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I recently came back from travelling around Europe for 3 months on a climbing trip, needless to say upon my arrival home I am very very low on funds, so I thought I'd give painting for profit a proper go, as I'd dabbled in it before going away, but never gone balls deep so to speak, anyway here's the stuff I've painted up since last tuesday, if anyone's interested in how I did any of it please feel free to ask for recipes etc, or equally if you've got any constructive criticism bring it on by the bucket load, I'm always looking to improve so it's all welcome!


Like I said it's all on ebay, so if you're interested here's a link :Ebay Linky


a Quick rundown of the kits: all were brilliant barring 2 -typical of the ridiculous quality with which GW have been leading the industry with their plastic kits, in particular the dark elf dragon and sorc were a complete pleasure to assemble and paint, and I think the sorc is one of my favourite individual char models ever!

Having said that...

a) Minor(ish) problem with the big skull throne piece - it's a bit of a ball-ache to construct the lower column, I had to leave it drying with about 5 elastic bands around it, and it was much more fiddly than I was expecting.

b) The Cockatrice (**Yes, another person moaning about finecast**)

Not impressed, I don't see why you would ever choose to use this over their plastics, on which the detail is amazing, filth from the moulding process all over it, miscasted sections which made construction really difficult. This is only my experience of one model but given the option I'd never choose this over their plastics ever, 'nuff said.


Enough babble, here's the pics:



























Ebay Link in case you don't want to scroll all the way up again ^_^


Again any questions/comments/crits always welcome!

Cheers for looking,

~Byronic

Wow...
That's well done.

amazing, I love that dragon

Your painting is really amazing. I especially love the piece in the last pictures, very nicely done.

I do have a small criticism and that's that I can see the lines where you attach pieces of the kits together. They are very visible on the dragon's head/neck.

But other than that it all looks wonderful. <3

The first fulcrum makes me want to say
"By the power of Greyskull... I have the power!"

Love it all. I need to get some of this stuff!

I'm making a Magnus daemon model, I need those feathered wings and at least one of those tails with the head on the end.

purplefood wrote:Wow...
That's well done.

Brennian wrote:amazing, I love that dragon

Cheers guys, I'll do y best to give you some more stuff to look at soon. If you can find a any excuse to go out and buy the dragon kit do it, it's brilliant!

Kimzi Caky wrote:Your painting is really amazing. I especially love the piece in the last pictures, very nicely done.

I do have a small criticism and that's that I can see the lines where you attach pieces of the kits together. They are very visible on the dragon's head/neck.

But other than that it all looks wonderful. <3

Cheers, crits always good appreciated! I'm currently trying to find a quicker drying alternative to green stuff for this - I'm painting about 1 monster a day and when I'm going so fast it doesn't have tie to dry properly, anyone with any ideas? (Milliput is too slow also, I'm sure I've seen that a humbrol version which dries faster is around somewhere, but I can't recall where, nor track it down).

Saintspirit wrote:The first fulcrum makes me want to say
"By the power of Greyskull... I have the power!"

Tell me about it is 8 skulls enough for you though? I love this stuff, GW know how to handle their own clichés!

tantan628 wrote:Love it all. I need to get some of this stuff!

I'm making a Magnus daemon model, I need those feathered wings and at least one of those tails with the head on the end.

I should think the bits will be up fro a few sellers on ebay some time soon (tail at least), or on the forums if people are converting the kit, which seems a popular idea.

As for the wings, a little word of warning, if you get the model in a shop open it up there and then and give it a check, mine weren't in the best state, covered in mould-release agent (which happens to be bright pink incidentally :S) and with a fair few imperfections, if you open it up there and then you'll be able to swap it for a better one if you get unlucky.

More updates soon hopefully guys, took a bit of a chill on the painting today as I'm in danger of suffering major hardcore hobbying burnout syndrone (MH..H.......BS...?) otherwise.

Cheers,

Byron

Those pieces look absolutly insane nice job.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just to add another comment... I forgot to mention the dragon's skin is so smoothly blended. Did you use oil paints or acrlyic?

Green stuff the dragon and let it set, in the mean time paint something else?

How are you painting so fast? And so fething amazingly???

Amazing work mate!

Wow, these look amazing XD

40k Ninja wrote:Those pieces look absolutly insane nice job.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Just to add another comment... I forgot to mention the dragon's skin is so smoothly blended. Did you use oil paints or acrlyic?

