalics on the engines for the valkyrie were done using 3 types of Alclad 2 laquer metallics and masked accordingly.



Hope this helps. Fell free to ask anything else

Awesome!

Can you give a definition for a pin wash btw? I can google it I know, but I thought others might like to hear the answer. For me, I have not come across the term before -

Thanks a lot btw!

It's best showing some techniques and this is one of them. I didn't understand it until I saw it in a tutorial. Here's one I found on YouTube just now which shows it well:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ws5pXCWpdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Here's an excellent pictorial tutorial:

http://www.hobbyfanatics.com/index.php?/topic/11312-wash-tutorial-for-panel-lines/

Quick update on my WIP Space Wolves:

Normally I despise frost blue wolves, but I'm digging yours. Assassins looking ace too -

I've been asked a couple of times now about how I painted the DE vehicles in comparison to the Alaitoc stuff so here it is:


Well, the Raiders were more complicated than the rest. I'll try and detail the steps I took:

1: Black basecoat.
2: Hull Red (Vallejo model air) mixed with about 30% black (same type of paint) sprayed evenly overall but I left the deepest recesses black.
3: Hull Red straight. I dusted on thin layers gradually building up a gradial highlight exaclty how it would be if lit from above. I looked at the model under a bright light and carefully worked out where the paint should go.
4: Hull Red mixed with Italian red and applied this onto the uppermost areas like the railing and the outermost points on the lower sections of the sides and prow.
5: Italian red straight. The extreme edges were very lightly highlighted.
6: At this point I realised it wasn't blended to my satisfaction so I misted on some of the Hull red from a distance of about 10 inches in a broad spray. This blended everything but it was a very very light coat all over.
7: Because of step 6 I went back with a mix similar to step 2 and went over the shadows a bit although very lightly. This was because step 6 had brightened the shadows.
8: I assembled all the major hull parts and glued them, then touched up and dodgy bits with hull red from where the glue appeared.
9: By this time the decking plated had been shadowed with pure black around the edges where they meet with the inside if the hull. I brought these components together in the shadows with some pure black again through the airbrush being very careful not to overdo it. I think i made several very thin passes to make sure.

I wanted the inside of the outer hull pieces to be very dark as i wanted to apply a flouro effect using my oil paint pin wash. This worked a treat I think. Needless to say the ravager took half the steps as i knew when to stop as i could compare it to the Raider.

I got some more SW done this weekend. Just the bases to finish and the transfers and we're good to go. I've got some more GH's to do then its vehicle time. I'm looking at painting 4 Rhinos (with Razorback magnetised options) and a Land Raider redeemer (will also be magnetised for normal LR and Crusader options).

First time I've popped in here in a while!

I'm glad I did. Your wolves are looking frosty!!!!

Thanks man, they are def better than my Eldar minis. I find larger things like vehicles much easier and minis are something I'm trying to sort in terms of quality.

I didn't go too crazy with these guys but my Lord and Rune Priest will be getting special treatment as will the Assassins I'm doing on the side.

I'm struggling with that as well, trying to get my minis to match my vehicles. Your sw are looking great, though i feel the fur could use another round of highlighting. Keep it up tho, looks fantastic. Your valkerie is sweet

Yeah, the wash dulled it down at the edges and blended the last highlights. There's a couple of things the pics showed up that'll get fixed before I start the next squad.

Work continues on me Pups:

WIP shots of my Space Wolves army. More info soon with better pics too!

Very cool Ezekiel! I'm guessing that the Rhinos would look better in person, or when they're all done. Definately swap that rune priest's hand, or the other option is to make it look more bionic. A fantastic looking completed squad too! Keep up the good work!

Yeah, the Rhinos look much brighter in the pic due to my daylight lamp (which runs two tubes).


I like that bionic arm idea. I may just have one in my bits box. Thanks.

I like ur eldar

fantistic I'm thinking of using an airbrush for when i start my eldar is the Gw airbrush worth getting?

steeds of war wrote:fantistic I'm thinking of using an airbrush for when i start my eldar is the Gw airbrush worth getting?

Thanks guys.

I use a Harder & Steenbeck Inifinity (2in1) and I really like it. I used an Iwata Eclipse before which was also very good. Tamiya paints are the easiest to use mixed 50/50 (or more dilution) with their own brand thinner. My best advice when buying either airbrush is to buy enough o-rings and seals to be able to rebuild it completely. The most common problems I've had were due to an o-ring dying due to normal wear and tear. Dedicated airbrush cleaning tools are also a must as is liquid reamer which is nasty stuff but destroys paint new or old (yay!). Oh, and buy an extra needle too because you will bend one.

Currently laying down the base coats for Mr Trespass' Grey Knights.

Loving the Alclad 2 metallics (i used the chrome for plastic). Another light coat and some buffing and they'll be solid metal. I lifted the doors earlier and dropped one and found myself expecting a clinking sound from the metal. Awesome!

Lots of Razorbacks - you're so naughty!

GK basecoats done. Troops next!

Work continues on the SW army. Waiting for some vallejo paints to arrive this week so I can re-do the basecoated minis. The Tamiya mix i made wasn't good enough so I'm going back to my original recipe. Thankfully i remembered to take note of the recipe!!

Tonight I'm in the process of converting some Las/plas turrets for some Razorbacks. They look not bad. More up soon.......


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Alpharius wrote:Lots of Razorbacks - you're so naughty!

Yes, the man who these belong to is naughty indeed. The GK army I've basecoated for him will be doing the rounds in UK tournaments next year.

