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Quick Question: What are the tentacles on your Khymerae?

They're from the talos kit.

 epicwalrus wrote:
They're from the talos kit.

Thanks

Feels great to be painting again after something of a hiatus! Not the most exciting comeback image perhaps, but I felt I needed to post some progress to help get back into the painting groove. I'm going to keep this short since I'm about to head off for a night of playing FFG's Relic and I've also got a game of 40k lined up for tomorrow for which I need to refresh myself on the rules (haven't played in a month or so) and come up with an armylist!

Very nice. Adding the edge highlighting was a very good decision Jon. Good to have you back in the saddle!

Too perfect, you return right when I started reading your Excellent blog!

I never tire of these sleek death bringers! Great job as always and glad to have you back!

Glad to see you back, with some additional goodness !

You mentioned the RELIC FFG game, how is it ?

Good to have you back , those bikes look very nice.

This is what happens when you deploy in a vehicle park against Dark Eldar and they manage to crack it. The Admech IG army looks small because two Vendettas with Special Weapon Squads on-board and a Hellhound decided not to turn up before Turn 4, by which point the ground forces were basically crippled. My opponent was also not helped by the fact that I seemed to be making about 90% of my cover saves while he was rolling more like 20%!

This was also the first game of 40k I've played at home in years since my junior high/high school gaming group mostly broke up and I shifted to playing at my FLGS. I was actually pleasantly surprised that I was able to dig up enough of my old terrain to put together a decent table layout without having to resort to tissue box buildings. Most of this terrain is more than 10 years old! Just look at those glorious 2nd Edition style flocked foam hills !



@Yggdrasil: Relic is a fun "beer and pretzels" style game, helped a lot by the 40k lore. I'm not sure I'd find a 3+ hour roll and move type game engaging enough without the 40k universe. But I'd definitely recommend the game to any fans of 40k.

@GiraffeX, Casey's Law, Gitsplitta and bofdar: It's good to be back !

Good lord that's a lot of DE vehicles!

Love it! Stand next to each other while we decimate you!

 Mechanicum Jon wrote:

GW cardboard bunkers FTW!

Highlights are done ! If I'm honest the highlights were really a bit tedious to get done. But now having finished, I'm definitely glad to have gone back to these models to do the highlighting. They fit in much better with the rest of the army now. I still plan to paint various runic designs on the canopies but I might work on something else first. I've got a whole box of Reaper Bones mini's that just came in that I'm keen to try painting but also have this strange urge to paint a 2nd Edition Space Marine in the Drowned Gardens color scheme. I think it's because I've got lots of old Marines sitting around with questionable paint jobs and the thought of quickly refurbishing a small marine army for gaming is gaining traction with the new codex coming out. Using the Drowned Gardens scheme means I can be lazy and get some gaming quality models out with relatively little effort! I've also got a sneaking suspicion that years of looking at Gitsplitta's amazing Mantis Warriors army has had some part in this...



@KrautScientist: Hey, I remember being pretty impressed with GW's line or cardboard terrain when it came out, especially the Gorkamorka stuff !

Nice squad!!! It was definitely worth the trouble IMHO !!

As for some Marines... I'd be glad to see what you could do with that !!

They look beautiful Jon, well worth your time! I am flattered to play any part in inspiring you to further feats of awesomeness. Can't wait!

Stunning, definitely worth your efforts. Marines sounds like a fun change of pace but it would be nice to see some slightly different colours. Have you considered just spinning the colour wheel a bit? You could probably copy all the same techniques with just a different palette.

This miniature cost me less than 50 cents USD. Yes the detail may not be 100% as crisp as other minis. Yes the plastic is a bit bendy. But neither of these criticisms are noticeable when you put the miniatures down on the tabletop. Not every miniature needs to be a display piece (although some of these could be). Sometimes you just want to enjoy having hundreds of characterful miniatures, from fishmen to giantesses, to paint and play with.

So for my first BONES mini I decided to stick with my Drowned Gardens scheme to get used to the new material. To be even more conservative, I picked a Dark Elf Priestess because I was fairly sure the scheme would look good on her. I'm happy to report that I haven't had to change my technique the slightest bit to paint this miniature so far. I've heard about primers not sticking but my usual Mr.Hobby Surfacer 1200 works just fine. As do Citadel and Vallejo paints. Readers will probably recognize the cloak and base colors which were painted exactly the same way as on my Dark Eldar minis and I think the results here look just as good! So overall a huge thumbs up from me on the Reaper BONES line so far , with my only regret being I didn't buy more during the Kickstarter (although realistically I can't see myself running out of things to paint anytime soon)!