I use GW acrylics mostly but for the wings I mixed tamia acrylic paint thinner in with them, I find that greys are probably the best colour for doing this with (hence it looking better than my other stuff probably), I'll run you through my sequence:


1.) Prime With Halfords Grey Primer (close to codex grey in colour - very helpful!)

2.) Basecoat with:

Codex Grey (I use this colour A LOT, it blends beautifully, and it's quite strong)
+ Chardon Granite (I put a foundation paint in pretty much every basecoat I use
+ a tiny bit of liche purple (my cohesion colour, I used it en every mix throughout the model)

1:1:microdot

This step is done with an airbrush, but it's only marginally slower when done with a brush (yay paint thinner drying fast - you'll notice this as a theme throughout)

3). Really Dilute down chaos black, but use thinner instead of water, as it's alchohol based it evaporates so much faster, use this on the lower sections of the wing membranes.

4). As with step three but with fortress grey (another good strong colour), but put this on the upper sections.

Part of the joy of thinning the paint is that if I make a mistake it's not noticable, because the layers are so thin, but because they dry so fast with the thinner it's a hugely sped up process, I guess it's kind of speed glazing? It's even possibly to use non thinned down paint on the highlight and shadow extremities, then blend towards them, it's not quite as smooth but it's even faster.

This technique is MUCH easier on a model of this size, as at no point are you waiting for paint to dry, there were 5 sections to each wing, top and bottom, and by the time I was on membrane 4 membrane 1 would be all but dry,

It's one of the reasons why painting a larger model to a high quality isn't necessarily going to be any more time consuming than painting a small one - the Delf sorc took nearly the same amount of time as the dragon, and that's probably only due to the extra time spent painting all of the dragon's base.

theQuanz wrote:Green stuff the dragon and let it set, in the mean time paint something else?

How are you painting so fast? And so fething amazingly???

Part of the painting fast is contained in your first question.

I find it very hard to maintain painting psyche if I'm painting 8 hours a day like I have been, and one way to maintain it is to make sure at the end of every day I have at least one finished model, so I've been doing one monster per day, or 2 pieces of scenery. So every day I've been waking up, having breakfast, taking the plastic wrap from a box, and then blitzing it until it's finished.

As far as techniques go I make use of any that I can to make things faster, drybrushing (all scenery), wet blending (cockatrice's tail), use of washes eternity stair was 100%covered in 2 stages of wash), I undercoat everything in halfords grey primer the best colour to start from in my opinion, it all builds up.

I airbrush any stage I can, I find this particularly helpful with basecoats, but even better is if I can use car-paints, for example if I'm painting a model red I Prime it then nearly always spray it with halfords VW mars red, this saves me doing ultiple layers of other brands of red as a base to get it as vibrant as I need fast.


If you've any questions about how I painted particular models fast please fire away, I figure it'd be great if people could learn from the 100s of mistakes I make while experimenting with painting

Excellent painting mate!

All in all, fantastic work on your models there. The only problem i have really is with the cockatrice. The blood kind of kills it for me. There's nothing on the base (that i saw) that was being eaten, so i can't tell where the blood was coming from, and with it only on the claws and beak, it looks more like he was trying to eat his own toes.

Overall, the models are fantastic. Great job.

awesome

to fill gaps quickly, vallejo make a plastic putty that can be put into the seams and will dry in around an hour or so, quicker under a warm lamp. but the other way you could do it is to use slightly more plastic glue and then sand the part back. this is a quick and dirty but not very pretty and can mess up the kit if you are not great with it.

one other method i have heard of but not tried is filling the seam with bicarb of soda and then puting some super glue on there. this causes the superglue to set very rock hard. but then again you will need to sand that back. all in all a lot quicker then greenstuff but ymmv.

love the painting but I would suggest using some inks and washes to get a bit more depth, I would say that is the biggest thing that notices on the vortex, where you have an awesome blend but not much depth

thanks for sharing!

Wonderful paints. Love the blending.

Amazing paintjob! Keep up the good work!

The paint jobs are so crisp, I'm jealous.

Fantastic job!

Cheers for all of the comments guys!

cyphertheory wrote:to fill gaps quickly, vallejo make a plastic putty that can be put into the seams and will dry in around an hour or so, quicker under a warm lamp. but the other way you could do it is to use slightly more plastic glue and then sand the part back. this is a quick and dirty but not very pretty and can mess up the kit if you are not great with it.

one other method i have heard of but not tried is filling the seam with bicarb of soda and then puting some super glue on there. this causes the superglue to set very rock hard. but then again you will need to sand that back. all in all a lot quicker then greenstuff but ymmv.

love the painting but I would suggest using some inks and washes to get a bit more depth, I would say that is the biggest thing that notices on the vortex, where you have an awesome blend but not much depth

thanks for sharing!