That Razorback is excellent! It looks like it's rolled right from the blizzards of Fenris. I really like the snow on the tracks, and the weathering is superb. Add to this that you already have four, and that's a mean quartet of tanks. The Rune Priest definately looks much better now you've swapped over the staff arm. He won't be needing a Storm Bolter, anyway.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what Airbrush/Compressor setup are you using? I'm very impressed by your work - keep it up!

Ulven wrote:Sorry if this has been asked before, but what Airbrush/Compressor setup are you using? I'm very impressed by your work - keep it up!

I use a Harder & Steenbeck Infinity airbrush and an Iwata Smart Jet Pro

Ezekiel, just a quick question (slightly off topic).

How do you upload your images onto this blog? They don't seem to be a part of your gallery, but I can't seem to get the "article" way of uploading my images to work correctly. I hope that this question made sense (sorry again for being off topic).

Click on attachments below the area you type in and upload from your computer

I never knew that. Thankyou so much! No more clogged up gallery with random images!

Just this minute finished my Rune Priest, 3 Wolf Guard with shiny power weapons, Scout squad and 3 Grey Hunters to complete a ten man squad (which I'll split in my current list).

The glowing effect on the power weapons and on the Rune priest backpack and eye was a total gamble. I've never tried this technique before but I've managed to pull it off to a reasonable standard. The power weapons were masked off to do the blending and the wolf eyes on the equipment plus the RP's eye was done by glazing with a normal brush.

I'm going to start my next Grey Hunters squad tomorrow.........

Looking good! Great blending work on their Powerweapons... the glowing eye(s) on the Runepriest are fab!

Runepriest is so cool!

Thanks guys, working on some more including a magnetised Wolf Guard battle Leader / Rune preist / Wolf Lord / Wolf Guard. I'll be magnetising several Wolf Guard type mins for maximum versatility which'll help testing various Loganwing lists......

I've also got a Logan Grimnar conversion planned as well as an Arjac conversion. I shall also be assembling a complete 'Loganbomb' (evil cackle).

Finished 2 razorbacks complete with switchable top hatches to convert easily to Rhinos. The plan is to make up some twin-linked assault cannon turrets as well as heavy bolter turrets in the future. Perfect match colour wise with the Rhinos I did earlier.

I realised yesterday that the white pads on my Wolf Guard were incorrect and should be yellow primarily (oops) so I've repainted them and applied new transfers!

I also built a Wolf Lord / Wolf Guard battle Leader with magnetic arms so I can switch weapons. I'll be magnetising more Wolf Guard as the army grows and I include Logan Grimnar into my army build (makes WG count as troops).

I'm in the middle of painting another Grey Hunter batch (10 of) as well as the aforementioned Lord. More on that later this weekend.....

Rhino looks fantastic! Great work, as always.

Awesome!

Cant help but feel the marines could do with a bit more weathering though, they seem a bit clean next to those fantastically gritty Rhinos.

I tried a test mini weathered but it looked way too busy due to all the accessories the SW have.

I stuck to weathering the bottom of the legs with dried mud and thats about it.

I think the terminators I'll do soon will have chips etc on them as the surface area is bigger.

What colours are you using for the wolves man? This is exactly what I've been looking for!

TheFirstBorn wrote:What colours are you using for the wolves man? This is exactly what I've been looking for!

The basecoat and subsequent highlights are airbrushed on using zenithal highlighting.

I use: Vallejo (model air) USA Grey , White, French Blue and black.

I start with a very dark blue/grey all over the mini then keep adding grey and white. The final highlight on the top surfaces is a very pale grey. I usually do about 4/5 stages from the dark colour to highlight in total. The middle tone would be something like : 60% Grey / 30% white / 10% blue. Its very much an educated guess when i do it as i'm continually adding to the airbrush directly as i go.

I've recently been using Tamiya colours in the equiv colours and found them to be much smoother and less likely to clog.

If you don't use Vallejo Model Air/Tamiya or own an airbrush you could use this site for GW equiv to brush on: http://colors.silicon-dragons.com/full_line.php

Me and my friend are picking up an airbrush next month. Will be looking at experiment on how to pick up this scheme, its gorgeous! Thank you for the step by step.

This is some great stuff and I love our work. Really great job on everything here!

Absolutely amazing on the Eldar. What colors did you use for the weapns?

Thanks, the grav tanks weapons were done in brown tones and metallics. I can't remember exactly which paints but the were Vallejo Game Colour. I washed them with devlan mud for shading.

After a break I'm back airbrushing some Eldar again. This time its Dark Eldar and I'm going for some fluffy list building in the form of the Kabal of the Flayed Skull. Lots of Reavers, Venoms and aircraft. Should be fun and challenging to play....

Here's a WIP pic of the stuff I've started:

Just final highlights, highlights on the details, battle damage and the Venoms canopy to finish.

While I've been slowly painting my Dark Eldar army up I've been assembling and painting a Vampire Counts army for WFB. I'm doing a little more on the VC stuff to get them finished first so I can play them first. Hopefully next month. I've painted the pictured Terrorgheist and assembled 10 Dire Wolves, a Necromancer and a Cairn Wraith which are next in the paint queue. Then its 20 Zombies.

Holy crap, that was a year ago? Wow!

To update I've sold all my minis and taken some time out from the hobby to move house twice and deal with some real life stuff.

I'm back now and just in time for a Wood Elves army More on that soon......

In the meantime I've been painting up an AdMech Knight for 40k to sell. Its on my other P&M Blog if you're interested. That should be finished this weekend and sold next week.

Really like your work on those eldar.