Blog Aginor's Painting Blog

To say your a new painter your models are outstanding, neat and consistent.

Your next step is adding depth to teeth and eyes etc but for the tabletop your models are great, bit more work on your bases (pet hate of mine).

Very good so far and I'm hoping you take your painting to the next level.

 

Thanks, I am glad y'all like them so far!

The bases... yeah. The idea is to place at least some tufts of grass on all of them. For the bigger ones I want to try something else: My brother builds model trains and landscapes for them. He has some electrostatic device that allows you to pull the grass in an upright position. That way you can create nice looking dense meadows. I want to use that on parts of the bases. I like grass on bases but I dislike that it is often just laying around. It seems the train guys solved that problem so I will check it out.

 

Flock box for the win!

 

I didn't have as much time as I'd like to in the last two weeks, but I finally made some more pics of my models.
Here are my Kroxigor, built in November 2016.


Remarks:
- Don't look at the bases, I realized I forgot painting them properly and noticed after the pics were done. I added another layer of brown in the meantime so they look better now.
- I will add more to the bases in the future but for now I'd like to get them all to the same level, sanded and painted brown.
- those were my first resin models. And I made some mistakes and learned a lot. For example that you can bend them when you put them in warm water. Those parts didn't fit well, especially the arms.
Also you should use a brush and water to clean them up after removing all those damn sprue things that don't belong there. That way the paint sticks better to them. I had major problems with that, the primer just didn't stick.
I prefer plastic SO much....
- I wanted to do those red war paints in the faces which you can see on many pictures, but since I was pretty happy how the faces turned out in blue I was reluctant to try and maybe ruin them. They lookED a bit boring then so I gave them another drybrush to make the scales stand out a bit more.
- the weapons are Obsidian + Bronze again to fit the rest of my army.
- I used some liquid green stuff to fix some of the holes that were caused by the arms not fitting. I hadn't worked with that before and it worked quite nicely. I was surprised how well it could be painted over.

 

I was aiming for the look like they are pictured when you open their warscroll in the app, heads and more almost completely red. But then I had second thoughts.

 

For Christmas my great wife got me a few models, and she also organized that other family members also got me a few from my wishlist.

Here's my Salamander:


Notes:
- First I painted it orange, then I shaded the scales dark. The fins on the back and the head were painted white and only drybrushed orange a bit. Then I applied Lamenter's Yellow (a glaze) over the whole beast. It did something interesting with the dark shade. It kinda attacked it and washed it away a bit. I applied several layers of that glaze on the head fins to make them really stand out.
In the end it was a bit too shiny so I applied a soft brown shade over the whole model.
- The base was improved after those pictures were taken, just like with the Kroxigor.
- I don't like the Salamander's geometry much. I wish they did a new model for it. Preferably Dimetrodon-Style.
- It was nice to paint something with a really different color. Up to that point I had only painted blue and green, with just a bit of other colors involved.

 

A short time before Christmas I visited my local GW store and something caught my eye. I just had to have it, it was the last one in stock and I liked the style.
My Balewind Vortex:



Notes:
- I used magnets to be able to disassemble it. That makes transporting it much easier. I also can use it as a static piece of scenery, waiting for a wizard to get there and activate it.
- I decided to do the green Vortex, although blue, red, and yellow also look very cool.
- the green is a glaze, Waywatcher Green by GW. I had hoped that the liquid, glossy stuff would make it look more alien, and to a certain degree it worked. So I just primed it white and applied the glaze. Not exactly as expected but I am pretty happy with it. I just was a bit careless and it pooled in some places. The rest was done with a green shade
- the base is just my regular stone texture, with some highlights and gold. In real life the gold looks less shiny, I had the lamp pretty close for the pictures.
- I noticed that the round plate in the center of the top part (with the skull) would fit right into the hole in the lower part, and I thought about sawing off the rest of the top part and magnetize it. That would make the static, deactivated Balewind Vortex look even cooler. But I postponed that to a later point, so I have more skill to make it look good.
- My friend was pretty surprised and impressed when I set it up on the table, made "swoooosh" noises and placed the green Vortex. I had kept that project hidden from him.

 

Ok, one more for today.
During the Holidays I had some time for painting so I did quite some models.