Thanks bud, I'll look into it!

I'm working on a Necromancer, 2 more pieces of scenery,another dragon, and a chimera currently, and I've got another cockatrice on order, I'll get some pictures up soon, Auctions all ending tomorrow:

Like I said it's all on ebay, so if you're interested here's a link :Ebay Linky

Fingers crossed! The terrain and chars both see to be going with a similar interest, which I'm a little surprised about :s

They're gorgeously painted, but the Cockatrice has something off about it.

The blood effects make it look more like it blew a bubble of cherry gum up and had it explode in its face than it just savagely rended someone. On the next Cockatrice, maybe try to keep the connecting points down a bit?
It's still amazing work mind you, but the blood effects just are kind of making it more comical than intimidating to my eyes.

WOW, wicked work mate, top notch

Tah for the responses guys, I thought people might be interested in just how hectic my desk is currently :O (apologies for the distracting background, I've got a small room and didn't think to shift the canvases somewhere else pre-photograph as that's where they live until they get sold.)

Looking forward to being able to shift some of this (but not necessarily to carefully packing all of this lot, hopefully the same person will buy all of it so I only have to send one very well padded box ^_^)

To the right is stuff which is WiP:




Now: Important question, which I'd really appreciate some responses on, especially if you are, or have been a VC collector: what stuff from the new pre-order VC models do you guys think will sell the best, in particular do you think people will be too bothered about buying a new banshee or cairn wraith when they possibly already own models?

That's it for now, I'll get some decent photos of the finished Necromancer some time soon hopefully, just one last gratuitous plug for Ebay as it's the last day

Cheers, Byron

For filling gaps you might want to try the paint-on-milliput method which dries a lot faster than milliput itself (especially when under a warm lamp).

You can also use any variety of modeling putty, but with those you have to be careful since most are acetone based, and can ruin your model if you don't know what you're doing with it.

My final word of wisdom would be not to rush assembly and painting. Take your time, plan it out, and it will all come out great.

Your painting is amazing btw. Some of the pieces look as if you took them from some GW catalog

Thats quite a bit of effort.

Well done.

adary wrote:For filling gaps you might want to try the paint-on-milliput method which dries a lot faster than milliput itself (especially when under a warm lamp).

You can also use any variety of modeling putty, but with those you have to be careful since most are acetone based, and can ruin your model if you don't know what you're doing with it.

My final word of wisdom would be not to rush assembly and painting. Take your time, plan it out, and it will all come out great.

Your painting is amazing btw. Some of the pieces look as if you took them from some GW catalog

Cheers for the info!

Unfortunately taking my time isn't much of an option when I'm trying to do a monster per day ^_^, that's why finding these fast-working products is so important.

AvatarForm wrote:Thats quite a bit of effort.

Well done.

Cheers

Here's another dragon, I tried to do a brighter base to contrast with it being so dark, all thoughts welcome!:




Hopefully I'll get some more stuff up this evening.

I love that dragon. Every time I see it a little voice tells me to buy one.
Very nicely painted again.

Kimzi Caky wrote:I love that dragon. Every time I see it a little voice tells me to buy one.
Very nicely painted again.

Thanks I think the little voice is probably talking sense, I can't sing the kits' praises enough!

It's been a while since my last post, I've not been idle though, I've done some more SoM terrain and some riders for dragons that people won:



(No matt varnish on this in pic)



New Vampire stuff!
So I've constructed a necrogheist, I've no idea how to go about painting it, which is somewhat daunting, as I'm going to start in about 10 minutes!

As far as the construction goes it's a well made kit, however it is a lot more time consuming than other recent GW monsters (SoM Chimera, Dragon etc), it's got quite a lot of parts and layers to it, also the seal lines, rather than running helpful in crevices, or down the edge of pieces tend to dissect them, for example running all of the way down the spine, which is pretty fiddly to get into, i recommend a semi-rounded needle file if people have one.

Anyway, here's 2 banshees, I'm pretty happy with how the colours cae out on the robes, given that it was complete guesswork I got what I was aiming for, making the hair bright was incredibly faffy, about 10 thin coats of skull white as a base to make sure it came out bright!:







If anyone would like any recipes etc shout out

Cheers; lots more to come in the next couple of days!

Byron

Looks amazing. I really like that frost base you have.