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Hello denizens of Dakka. This will be an occasionally-updated log of my attempts to get back into miniatures painting after a rather long hiatus. Like many before me I hope that sticking my work online will motivate me to be productive. Let's see if it works...

This is the first model I had painted in ages. I did it mostly to check that I could stil use a brush to stick paint on a model, so excuse the quality. I shall leave him here in all his noobish glory in the hope that he will be surpassed!


Below is my current project. It's one of the old school metal Long Fang models, who will be getting one of the new-style heavy bolters.

This is a 'Meroid' from the Descent boardgame. It's a sort of shark-humanoid with tentacles. This one belongs to a friend of mine who asked me to fix it after it became detached from its base. After fixing it I thought I'd go the whole hog and paint it as well.

Here is the finished Space Wolf.

He's a Long Fang of Ragnar Blackmane's Great Company, although you can't see the shoulder icons in this picture. The scale creep between the metal model and the plastic arms meant that I had to fill the joins around the shoulders, and the gun obscures most of the detail on the torso, which is a shame. The base was done with Citadel 'Mourn Mountain Snow' texture paint. It's supposed to be snow but I'm not entirely happy with the result. Am I meant to use the texture paint in conjunction with another product to achieve a snow effect?

I'm also trying to improve my photography setup, so here is a better picture of the Meroid.

Below is my current project, a 54mm scale Space Wolf. I inherited this model as an unfinished project from a friend (thanks Nick!), so all the 'wolfifying' conversion work is by him, though the painting is mine. The rest of the model's components are all finished, which just leaves the main body and the head.

The head is the bit I am dreading, since I'm not great at painting faces. I also need to find a technique for doing red/ginger hair that doesn't make it look too much like an artifiicial colour. I'm not sure what to do with the base. The rim will be black and I'm thinking a metalic colour with an appropriate wash for the surface, but I'm not sure if that will be too plain.

More to come!

New project! They're mostly held together by blu-tac at the moment, hence why they look a little wonky.

Something new - a "Zaku" from the Gundam series awaiting painting.

Completed MS-06F Zaku II mobile suit from Gundam. This is the first time I've built an articulated kit. I'm quite impressed how big it is despite being in 1:144 scale. It went together quite nicely with the exception of the torso cables, which I ended up botching. It's a cheap kit though so I can always try again. Oh, and Vallejo Tinny Tin is actually more of a bronze, which was annoying.

I wanted to have another go at a gundam kit, and improve upon my last attempt. The kit I got is of a red Zaku II, and is much more modern. "Red" turned out to mean than the plastic sprues were pre-coloured in shades of burgundy and salmon pink. Very clever, but not the colour scheme that I was going for, so it got the same green scheme as the last Zaku.

This is the sprue before I started.


I decided to paint all the components on the sprue, to avoid gumming up the joints with paint. Here is one of the sprues ready for assembly.

Sub-assemblies in progress. Some of the snap-fit joins weren't as tight as they could have been, so I'm going to have to get some liquid greenstuff to fill the gaps.

It's just as well this is a painting log or I'd be dabbling in the dark arts of threadromancy with this post! After a far longer than intended hiatus, I have finally finished the second zaku. This is an MS-06S Zaku II.

I realised after final assembly that I'd mixed up the left and right armour skirts , but overall I'm quite happy with it. For some reason this kit lacks the back-pack thrusters which the older Zaku kit has, so I added some from an upgrade kit. I may go back and add transfers and weathering later, but I'm calling it done for now. Comments are welcome.

With the Zaku out of the way I can start working on the Adeptus Mechanicus "start collecting" box that I have. I'm really impressed with the delicacy and detail of these plastics; no plastic Cadians these, though it makes them trickier to paint!

Below is a test miniature for the skitari. They are from the (home-brew) forgeworld of Volker Prime. I imagine it being covered by those red-spiked giant cacti which use to appear as terrain in White Dwarf battle reports, so I went with a camoflage scheme but kept some red on the shoulder pads.


I'll be doing all the skitari models in this sort of scheme, so critique is welcome.

The Skitarii is cool. I like the idea of rangers having camoflage. It might look good if the trousers were red though, as if it is wearing the normal Ad mech colour scheme, but with the camoflage cloak over the top.

Nice! I have the 2nd ed Ultramarines codex that I use for reference material and those cactus things are in almost every picture. You should make a few if you ever get the time. Pretty sure they were just foam balls and toothpicks. Interested to see more of these guys.

Thanks for the comments guys
@ corpuschain: I'll try out some red trousers on one of the next figures and see how it looks.
@ brushcommando: I'm not sure where I'd get foam balls from but I'll keep an eye out for something suitable, a couple of retro-cacti might be neat.

One month later and I have painted a whole other figure! Progress is sloooow.

This is a skitari assembled as the rad-trooper version.

I tried red for the trousers on this one, which looks good. I also used a darker wash on the metals for the torso and the gun. I'm not sure which to use for future figures, the lighter metallic look of the ranger or the darker look on this one.

Here they are together.

This week, I have been working on some terrain:

Progress:

Finished! Second-edition-style red spiky xeno-cacti.




Trooper T35T-M0D31 claims the cactus patch from the xenos threat.

It's been rather a long time since I did any modelling, I spend far too much time admiring other's work on the net. So, I decided to correct this with something cheap and cheerful.



This is (or will be) a super-deformed parody version of "Char's Zaku", the initial mech piloted by the series' antagonist in Mobile Suit Gundam. I say "parody" because for some reason the shield this mech carries is sculpted to look like a bar of chocolate,
For a shokugan kit I picked up in the supermarket, I'm really impressed with the quality of it; the sprue clips away cleanly, parts snap-fit together well and nub marks are minimal. The only downside is that some components are moulded hollow rather than having a solid face on every side, likely to reduce cost.

