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So instead of starting a new blog every time I start a new project I'm going to try having a general one again. It sucks when I'd get burnt out on something and just ended up abandoning the thread.
I'm going to build up an army, hopefully, but there's going to be a few random bits and pieces thrown in as well as I go.



Anyway I picked up the Nurgle start collecting.

Haven't built the plague drones yet as I've not been so sure of them but I may as well.

Then I waited until I finished painting the first batch of plaguebearers before starting this so I have something to show.

I'm really happy with how they turned out. Especially that one in the back right. I know Nurgle is usually about being disgusting and stuff but I wanted to tone it down a bit, and ended up with some alright Ork flesh by accident.

Plaugey goodness!

Nice to see you blogging

Thanks, it's good to be back at it too.

Got the other 5 done; I intended to do them one at a time but ended up batch painting them in 5s.

The most I batch paint at a time is 4 these days. Once I did a whole box of chaos warriors at once (16 guys IIRC) and it was a mistake.

It’s a little hard to tell, but did you paint the eyes? They look to be the same as the skin. Something with a little more contrast might help. Either just a cream color or a bright red. Nice thing about demon eyes is you don’t need to worry about pupils or anything hard like that if you don’t want to. And even if you did, cyclopses like those guys don’t need to worry about getting them looking in the same direction.

I've been painting them stormhost silver then a nuln oil wash. I'll try a dot of stormhost again and see if it brightens them up a bit more.

They look great and will really be set apart from your other demons .

The biggest difference being I'm layering pink instead of drybrushing it this time.

Finished the poxbringer. That nurgling is my test model basically .
Spent a while working off the same green but I wanted it to be different so it's less of a huge mass of green and I think just tossing ogryn camo on top works.


And a group shot of everything so far, I think I fixed the eyes a bit but I might need to fix up the poxbringer's. Although they all seem fine in person so maybe I need to mess around a bit more with my settings; currently setting white balance to daylight and shifting exposure up to 2.0 which worked before with stuff like the Tyranids.


Thought on how I'd want to build this army more and figured out I'm going to end up with 5 different HQ models; poxbringer, snail guy, sloppity bilepiper, spoilpox scrivener and a great unclean one. A bunch of beasts although not sure on how many, at least 2 units of 30 plaguebearers and a bunch of nurglings.


Might get other things too, but I'm not really looking at this as building a list then getting the models to check it off. Interestingly I could get up to 27 beasts in a single list with the rule of 3; very likely won't (it's like $1890 to do that) but it's kind of cool to think about when you realise they're about the size of a dreadnought.

Eyes look a lot better in that pic. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s the model and what’s the camera. Nice looking mob!

Been a bit busy, but ended up setting up my new desk so have a better spot to paint at.

Finished some nurglings.

Also already have the next 10 plaguebearers built and primed.

They came out well.

Still unsure if I like the Pile of nurglings, rather than the carpet of nurglings for a swarm. But I’m old like that.

Yeh I'm not sure of the pile look as well. Looks fine as a swarm by itself but you start putting them together and it looks a bit less cohesive.


Anyway I felt like building something and ended up building a watch master out of spare parts I had.

Still need to drill out the barrel though. I was really unsure of how this looked until I finally got that cape on. Was actually going to avoid it but with some cutting on the underside and a little bending with heat (got a little too close with the flame at the right as you can see a bit in the bottom right picture), but it ended up fitting well enough in the end to put that backpack over it.

The actual nightmare was that guardian spear as I didn't seem to have any matching arms left.

Very nice looking build. Kitbashing one is also on my to-do list. The one they make is a little static for my taste. I like the movement you captured.

Wonderful movement captured. Quite superb.

Nice bunch of nuglings you've got there.
And agreed with the others, the watch master has an excellent pose. It would look great as a duel piece with another model.

Been a bit busy, but got some painting done this week and got the other 6 Termagants finally painted up.
Also forgot my camera settings for these guys so this first one is at 2x exposure then the rest are 1.5x, tried getting it as close as I could.


Here's all 12 of them so far with some rippers as well.


And it was surprisingly fast to paint up this guy too.



Accidentally got a bit of the green base for the carapace on the spore chimneys, but instead of fixing it up I decided to just make them the same colour as the carapace and I think it works.





I really like working on these kinds of bases. Anyway looking back on these guys and how they've come out and I think I'll work on some more bugs for a while. I do kind of jump around from project to project a bit, but I want to get back into actually playing the game.

On camera settings, you might want to play with the white ballance. Or adjust it in a editing program. Especially with the muted pallet you are working with, I think your pictures are looking very flat. I can see that you have highlighted things, but overall it’s hard to see the detail work you’ve done.

But shapr looking barch of bugs you have there.

Trying to figure out why it seems to go a slight blue when I used the same settings as the plaguebearers. Their colours match just fine, but the nids are off. Might be because this room has a warm light rather than a daylight bulb (which is in the other room where I was initially messing around with settings for the nids last time ) so that could be affecting the white balance as well I guess.

I usually set it to daylight and its worked so far, but the colours were closer for these guys set to cloudy instead.

Messed around with the camera settings a bit more. I think this is probably as good as it'll get.

The other thing with the trygon is it might just be tall enough for it to be a bit close to the lights cause the gants look exactly the same colourwise.

I don’t know if this helps, but I used a program called Photoscape (free, I use it to make collages mostly, light editing) to tweak the white balance of one of your pics. Does the one on the right look closer to real life? The left (unmodified pic) looks like it has a yellow-ish filter over it due to the light.



