Blog Caprasauridae's Lizardmen (Woogity's Rex! )

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Right update on the "black" method...

It does work however I'm not fully happy with the effect, after a couple of test runs on the models I've discovered that you have to use quite a light grey to get any effect as the watered down black just floods the grey and it's almost impossible to see. But it does give very subtle highlights and it's quick and easy, I guess you could just keep highlighting up with lighter and lighter until you found a brightness that works after you add the black, that's one good thing about the tech. it is very forgiving. I'd use it if I was painting say 40+ N. Goblins for I was quite new to painting.

That said I think for the goblins I'm doing I'm going to go with a quite a stark (read:sloppy) edge highlight of very light greys. I'll post some pics. of both highlights when I get a chance but I'm not sure that you will be able to see the highlights on the black washed on. We will see

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Hi, just a little update, I wanted to post the pictures of my Saurus "horde" so far. It's only 10 of them, though. I know, I know, I'm a really really slow painter, but I did paint some characters for my Tomb Kings too, so that has eaten up quite a lot of my painting time. Excuses... Still, I think they look really nice even in these numbers.





I wanted to try to paint different colours for the shields, so in this bunch they have four variations. Here are examples of all of them:



Now, 30 to go...

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Looking great! The mixed shield colours look good; it works well. Will you stick to 4 colours, and scatter them throughout the unit, or are you going to have lots of different colours?

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Thanks, Mossy! About the shield colours... First I thought I had all the colours I could do from my paints that wouldn't be too close to the colours of the Saurus Warriors, but now that I started thinking, I can do many different ones. Most likely I'll try some green ones, too and maybe a brighter red... Oh, and black and white... It all depends on the mood I have when I start painting a shield.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Looking good on the Saurus, I like the mixed shield colours as well.

Have you tried giving them an orange wash on the orange bits? GW have recently added one to their range...

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat800004a&prodId=prod1500244a

I have no idea if it'll make them look better or not, but it could be interesting. If you have a GW store nearby maybe you could take in a model and ask if you can test it with the store paints.

Yeah, for my Night Gobbos I just spray black, do a single highlight of Codex Grey, which looks a bit overly bright, so I just go over it with a Badab Black wash and it tones down the highlights and brings the whole model together nicely with a nice matt finish. It's a good method for robes with lots of creases and stuff, probably not so good on scales or skin (unless the skin has a lot of crease-like texture to it).

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

So trying to do salamanders like fire salamanders ex(http://www.caudata.org/cc/images/species/Salamandra/Salamandra_c5LARGE.jpg) so i used the new mechanicus standard grey with a wash of nuln oil over it to make it black but still have some highlights and i got to say i'm stuck. looks like they are black unless you look at them under a lamp then it just barely has any kind of highlights. Doing more gray over it as a highlight makes it look gray instead

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

I use the Ogryn Flesh wash on top of Solar Orange Foundation and then highlight with Blazing Orange. Ogryn Flesh is quite brown, with an orange tint, but I think it meshes really well with the Foundation colour. Did you mean I could try the new wash on top of Blazing Orange?

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

From looking at the fire salamander photo, I think that if you want to achieve that black finish, all you need to do is put a couple of gloss finish.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Yeah that's what I was thinking, I'm not sure if it'd actually make it better I'd just be interested to see the result. I like your orange, but to me it looks like it could use a bit more depth to it as the Saurus shields and scales both have quite a contrast between their shades and their highlights which looks really good, but it's making the orange look a tad flat to me. Though maybe that's just the images not doing the models justice.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

The images are not the best possible, but you are right that the contrast is much bigger in the shields. Maybe I'll buy the orange wash and perhaps an orange tinted dry colour too (Kindleflame, maybe). Another thing would be to use darker initial wash, Devlan Mud or Badab Black even. That's what I did with the shields. And used *lots* of it. Thanks for the ideas, AllSeeingSkink!

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Really liking the different shiled colours there. Keep it up!

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Thanks, Favored, I'll try, although the coming summer is distracting me...

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

So, partly because of a cold summer we had here in Finland, I managed to complete my first Saurus unit and I thought I'd share the pictures. I think 20 Warriors massed in one unit, complete with standards and all, looks really intimidating, I really like the feel they have!

