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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Gun fight on a platform in Necromunda Under-Hive.

Should be viewed listening to Ennio Morricone's instrumental them to the movie of the same name. (As pointed out by Eski, the song of the gunfight is "Ecstasy of Gold")







The bridge idea proved to be too long for a photo, so I added the Bounty Hunter and settled on the movie theme in the 40th millennium.

Proof pictures:


New trick was painting some graffiti on the side of ribbed can terrain, some new weathering splatter, and using dead Christmas lights in the terrain.

Cheers,

CB

Think this is starting to look like some of those lovely examples now. I really like the bright tip i had so have deviated slightly from josh's example to keep that but i think its working.

Its one of those techniques where you hear from someone experienced like QAR to do checkerboard and think "that wont look anything like metal" but it does.

Need to bring the edges back up to white again but here is tonights progress. As always keep the feedback coming please.

Proof and Final Photos in one post! What sorcery is this! All jokes aside, my new trick was twofold; I wanted to paint my first sylvaneth, and also try some glazing and nmm-style blades.

Proof:


Final Photos:

Lots of fun entries appearing while I'm still slowly labouring away on these ... not sure if I'll manage to get more done then the three guys to the right. Also yay new camera, now I'll just have to find out how it really works haha

Jamie Shred wrote:
Think this is starting to look like some of those lovely examples now. I really like the bright tip i had so have deviated slightly from josh's example to keep that but i think its working.

Its one of those techniques where you hear from someone experienced like QAR to do checkerboard and think "that wont look anything like metal" but it does.

Need to bring the edges back up to white again but here is tonights progress. As always keep the feedback coming please.

Nice! See you can tell it's looking more like steel now, I assume you feel the same. Checkerboard is where it's at on sword blades. NMM in my opinion is less about recreating the exact visual appearance of metal, but of achieving a super high contrast, which creates the illusion of metal when viewed. Keep the purest white areas quite small as a general rule of thumb, but ensure they are there, with a transition to pure black as you have done. I only go larger with bright white on uppermost areas where the light is going to glint most, so you could maybe get away with going a touch larger on the top edge of the blade. Good work. Once you get a bit of experience with this you can work some colours in the forms of reflections of tonal variations.

Cheers QAR, yeah i agree its looking much more polished steel blade rather than fantasy glowing weapon now. I have a tendency to go overboard with my white highlights in general so will try rein it in.

I didn't quite realise how late it was in the month, I don't know if I'm going it be able to finish in time. We shall see.

Here's a WIP on the body. I'm still not happy with all of it, but if I'm going to have any chance of finishing I think I need to move on. I'm relatively happy with the NMM steel on the face and little shoulder shield thing, but I just couldn't seem to get the gold/ brass to look right. Also I had no idea what to do with those hanging swords in the crotch area, there were far too many surfaces for me to figure out. Any feedback on the NMM would be greatly appreciated, as I'm in foreign territory and I still have no idea what I'm doing.

Another thing I noticed was how messy the model was. I got it second hand and it had too much primer on, so I had a go at cleaning it but it's still a little weird in places.

Everyone else's entries are looking fantastic, this months challenge has led to some really interesting techniques, which is just awesome to see.

Thanks!

Ferrous695 - the NMM looks pretty good to me.

*Edit* changed my mind

I think I'll just be glad to finish this month...



Mandrake

Catchya,
Arakasi

Really happy with this sword now. Will finish the sand timer tomorrow and get some pics up on Sunday.
Thanks again for all the tips everyones given, you all really helped.

Amazing results! So much fun to watch you progress though working up the NMM.

Thanks Nevelon. It was a proper learning curve but well worth it.

I'm in. At the beginning of this month I picked up one of these:


I've got him all painted up now, and have recently been obsessed with Zumikito miniatures YouTube videos, so my new tricks were going to be working on blending (which I discovered I suck at last month while attempting NMM) and edge highlighting. I was doing pretty well at it too, when I had declared the paint job on him finished, noticed that I forgot to greenstuff the connection between the backpack and his flamethrower, and accidentally broke off the flamethrower arm and subsequently the backpack too while fiddling with it. I decided to pin the arm and greenstuff the whole thing properly (like I should have done in the first place), but in that process rubbed/chipped off most of my careful blending since the paint hadn't dried 100%. So I've gone back over it and will post final pictures either tonight or sometime this weekend. I also painted this one almost entirely in Vallejo paints which I got for Xmas after deciding that I was never going to buy another Citadel paint pot of anything thicker than a glaze or a wash, so that's new for me too. The blending is something I'm committed to learning and improving on long term, so consider this a first attempt.

Jamie Shred wrote:
Really happy with this sword now. Will finish the sand timer tomorrow and get some pics up on Sunday.
Thanks again for all the tips everyones given, you all really helped.

Nice. Minor point, but I would try to checkerboard between the front and back of the sword blade aswell as the upper and lower, if you see my meaning. So you don't have light portions in the same place on both sides. It's not a huge issue, and something you can experiment with if you keep doing nmm.

The level of painting ability on display in this thread is unreal. It should also be archived as a how-to on NMM at this point.
I just took pics of my humble entry and realized seeing them all blown up that I did a pretty sloppy job of repainting after breaking and regluing this guy, although he looks really good at arm's length.
It will be up to me to continue to practice blending and edge highlighting on subsequent miniatures but I'm calling this good.
Ork Kommando wiv Burna:






Props to whomever sculpted him too; I had never seen the glyph on his backpack before and fell in love with that thing the minute I opened the package and laid eyes on it.

Great entries all, looking forward to the vote and next month's challenge!

Crikey, I disappear for 3 years and you all turn into golden daemon tier painters

The system works!