I assume you are useing a pure white backdrop.

Yeh it looks a lot better.

Is Photoscape X the right one?

 n0t_u wrote:
Yeh it looks a lot better.

Is Photoscape X the right one?

Yup. At least on a Mac, the PC version might not use the “X”

I'd throw my hat in for GIMP, too. It's a little bit more complicated than Photoscape, but much more useful.

Plus, there are great tutorials out there for anything you might be struggling with. It's also free.

I struggle with exposures, too, so my pics get edited in the free Windows 10 program, then 'polished' in GIMP.

It mentioned windows 10 as well, now I just need to figure this out. I've actually only been using paint all this time still.

Edit:
Think I got it already this seems pretty easy to use.

I thought it was auto levels at first so messed with that and noticed it helped then found the white balance. So then I did the white balance then auto levels after it and this is what I got.
Not sure if it washes the bit of green out of the skin or not but seems pretty close now.

Thanks for showing me this.

I like both

Thanks

Hadn't felt like painting for a bit, but grabbed the start collecting on Sunday and started painting them today. Finally caved in on my stance on genestealers . Have a friend who has played nids for ages and mostly focused on them so at first I wanted to avoid them (and the mirror match), but I don't even know if he plays nids anymore as he's moved onto marines and custodes for a fair while now too.

Still have to do the teeth and tongue before I wash the entire model so I guess they're about half done. Cause I wanted to avoid them and wanted a trygon, I now have a second thanks to this start collecting.
Already built the entire box so it's a mawloc though.

Anyway I'm kind of feeling like I might need to look at a slightly bigger lightbox. The one I have is fine, and really I went for something cheapish to mess around with (it's pretty solid for about $16-18 AUD). But, when it comes to group shots I need to mess around with positions a fair bit to keep those edges out since it only has 20cm3 to work with.

So things worked out well, finished the stealers last night and the new light box arrived today.


It's actually made it a lot easier too, not sure what the difference is but the auto white balance on my s5 was a lot closer in this than the smaller one. I guess it could be cause the old one was smaller so the colour reflected off them with the light, or the light was off balance or even cause the background for that one has this sort of weave pattern in it while the new one is just completely flat.

For comparison here's the raw image.

I use discord to transfer it across to my pc cause it's a lot faster.

I thought I had replied earlier about photos, oh well. I guess Dakka ate my post.

Much better looking with a little work on the pics. We spend so much time, effort and money on the paints and minis, we sometimes neglect the photo side when we share them online. Not that it’s needed at the FLGS, or display shelf, but for many of us, online is where we spend most of our hobby time.

You don’t need an expensive camera. I do most of my work with an old point and click Cannon S95. Some quick research shows it’s a 10 megapixel, where my not quite as old iPhone 6 has a 12 megapixel camera. Any halfway decent cell phone these days has enough umph to get decent results.

You don’t need an expensive set up. A couple of good lamps, a decent backdrop, some diffusers (which could be as simple as parchment paper and cardboard). I use a lightbox that came with lamps and cost less then a tactical squad.

You don’t need fancy techniques or know-how. Brace your camera, let the autofocus do its thing, watch your zoom and depth of focus.

You don’t need pricy photo editing software. What we need is basic cropping and white balance. Sure, you can go all-in and tweak colors and contrast, but you can still get that in free programs.

I love looking at pictures of cool looking models. Living vicariously via other people’s paint benches. Also, for blogs where people ask for feedback and advice, being able to clearly see what’s going on helps a LOT. I honestly think we should be recommending basic camera tricks as often as we tell people to thin their paints and drill their gun barrels.

---

When I started using my lightbox I noticed that I no longer needed to manually white balance pictures. It might be that the LEDs put out a brighter, cleaner color, or the fact that everything was nice and white and diffused. But my camera got the memo on what the white should be, and straightened itself out.

Genestealers are looking nice and gribbly. Need to go find some thing to munch on. Or eat a few bolter rounds, whatever.

Thanks again for helping me out with it.
I used to use this old kind of crappy fujifilm camera for ages, a quick crop in paint and that was about it. Had the thing to take pics when I was out hiking at the time. Even had to tape the battery door shut because it got dropped once... down a ladder and some rocks.

When it eventually died I just moved onto my phone cause I had a S3 at that point, and still only have a S5 now (I don't really get the idea of having to upgrade it until it starts having issues)

I really didn't have much of an idea besides trying to get alright light and maybe a white background, which to me ended up being use flash and some paper on a bookshelf for ages.
But, like with that software and getting a light box it's made a huge difference and it's pretty cool to look at the pics. And I agree with you don't need to spend much; the new light box was basically just twice the size of the one I had and it was only $30.



Also the friend I'm kind of getting back into 40k again with is going with Orks so it's going to be pretty fun with the similarities they can kind of have between each other I think.

More rank and file bugs.


Up to 17 finished now, not sure if I mentioned it before but these guys will be going with the Trygon so there'll be another 5 of these then I need to get 8 devourers to finish off the squad.

Have another 5 gants done.


They were actually done for a while, I just took a break from painting.



Ended up painting some horrors I had laying around for fun. They're all different colours because I figured it'd be a good chance to sort of have them like a mini project and practice or paint colours I never really paint (I'm pretty sure this is the second or third red model I've ever painted). Surprisingly I actually like the look so far.

Not based yet cause I'm not sure if I'd go with the current usual or try out something else. I also kept the horns and jewellery the same cause I kind of feel like it at least tries to make them seem like they belong together. Not sure if it helps.