Blog Aginor's Painting Blog

Excellent job , I'm hopefully get mine next month.

What I like is how you have gone for natural tones but used a spectral theme on the axe shaft, with the blood in the snow on the base remember less is more.

 

Thanks, guys!

About the bloody snow: yeah on white it will be pretty extreme contrast, I think a few droplets will probably suffice.

Last night I did some magnetizing on my Terradons/Rippers and prepared the Basti's Solar Engine for priming.
So yeah, slow progress but progress.

 

Short update:

I assembled all the magnetized parts for my Terradactyls D) and the three pilots.
I also prepared the Bastiladon's crew and the solar Engine and then I primed them all.

Last night I started painting them and had a good day it seems. The Skinks are almost finished (except some bronze details) and the lower part of the Solar Engine is also mostly done except some little triangles that I want to paint, and the gems which will get glazed yellow (the white parts).

Here is a WIP picture:

 

Short progress update:
Not much, just worked a bit on the Basti and Terradon crews and the solar engine.
I hope to finish the Basti this week. Probably not its base though.

I also plan to add least basecoat the flyers.

 

Quick, guys!
Talk me out of buying an airbrush!
I already have it in my Amazon shopping cart....

 

LOL you are (not) helping!

 

Still WIP, but ready for action!

Wild version:


....and Solar Engine version:



More pics and Ark of Sotek version soon.

 

Thanks! It looks really cool on the tabletop as well, I played it for the first time on friday.

 

Looks really good so far

 

Didn't do much painting today, but...something arrived today:



Harder & Steenbeck Infinity CRplus 2in1 with a 0.15mm and a 0.4mm nozzle.

Fun fact: in German an airbrush is called Farbspritzapparat (paint spraying apparatus )

Compressor will hopefully be ready by the weekend.

I chose that airbrush because I was told it is really easy to clean and an allrounder that you can use for fine details or bigger stuff. There is also a 0.6mm nozzle available if you need to go bigger.

I still hope it is worth it and that I will learn to use it properly, because it wasn't exactly cheap...

I also got some thinner and a hose and stuff.

My first step (after spraying paper to learn how to use it) will be to try and prime a model and then move on to basecoating.
I already ordered some airbrush primer and hope I can replace the rattlecans with that.

 

Wow nice, I don’t use my expensive air brush for primer I have some £10 of ebay that are brilliant for primer.

Saying that you get what you pay for, treat that gun well and it will last you a lifetime.

Plenty of YouTube vids on airbrushing, search way of the brush

 

Yeah I also have a cheap one I bought years ago. Single action and it was 80€ or so including a noisy small compressor.
My brother uses it for rough stuff but I never learned to really use it.

I wonder how useful that paint flow limiter will be. Some reviews say it really helps to not splotch around with the paint.

 

Keeping the paint thin is the key, it can be thinner than brush applied as you can lay a coat down in seconds instead of minutes, by the time you have based 10 you can go straight back and recoat it drys that fast.

 

I tried something last night that I want to share with everyone. Maybe I'll make a tutorial thread if enough people are interested in the specifics.

For my wife's Sylvaneth army we want to really go for that "Life"-theme, which means: Where the Slyvaneth are there is life.
There is a recurring visual element y'all probably know from comics and movies (especially manga and anime) that has some evil entities causing an aura of rapid decay around them, and the powerful good entity walks around and in its very footsteps there are suddenly flowers blooming and such stuff. Rapid growth wherever they move because they radiate life.

So that's where we want to go, so will will try and do flower meadow bases for that army.

So the meadow is task #1. As you know if you follow my blog, I am doing grassy bases using my Grass Master AKA Flock Box AKA electrostatic device, which is fine.

Task #2 is trickier: the flowers. I _could_ buy ready-to-use tufts for flowers, but it is hard to get them in the length I would like (6mm+) and it is also hard to get more than 2-3 colors/shapes, especially for a low price.


More soon..... (no time right now to post.)

 

Another problem with pre-made tufts is that I would have to place them in between the meadow so I would have to leave spots open or cut them free in the grass to place the flowers.

So I had that idea to maybe just use colored flock and put that onto the finished grass. I once saw someone in a YT video doing that with very fine (white) sand to do some white flowers.
The technique is to put some PVA glue on a brush, touch the tips of the grass with it and then just put the sand on there and let it dry.

So far so good but... I wasn't quite happy with how it looked to be honest. Nice enough but... the sand grains often look like dots. I wanted to have something more leaf-like.
I considered using moss flock and somehow paint it with different colors but.. that looks too mossy and most of it is just too big.

My next step was to look up my favourite flock company to get some ideas. The stuff manufactured by Noch here in Germany is high quality, easy to get via Amazon or in model train stores or even some toy stores and there is a lot of different products.
They don't have colored flock to use as flowers, but they have many different sizes of flock to use for the ground to make it look like forest floor or fallen leaves and all that stuff.

I noticed a very cheap bag of Noch meadow mix, 42g for a few bucks on Amazon. It looked like it contained different colors and like it might be the right size. So I ordered it and it arrived two days later. If it hadn't been of use for that purpose I would have been able to use it for a lot of other stuff, and it was cheap.

...but it was useful!
It contains a bit too much green for my taste, but the aforementioned method works well with it, it is very light so even if you apply a bit more of it, it doesn't press the gras down.
You can use it to create the impression of blooming gras.
....but I wanted to create red and yellow and blue flowers and there aren't that many particles i there that aren't some tone of green...

I thought: Maybe I can paint this?
So I took a piece of paper, put a small drop of paint on it, and then put the flock on it until it had soaked up the paint. Then I just moved it around a bit on the piece of paper and between my fingers until there was no liquid color left. It clumps a bit but not too severe.
And indeed the material is paintable! In fact it looks quite cool because the particles have different color and aren't completely covered with paint either, which makes it look more natural.

I tried yellow, red, and blue. My Army Painter yellow is pretty thin so that didn't work well. I added some red to it and created an OK looking orange that way. I will try again with another yellow soon.
Blue and red look cool, although a bit darker than the color looks on a model. So it is recommended to use relatively bright colors here.

I then applied the still not completely dry flower petals to the grass by just pressing my finger on it so it sticked there, and then touching the PVA drops on the grass blades. Easy. You can also let it dry and put it into a small container for later use. Works the same way.

There was some of the material of all colors still stuck to my finger or the paper so I just put it all together into one small container.
Judging by the amount or material used for my test I think it could cover literally hundreds of bases completely using that one 42g bag, you need tiny amounts. Really efficient!

I'll post a picture of my test base soon.