 Gulgog TufToof wrote:

I just took pics of my humble entry and realized seeing them all blown up that I did a pretty sloppy job of repainting after breaking and regluing this guy, although he looks really good at arm's length.

This, I tbink, is the best standard by which to judge your models. Even the best, most technically proficient painting breaks down in extreme close up. That Burna Boy is gonna look great on the tabletop.

If fact even blown up he looks pretty good

kb_lock wrote:
Crikey, I disappear for 3 years and you all turn into golden daemon tier painters

You’ll catch up. Good to see you back.

Calling this Elucia Vhane done, few things to improve on in future, I found the contrast paints to be good fun and useful for certain things, I'm probably going to try layering with them at various dilution ratios. The zenithal I seemed to just paint over on a bulk of the model but considering how long git takes to do there isn't really much of an argument against not applying it. There are a million and one things I could have continued to do add but real life and all that...

Down to the wire a bit, but done.

So, W&N S7s. Worth it? Probably. Especially when they show up under the Christmas tree and you don’t personally pay for them. Will they make you magically a better painter? No. Will they help? Yes. It was easier to get the brush to behave, get the point where it needed to be, get the paint flowing from the brush to the model. They were working more with me than against me. If you’ve used old crappy brushes (and let’s be honest, we all have at some point), you recognize that very import distinction. No working the brush at just the right angle to try to get it to behave. Less slop and clean up.

With most things there is the weakest link, the thing holding back the project as a whole. Could be you eyes, your brush, your hands, your paint, or the mini itself. For me, it probably is not the brushes.

But while the didn’t make my painting particularly better, they did make it easier. Less struggle, less fuss. Especially the 0 and the 00. The improvement in the larger brushes was there, but had less of an impact. The smaller brushes I could tell helped a bit.

Those are some solid marines, Nevelon. And I agree with you on the brushes-- I do almost everything with my W&N size 1, and it makes it so much easier than the cheap synthetics. That said, the cheap brushes still have their place-- the W&N are just another tool in the toolbox.

So many great entries!
I think this might be one of the coolest rounds already. It has been fun to follow everyone trying out new things.


My new tricks were: play around with enamel paints and pigments for weathering and to test out my new brushes.
Toying with enamels was a lot of fun and a completely new challenge for me. Although the smell was horrible.
Had to think about ventilation and wear some protective gloves.

Did not remember to post the picture from my first enamel test, so might as well add it here as well.
Took a couple of random Leman Russ bits and did a quick test to see how the paints act.


I was too hesitant to jump to the Sentinel and just started brushing that next.
I maybe should have played around a bit more, as I had to redo the weathering on my actual model a couple of times.
Good thing about enamel paints is, that especially the wash is fairly easy to remove afterwards.

Things I learned:
- Don't use too much white spirit (or similar) when making the streaking effects, or you end up messing the whole surface (yes, that happened a few times).
- Be patient and let the paint dry. It takes longer than with acrylics (during the third go on the front panel I started getting a tiny bit impatient).
- Do not start learning a new technique when you are hungry (I almost tossed the whole model out of the window a couple of times).


Anyhow, here are the final pictures.
Death Korps of Krieg Sentinel conversion. Heavily Iron Harvest / Scythe inspired.


The thing turned out to be a lot more weathered than the rest of my Krieg army. But the point of this experiment was to make it look really beaten up.
There are a few parts where I used shortcuts (like using a transfer for the Aquila) or did not put too much effort into every little detail.
But all in all I'm quite happy how the weathering turned out on the lighter areas.

This turned out to be like a blog post, but I figured that might as well share some of my experiences with the "New Trick".

Good luck to everyone still finishing their entries!

Made it!


Drukhari Mandrake. (new faction, new material-finecast)

Definitely a new faction (first Drukhari model). While my first painted finecast material, I'm not sure that made much difference at all. Black was challenging as always, although not new. Having mainly painted Orks and the occasional Space Marine, the size of the model and the details felt new. Those torso grooves were also challenging - I tried a new technique to gradually build up highly diluted greens and yellows to try and let the paint follow the contours rather than me, to varying success.

Good luck everyone!
Arakasi

After some very rushed painting, and an unfortunate amount of things skipped, I managed to finish this guy off. There are heaps of parts I'm not happy with, and I never finished making a base for him, but as far as my first foray into NMM goes (outside of power swords), I'm fairly happy with most of the results.

New techniques attempted:
- NMM steel and brass/ gold
- Sculpting (the shield)

Even though it's not going to win any awards, I really enjoyed pushing myself and trying out these new techniques. Everyone else's entries look absolutely stunning, I've been really inspired by so many fantastic entries.

A really great topic for this month - the amount of really interesting stuff and great work by so many people is proof of that!


I never have much time to paint through December / January, so for me, this was quite an interesting month.
The oil paints take FOREVER to dry and I found my ability to wet blend them was very hit and miss...I'm glad simply to have finished him!

That said, I reckon that I learnt more in this month than I have in a really long time and for that alone, I think it has been a fantastic topic.

Anyhow, here is my frog-guy. I love this model as he has heaps of character and I think the skin kinda suits the oil paint sheen (which is a total pain to photograph, as you can see in the second pic especially).
Hope you like him!





Good luck everyone and I look forward to seeing all the rest of everyone's new tricks!

My new trick to get a translucent layer of Contrast on my tank failed... hard But, not wanting to break my streak, I have here a quick and dirty (focus on the last part) Rider of Rohan. Gonna start this army new and my trick is gonna be lots of Contrast to get them done quickly (characters will get more attention). The quick part was successful, painted him up in about an hour.

Proof:


End result:

Finished photos. Went for a more art style approach with this due to the larger scale, leaving visible brush marks and rougher transitions. Nice to work at a bigger scale and I can display this one on my mantelpiece...

Here are my final pics. Thanks again for all the help along the way with this one.