They represent my second, much more successful attempt at the technique I said I wanted to get the hang of in my hobby goals post.
First, I primed them black using my airbrush. Then I airbrushed a very light grey from above. Then I left them in a drawer for a month or so. When I was finally ready to paint them, I started by completing the ‘value sketch’. This just meant going in with black paint in recesses the airbrush had missed, while bringing up the brightness on areas like the face with white paint. I also did all my edge highlighting in white at this stage – it’s really nice to be able to do this step earlier on, when the cost of mistakes is much lower. At the end of all this I had a greyscale representation of the final result.
Then I began glazing, that is, applying paint that has been thinned down to the extent that it only tints the layer beneath. In my previous attempts at glazing I used Citadel Lahmia Medium, but this time I tried out Vallejo Glaze Medium. I was able to do this for most of the models apart from the skin and metal parts. Both required a thicker application, and I had trouble mixing the medium with these paints without them getting runny. Finally I needed to apply washes and highlights to these areas the old-fashioned way for them to look right.
Having done these I strongly want to do more minis this way. It’s so fast and freeing. No painstaking application of basecoats, no time-consuming layering process. I estimate each model took little more than an hour of painting by hand. Amazing.
Also painted this weekend: a tracker and her dog! I’d zenithal primed the dog and it’s quite small and simple, so it went quickly, but the tracker longer. I’m really pleased with how my colour choices turned out, especially the lovely warm crimson-shaded leather parts. (Skrag Brown, shaded with Carroburg Crimson.)
The North Star Frostgrave range is fantastic. Diverse and characterful, even the wonkier sculpts have a certain charm. And it keeps getting better - there’s a plastic Wizards kit on the way :D
Other than these I’ve painted a few scraps of terrain, made a start on the Chosen Axes, magnetized some bases, organised my bits and pieces, and invested in a spraying booth for my airbrush. 2019 is off to a flying start.
Last year I went hard into miniatures; the hobby grabbed me and just would not let go. I painted a tonne of stuff! And this year I’m going to try to paint just as much, if not more. Yet, my actual goals for the year aren’t to paint X amount of minis or a list of certain things1, they’re all about gaining confidence with techniques I haven’t gotten the handle of.
My main aspiration is to get to grips with the process of painting minis by first doing a zenithal highlight, and then using glazes and washes to paint stuff fast. Vince has a good tutorial on this system:
The zenithal highlighting stage consists of painting the model black (or the shadow colour of your choice), then applying a mid-tone grey from about 45 degrees, then the lightest colour (white) from directly above. You can do this with rattlecans, or airbrush, or even by drybrushing.
See also: value sketching. I’m confident enough with my airbrush now to use it for this kind of thing. It’s glazing that I’m still figuring out.
The idea with glazing is to apply a layer of paint that is so thin as to be partially/mostly transparent2. In the video he uses an airbrush to apply the glaze, but it can be done with a normcore brush.
My next goal is to up my airbrush skills. At the moment I can just about get a miniature primed and zenithal highlighted, but I want to be able to actually get some of the base colours down on larger areas to avoid needing to do painstaking multi-coat brush application.
Other than that, I’d like to be able to wet blend, magnetize parts of miniatures for easy weapon-swapping3, and take better photos of my minis. And spread my disease around by trying to get more of my friends into the hobby.
What I’m not going to do is devote much time to learning how to make terrain, much as it fascinates me. I’ll leave that for 2020.
Oh, and, final resolution: No buying new stuff until I’ve cleared most of my backlog!
What are your hobby goals for this year?
God knows I have an enormous amount of stuff to paint, though. ↩
A partial list of every figure I built and painted last year, in vaguely chronological order:
‘Olden Times’ refers to the mystical way-back-when in which I was given/bought miniatures and barely painted them, because I was a CONFOUNDING WASTREL of a child.
What
From
Did What
Skink Chief
Olden Times
Painted. Came back and based it nicely later in the year.
Snotlings? I think? x5
Olden Times
Painted.
Night Goblin
Free with a White Dwarf ages ago
Painted.
Dwarf Warrior
Free with a White Dwarf ages ago
Painted.
Skink Starpriest
2017, birthday or Xmas present
Painted, based. Later rebased to a round.
Steelhearts Champions
2017, Shadespire
Painted, including base.
Saurus Knight
Olden Times
Painted
Skink Chief 2
Olden Times
Painted. Came back and based it nicely later in the year.
Phew! I think that’s all of them. I could only be bothered to add links for some of them, and there are only photos of some of them on this website and on Twitter. Too bad, for you.
Things are a bit subdued in my life at the moment. I had major surgery less than 3 weeks ago and am very much just beginning my recovery. While I feel better nearly every day (in more ways than one), it’ll be a good few weeks before my life is back to something resembling normal.
In the meantime I’ve been reading plenty, watching lots of YouTube, and getting some hobby done when I’m feeling good enough to sit at a table.
I haven’t really had much of the right kind of energy for programming or writing, which seems like a shame because of all the free time, ideas and motivation I have bursting from my seams, but that’s okay. I suppose it’s best to save my thinky-energy for dealing with real problems should they arise and keeping myself comfortable.
Natalie is being a great help, getting shopping, cooking and generally providing morale support. I feel incredibly grateful to have such a good companion around. My mum has also been excellent, helping us return to Edinburgh from the hospital and doing some shopping for us when she can. I’ve also received a lot of nice messages and visits from friends and family members that have really helped to keep me happy and comfy.
If this upward trend continues my time in the recovery doldrums will pass by like nothing.
My army of Stormcast Eternals is growing. The chap above is a Lord-Relictor, a very gothic sort of priest who can heal friends or zap enemies. He’s from the original Age of Sigmar starter set which I bought pre-assembled and half-painted from a friend, so I had to struggle through painting not-in-subassemblies. Which turned out fine in the end. There’s only a few places I couldn’t really get the brush into, but they’re not visible on the final product unless you go looking for them.
I’m particularly pleased with the candles and hourglass, which are coloured purple to connect him to the Realm of Death.
It’s such a characterful model and I feel very happy to have painted it!
Where the Relictor is more of a support character, the Lord-Celestant is more of a leader. I bought him off eBay quite cheaply because I thought he’d be fun to paint and add to my Skirmish warband. (He was!) He’s got a sword, a hammer and a ridiculous hammer-cape, so he can dish out quite a lot of damage while also buffing the soldiers following him. I experimented with using a dark blue wash (Drakenhof Nightshade) to shade the sword and hammer instead of a black one (Nuln Oil) and the result is nice, I think. It’s subtle, but it makes the metal look colder and somehow more solid.
Finally, I got through all these guys from the starter set. Like the Relictor, the Liberators were already assembled and partially painted. The process was a bit of a slog in places – when you’re putting the base colours down on 10 models at the same time, it takes a long time before you start to see the models looking anything like they will in the end, so it’s easy to lost momentum. But I got them done, and now I have a solid battleline of chunky golden boys.
I now have only to paint the 3 Prosecutors, the 3 Retributors and the mounted Lord-Celestant and I will have finished the Stormcast side of the starter box. And I’ll have enough of an army to play actual non-Skirmish games of Age of Sigmar. Exciting!
