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Hey guys,

For Christmas I decided that I'd try and bag me the Island of Blood starter set so that I could learn to play WHFB before picking an army (and maybe e-bay the minis afterward).

Since a slightly more secret agenda would be trying to wow my housemates into maybe restarting the hobby (some of them quit it) I'd want it all painted up and spiffing within a couple of weeks.

So I decided I'd use ArmyPainter after I saw a really good tutorial by GirlPainting on YouTube for Warriors of Chaos minis. However, I'm not sure how to go about it with the Island of Blood stuff so I'll add some guesswork here:

High Elves:

I'll use my spray gun to apply some kind of light blue as a basecoat, a GW colour preferably, perhaps Enchanted Blue (or Ice Blue..)? Would Dakkites recommend this? I'm assuming that (barring the manual highlights I'll apply afterwards) your basecoat should be the same colour as your lightest highlight on the raised areas and the QuickShade will deal with everything else. So perhaps for the hair I should use something like Sunburst Yellow or a bleached bone/snakebite leather mix? Or what the hey... perhaps I should just leave it as Snakebite Leather and manually paint the hair?

Of course I'll manually apply white and mithril silver to the models for the robes and armour respectively... apply the quickshade and my final highlights+details+varnishing can be done after... is that reasonable? This is pure speculation for me, never done anything like this before.

Skaven:

I am much more clueless here, I have no idea what to even base them with... Snakebite leather? That actually makes me cringe now... On ArmyPainter they use something called Leather Brown which rather looks like bestial brown to me. To be honest I really need my hand held with this army.. Any ideas? I guess the big question is what GW colour I can load into my spraygun that looks the same as AP's Fur Brown?

My final and unrelated question is: Points-wise, are the two armies in the starter set balanced? Because AFAIK AoBR definitely wasn't.

Thanks a bunch




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Are there any cheaper alternatives to armypainter?

have you checked out the GW 'official' help pages?

high elves:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?catId=&pageMode=multi&categoryId=§ion=&pIndex=0&aId=10700022a&start=1

skaven:
http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?catId=&pageMode=multi&categoryId=§ion=&pIndex=0&aId=11000015a&start=1

to be quick you really could go to step 2? hope that helps.

I hadn't spotted the Island of Blood articles no, I'd read the ones for the two races individually though.

However, I doubt they'll cover how to use QuickShade, what with it being a rival product 'n' all

Any advice for using that?

I'll read these anyway.


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Hrm the first page for the High Elves... it's making me think that the lighter QuickShade would be better than the Strong one?

And I assume that you would want to use the more "final" colours as your base-job? Since QuickShade is kind of like reverse-highlighting?

Judging from these... I'm guessing that for High Elves you want to do the cloth in a 50/50 astronomican grey with skull white, enchanted blue on the trims, tallarn flesh on the skin, mithril silver on the armour and vomit brown on the hair?

For Skaven... Bestial brown on the fur, tallarn flesh on the skin, boltgun metal on the metal, and khemri brown/mechrite red on the cloth?

What do you think, Dakka? is that a fairly definitive way to get a good-looking army done fast with ArmyPainter? I'm rather looking forward to Christmas all of a sudden

Skaven are pretty easy - paint the fur in a variety of light-ish browns and greys, then add any darker brown or black wash (from anyone, they all work much the same way, but do try it out on a test model first). Similarly, a variety of metallics for the metal bits, and a variety of similar colours (reds look rather good) for cloth, then wash in dark brown or black.

Elves won't be nearly as easy as they need to look clean and consistent. Definitely do the rats first...

You''re probably better spraying white and then hand applying the other colours. You don't really need to add highlights for bright colours as, Quickshade has a habit of shrinking when it dried, leaving your edges lighter than most other places.

It does darken the colour in general though (though I only have experience using dark tone) So for the high elves in particular, you may want to have them slightly brighter than you intend the final colour to be.

Also, I knwo it's dwarves but this tut from AP itself, http://www.thearmypainter.com/gallery_presentation.php?GalleryId=10&Gallery=Warhammer%20Dwarf%20Regiment might help you as its similar in colours to high elves. with blues and reds.

If you plan to paint it on, rather than dip, you could always get dark and light quickshade and just paint on the lighter stuff on the white etc

It's always the same with quickshade. White or grey primer and then basecoat of your midtone colors. The quickshade does the rest.

I wish I wasn't so proud and used it haha

@RayvenQ

I'm liking that Dwarf tutorial but a quick question:

If you use the dipping method is it easy enough to add details and highlighting afterwards to boost the standards? Specifically I think the faces look a tad disappointing and some nice edge highlights would look good. If you properly shake your QuickShade should it come out in an even consistency and be good for painting? Or does it wreck the texture of the model?

It might be a tad difficult since you'll find that the dip has smoothed out the texture of the model somewhat, not exactly wreck, but it shouldn't be too difficult (you're possibly better off highlingting first, though you'd have to try and see what way of it turning out you like) Although as I said, it kinda does highlighting for you,

Take a look at ym Blood Ravens thread, that was all dip, as you can see, there is very little of the actual quickshade left, best way is to swing it a few times, take a look at it, keep swinging and looking until you're left with something you're hapyp with.