I love the theme and I love the scheme. I cant wait to hear the homebrew!
Awesome start to the bearer!
I really like how you painted that carnosaur! The purple looks fantastic... as does the base!
Great job on the water-ripple effects emanating from the clawed foot, that is a beautiful touch.
Thank you both so much!
You may need an undercoat to establish opacity on the barroth blue
May be, or at least a couple layers of it, since it's such a thin paint. It's the color I used as the basis for the carnosaur's stripes, before I washed over it, and it definitely took a few applications, but it's such a lovely color!
I hoped to post more this month, but one of my Thursdays (the only day I can really sit down and paint) was eaten up by being stuck at work for parent-teacher conferences (and no parents showed up, surprising none of us). But I did finish the Astrolith Bearer this week! Not sure when I'll be able to get nice lightbox photos for it, but here's some I took at the table (which also happened to be taken up by a bunch of nerd themed wax melts that day, don't mind them)
The little dial of the astrolith itself was a bit of an experiment. I couldn't make the
entire thing gold, but I didn't want to do stone either, so I tried mixing some paints with pearlescent mixing medium that I bought a huge bottle of for a separate project I never got around to, just to see what sort of effect it would make. My camera unfortunately doesn't do it justice, but it flashes really neatly in the light. At first I tried mixing it with regular paint, but going over it with a wash afterwards just ruined the color. So my next thought was, what would happen if I mixed it with a contrast instead? The result you see here is a little bit of Aethermatic Blue, Akhelian Green, Contrast Medium, and the pearlescent paint medium.
Feeling a little bit of paint fatigue though, I'm excited to be able to move on to something else-- since it's technically not my army (though I'm sure he'd be happy to share), I don't want to start and half-finish a bunch of things all at once, and actually finish one chunk at a time. So next up was the old box of skinks! Some of them were built but attached to slotted square bases, so first I had to de-base them, and then I put the rest of the box together. He wanted all of them with shields and melee weapons. but I tried to make some variety in their poses and which hand was holding what. With all these shields they'll be a great way to show off their unique cohort symbol!
Of course I can't take same sort of time I spent on the Carnosaur and Astrolith Bearer for
every unit so I'm excited to try the "slapchop" technique on these guys to speedpaint them. This army is eventually going to have a lot more skinks, not just these. I'm imagining their scheme will be quite simple, blue with purple head frills or something. The one in the middle with his frill and sword raised is supposed to be a sort of champion or leader type so I'll probably add some more little bits and bobs from my Saurus Knight sprues to make him stand out more.
And, finally... yesterday was the last day to donate/vote in the painting contest, so the results were announced today. I won! Some of my friends spoke to me afterwards as if it had been a foregone conclusion, even though the individual donation amounts were kept secret and I had a late start, and that kind of made me a little uncomfortable. It's been a long time since I've had real self-esteem issues with my work, I'm generally pleased with the things I make even when I can see room for improvement, but I know I still have a lot of that room for improvement when it comes to
this stuff, and there were other entries that I felt were at least as good as mine was in terms of technique/skill. I guess I'm still not sure how to respond when the reception to something I've made is so disconnected to my own perception of it. I'm definitely proud of my Carnosaur, but he's certainly not perfect. I'm excited to see where I can go from here, though!
But enough of the introspection, sorry for carrying on, enjoy this picture of the Carnosaur with his new Astrolith-bearing brother in arms!
This upcoming week is our fall break and my husband and I will be out of town all week visiting our families, so it'll be a little while before I'll have updates on the skinks, but I'm real excited for those!