Here are my Terradons, finished around New Year I think:




Their Alpha's Terradon has different claws.



I magnetized their wrists, so they can have their other weapon option as well. One of the magnets is really sitting in a hole that I drilled into the wristband, the other was just painted blue or gold.









The really tricky part was to magnetize the Alpha and the Master of the Skies as well.
The handles they use to hold on to their Terradon are custom made of sprue parts, so both would fit.




Notes:
- Inspired by some art I saw somewhere on the Internet and on the Terradon box I decided to go a bit more crazy with the colors. So I got me some GW Emperor's Children and and Temple Guard Blue. The rest are my trusty Army Painter colors.
- the blue color makes them harder to spot from the ground, that's also the reason why some fighter jets are painted like that in real life.
- Finding the lines at which I separated the blue from the purple (and drawing them) became a major problem for me. Fortunately both of the colors I used cover wach other pretty well, I had to correct many places.
- The unshaded Terradons looked like straight out of a Barbie catalogue, but when I shaded them (purple on the pink parts and purple parts, blue on the blue parts) they looked much better.
- I thought about adding orange crests (the complimentary color) to the purple heads but ended up deciding against it.
- the Bolas were painted by my wife, and she used Vallejo gloss varnish to make the fire shiny.
- the Skyblade is just silver, shaded blue. I learned that technique painting my Starpriest and I used it here as well. I probably won't play the Master of the Skies much, but I just wanted to build him as well.
- the runes on the bombs are Lamenter's Yellow again. I like that glaze.
- I replaced the plexi glass things by black painted steel, those bubbles in there really put me off and to me it looked ridiculous the way they looked when flying so low. With that length they are pretty top-heavy though, so I glued some big washers into the bases that I got from a hardware store. They are pretty heavy now.
- Almost all of my Skinks have some color on their head. Terradon Riders are purple like their mounts, while normal troops have green and crews of Monsters and Handlers have yellow.
- EDIT:, and wow, now that I see them that close I spot some errors that I'll probably have to fix...

 

One item left on my wishlist in December was a Skink Priest.
Not that I needed him urgently, I just liked the model.
So I got one for my birthday. I painted it soon thereafter. Here it is:





Notes:
- I really really wanted to make that one good. I had seen pictures on the net and liked those feathers, I just feared I wouldn't make it.
- I was surprised he really only consisted of one part. "Easy" I thought, but then I saw all that casting flash. OMG.... It took me hours to clean up that model.
- First I primed him white. I used the yellow glaze for the staff, the skin was painted with Temple Guard Blue and then shaded blue.
For the cloak I just painted everything yellow (except the inside which is just red) and then I worked from the edges, carefully drybrushing towards the middle. First I only had the green but then I thought I'd try and do the same with orange. I am glad I did it. Those color contrasts are very nice IMO, and it really looks like a rather soft gradient. I thought that was almost impossible using a brush (I was told it is pretty easy with an airbrush though) but when I managed to get it done it really gave me hope for my painting. With some more practice I might really produce some nice models.
- there is a tiny amount of green drybrush highlighting on the skin. The idea was to make it look as if that yellow orb glows and shines on the skin. It makes for a good highlight I think.
- I carefully shaded the deeper crevices dark. Those resin models don't have all the holes like the plastic ones so I thought I had to hide those parts where the parts meet.
- I am proud of that model. Of course I see a few spots that could be made better. The eyes and teeth are far from perfect for example, and there are a few tiny holes in which there is no paint. I am still very happy with it, because most of the time my models look quite different to what I had in mind when I started painting. Not necessarily bad, but different. This one looks almost exactly as the picture that I had in mind when I started. And that makes me really happy. When I was finished I was excited and showed it to everyone who was interested, and some who weren't.

 

Thanks!

About those bright colors though: I used a pretty strong lamp there, so when I play in normal light those look a bit darker.
I find it very hard to make them look on pictures as I perceive them in real life.

 

I think we all get that, my models never turn out like I have them in my head as I always change things as I paint.

Tip for mouths and teeth, paint all the mouth a dark red, Mephiston with a spot of black mixed in then when you paint your teeth leave a little red showing, like a gum line.

 

Thanks, I will try that trick with the teeth soon-ish!