It's moulded in mostly correct colours, but I'll be painting it anyway as I have some paints I want to try out.

Looks like it was almost three months ago that I started this...
Painting in progress now, almost finsihed.

Looking back up a few posts, I absolutely love the camo scheme on the AdMech, it looks great! If you were to do vehicles in that scheme, how would you do it do you think?

Thanks. If I was going to apply this scheme to a vehicle, I'd do it the same as on the infantry figures, which is brown patches over a green base. I think I might add a third colour to make the large areas of camo a bit more interesting, maybe small patches in an intermediary colour, or outline the brown patches with a black or grey.

The other approach would be to do the same colours in a splinter scheme. I was going to refer you to pictures of splinter-camo rangers earlier in the thread, but it seems I never actually posted them. Thus:

This picture doesn't really show the splinters that well, and my rather indelicate masking skills didn't really suit an infantry-sized figure (the splinters are too big), but I think it would look good on a vehicle.

Oh, and an area of the red somewhere. They are mechanicus after all.

What I'd really like to see though, from some-one with the skill to pull it off, is skitarii rangers wearing digital camo. I think it would really suit their theme.

 Turaxa wrote:
Looks like it was almost three months ago that I started this...
Painting in progress now, almost finsihed.

And thus it remained for another month and a half! But it's done now. Quick and dirty pictures of the finished build:


The eye is a sticker which came with the kit. Everything else is paint.


For some reason the shield is shaped like a bar of chocolate, so I painted it accordingly.


The hand-shaped backpack is actually "kibble" from the combined mecha these SD kits make. I think it's also a nod to the pilot's final boss battle mecha, hence the grey colour.

 Turaxa wrote:
Thanks. If I was going to apply this scheme to a vehicle, I'd do it the same as on the infantry figures, which is brown patches over a green base. I think I might add a third colour to make the large areas of camo a bit more interesting, maybe small patches in an intermediary colour, or outline the brown patches with a black or grey.

The other approach would be to do the same colours in a splinter scheme. I was going to refer you to pictures of splinter-camo rangers earlier in the thread, but it seems I never actually posted them. Thus:

This picture doesn't really show the splinters that well, and my rather indelicate masking skills didn't really suit an infantry-sized figure (the splinters are too big), but I think it would look good on a vehicle.

Oh, and an area of the red somewhere. They are mechanicus after all.

What I'd really like to see though, from some-one with the skill to pull it off, is skitarii rangers wearing digital camo. I think it would really suit their theme.[/quote

I think a third colour would be a good idea. Possibly a pale orange? Outlines or pale orange or grey, but I'd make it just partial outlines, rather than full.

I don't think you should worry too much about the red, unless you do their eyes or something else that could glow red.

I decided to enter round 63 of the Dakka Painting Challenge, since I recently unearthed some very old school paints.

The plan was to paint these:


With these:


By following the guidelines for painting Blood Angels in this:


But it turned out that the bottle of Terracotta paint was actually mostly empty and dried out, and the guide also called for Sunburst Yellow when I had Bad Moon Yellow. I thought that I could substitute one yellow for the other, and swap Terracotta for Go Fasta Red. Red and yellow are red and yellow, right?

I was wrong......

Oh dear, this looks even worse on camera than in person. The first highlight was Go Fasta Red and Blood Angels Orange mixed together, but they are so close in colour that the highlight was hardly noticable. The next was Blood Angel Orange and Bad Moon Yellow, but that gave me a carrot orange, and it just got worse from there.

But I do have an unopened pot of original Blue Grey, so if I cheat a little and use Coat d'Arms Lupin Grey (essentially the same as Space Wolf Grey from the original Citadel Colour range) then I should be able to paint the other marines as retro Space Wolves.

Retro Space Wolf painting in progress:

Retro Space Wolf finished.





For Space Wolves, the Space Marine Painting Guide recommended drybrushing the figure. That probably wasn't the technique used to paint the reference figure in the Guide, but I was following the instructions for this project so a drybrushing it got. The result was....okay, but not good enough to motivate me to finish another four figures in the same style. If I ever return to retro Space Wolves I'll probably use the highlighting technique from the Blood Angels entry in the Guide.

The technique for squad markings in the Guide is to paint the icon with black, fill it in with white while leaving a black outline then overpaint the white with the desired colour. This figure had a sculpted tactical marking, so I used this technique on that. I couldn't freehand the old-school Space Wolves symbol though, so I used a modern transfer to provide the black layer and then overpainted it in white and then yellow. I'm reasonable pleased with the result, even if it looks more Shiba Inu than Wolf.

Although I think of Goblin Green bases when I think of old 40K, none of the figures in the Guide have them. Instead the bases are painted various shades of a brown I don't have, so I mixed Snakebite Leather, Bleached Bone and Blue Grey to get something visually similar.

A final picture with some the paints used.

Test of a darker Ultramarines scheme.

This is my entry for the Dakka Painting Challenge Round 64, a Space Marine Techmarine.


From looking at the official GW images of this figure I always thought it was a bit of a brick, but it actually has so. much. detail. This one was an Ebay purchase at some point, so it is missing two of it's servo-arms and has damage to another. Nothing a quick bit of converting couldn't fix though. Since I'm painting the miniature in sub-assemblies I decided to test my planned colour scheme and techniques on the backpack first.

Some work-in-progress.