@Casey's Law: I'm thinking about bright yellow like the Imperial Fists but it's not just the blue from the Drowned Gardens scheme I'm attached to. It's the whole combination of blue, rust, copper and red!

I'm not familiar with that line of minis. Be interesting to see what you do with them.

Looking really tight already Jon, you can't go wrong with this scheme, you've mastered it!

Yellow looks amazing on marines so I'd back that decision for sure. I wonder if you could use the same ratios of seperation on the colour wheel to match the other DG colours in a way that gives you the same feeling.

I tried it here: http://colorschemedesigner.com/
And it's not great becuase it falls between warm and cold. If you squidge the yellow to warm then the matches would be indigo and mid to dark blue to replace the redish colours. That means it'd be blue tinged steel and a blueish verdigris for the metal. That doesn't sound too appealing to me... If you go with a cold yellow then pink gets added to the mix for the metals which wounds even worse.

So yeh, maybe not. You could probably come up with something better without the wheel. How about just swapping the blue for yellow? Or a simple analogic scheme with green verdigris on copper and yellow armour. You could keep that lovely rich red for the cloth and icons. Actually I like the sound of that. All that changes is the blue swaps to yellow and the rust swaps to verdigris. I think a lot of your techniques could be directly transferable.

Tierdeleira's painting up quite nicely, but of course there's still a ways to go. The warmer brown areas are going to be painted bronze, the lighter brown areas will be done as leather, the armor will be weathered and they were be a bunch of highlights and washes done all over.

It also just occurred to me that she'd make a decent proxy as an Archon for the Drowned Gardens.



@Gitsplitta: I've always liked Reaper for the sheer variety of sculpts they have.

@Casey's Law: Thanks for the thoughtful reply and taking the time to test things out for me.

Great work as usual. I actually bought a few the the Bones Hellhounds to test out how they'd look as a Khymerae. With the Bones pricing, it was almost a must try. Yours is painting up quite nicely and great to see such nice detail in such an inexpensive model.

Presenting my first painted miniature from the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, Tierdeleira, Dark Elf Priestess. Let me know what you think of the cheapest miniature I've ever painted .







@Sarigar: Puppet's War also just released their Barghest Fiends which look like perfect proxies for Khymerae, although definitely not as cheap as the Bones Hellhounds.

Very nice. Your drowned gardens scheme works nicely on her.

Lovely job mate! I'm not sure I'm sold on the miniature itself oddly enough, I really thought I'd love it but it just feels a bit off in places to me.

No worries btw, I always enjoy looking at colour schemes, it's good practice. The last one I came up with in that post I'm actually rather fond of now, I might have to try it out myself!

I sprayed Tierdeleira with a few coats of matte varnish and found it makes a huge difference! I've realized that I really like the "softer" painted look over shiny metals. The problem with matte varnish though is that I'm always worried about it coating the mini in a white frost (you can see a bit of this on the mace handle). Sometimes the usual gloss varnish or future floor wax methods won't even fix things completely so I'll have to repaint parts. Do any of you have any tips on how to avoid this?



@Casey's Law: Post some pics if you try it out! I'm promise to shamelessly copy your successes .

Haha, will do, I might try and wind it into one of my current projects.

She softened down very nicely, I agree that I prefer that look myself. I'm not sure what you can really do to avoid the frosting mistakes. It seems to be a distance and climate issue. Maybe checking the temperature before spraying would be beneficial.

Temp and humidity cause the frosting.

living in the tropics, which is the enemy for spray varnish, i have taken to using Vallejo's brush-on matte varnish...
it works great...
just use a slightly moist brush, and don't thin your varnish with water...
it fells like it will be going on thick, but i just come back to the first few brush strokes, after i have used up all the varnish on the brush and feather it outward...

it works great, and doesn't frost...

keep up the good work...

cheers
jah

Is the frosting happening at application or during drying? If the latter, take a hairdryer to it and dry it yourself. (Bonus, this is also a quick way to not to have to wait for paint to dry after basecoating, layering etc)