So, here's the whole unit:



And this is what the opposing player sees when he's against my Lizardmen:



A side view of the unit, showing two more different shield colours than what I presented in the earlier picture:



And a special shot of the Command Group. Notice that the Standard Bearer is honoured with a unique (in my army, so far) black shield. The green "eye" of the standard needs some work, I only noticed that when I was taking the pictures. The Champion gave me troubles as I didn't really have a good idea on how to differentiate him from others. I didn't want to use radically different colour scheme, as I'm saving that for Scar-Vets. So I just gave him another hand weapon to represent his additional attack. The Musician was the worst of them all, I was really lost on how to paint the drum, and stupidly didn't fix the glue lines with Green Stuff, but just tried to scratch it to look like it was, well, beaten.



After painting plain Saurus' for so long, I was really happy to start working with the skinks, and I have six now painted and ready. Here I wanted to have some link to the colour scheme of the Saurus Warriors, but still different, so I took one step towards brighter colours. This means turquoise turns to light blue and orange to yellow. I know it's not according to the colour theory, but I'm quite happy with the result, even though they are almost the colours of the flag of Sweden (and Swedish Olympic athletes wore shirts with really similar colours on their entrance during the initiation ceremony):





At first, I wasn't sure how to paint the yellow, so I tried different techniques. First, I base painted the mini with Iyanden Darksun, washed it with Gryphonne Sepia and then painted over with Golden Yellow, but this looked too messy. Next I painted, over white primer, with Golden Sun, washed with the new Casandora Yellow and painted again with Golden Yellow. This was too bright, or rather, didn't give a good enough contrast between the light and dark areas. So, for the third miniature, I first painted with Golden Yellow, washed with Gryphonne Sepia and painted again with Golden Yellow. And was really happy with the results. The rest of the models have been painted with this third technique and all were given a glaze of Lamenter's Yellow. Here you can see all three different styles side by side, the rightmost being the one painted first, the middle one the second and the leftmost one the final:



Comments, questions and critique are all welcome. Thanks for your interest.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

I notice that one of the saurus has a red crest instead of blue. Accident?

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

That fully arrayed saurus unit looks awesome! Can't get over how cool the different colored shields look. Very well painted.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

No accident, elmoheadbutt, I wanted some variation among the lizards, so some are painted differently, i.e. some have blue "nose" and some orange and so forth. There is one that has fully orange head except the blue spikes, that is the most extreme. I'm not sure if it is a mark of the Old Ones or just some a bit rarer colour variation, we'll see how he fares in battle. There are also two warriors that have red bone spikes (and for some reason, they are both on the second row...), those are also made just for variations sake, like are the ones with bone coloured protrusions.

And thank you, FavoredoftheOldOnes, glad you like 'em! They were really fun to paint, but after those 20 they started to feel a bit tedious, so I'm really glad I can paint something else for a while.

Oh, and AllSeeingSkink, I did as you suggested and bought that Orange Wash, and it worked great! Really gave the orange more definition, so thanks for the tip.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Oh I love those skinks! I especially like how you have painted their heads, very unorthodox. Only thing I would suggest is to paint the crest a slightly darker nuance, maybe just a red/orange wash will do.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Thank you very much, totzro! Yeah, the crests were troublesome. Originally I was thinking of painting them red, but that wouldn't have worked really well. Orange wash is actually a nice idea, I could use the same I used for the Saurus Warriors. I'll try that, thanks for the tip.

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

Just a quick update. I have finished all 12 skinks and am really happy with the results. I followed totzro's advice and washed the crests with the new orange wash, Fuegan Orange and I think it draws more attention now, as it should. What do you guys think? (EDIT: Just noticed that the crest aren't actually that much different in the pictures, but that's because I just quickly took the pictures with bad lighting. In reality, they are clearly more orange than the yellow skin)



Next, I'm starting with these fellows:



They will probably take me a good while to paint, but after they are done, I have enough models for a 1200 points game. Yay! Any opinions, I'm going to paint them as showed earlier on this thread (page 2, I think) with yellow bottom and black scales, but I have troubles with the riders. Should they be the same turquoise/orange as the Saurus Warriors or somehow more special? And if special, do you have any suggestions?

 

Re: Caprasauridae's Lizardmen

The crests look great, much better.
And I must say that you have made a great job with your skink color scheme once again.

Good luck with the cold ones, imo those models are so damn ugly, what I hate the most is that they have this cancan effect with everyone looking in the same direction... and their claws just look weird.

They just have such a static pose, I think the old ones (that everyone hated back then) was better.