Blog Deer Riffs' thinking, inking and skinking.

And all you need is godlike magical powers to pull of such a paint job! Her army is insanely amazing.


She definitely does show the potential of using a bright and vibrant colour palette.

 

@Bowser, thank you for the compliment and your very understated description of @Fiona's work. Saying she had great success is like saying lava is hot. My goodness, I am in awe of the skill, knowledge, time, effort and dedication that went in to those models. They are otherworldly.

@Seraphage, I'm blown away. I think that's the nicest comment I've ever received. Thank you so much.

@Ritual: says the guy with the amazing feather cloaked skink!

 

A Priest is entitled to a varying wardrobe as much as the next Skink!

 

Now I'm just imagining this skink standing in front of the wardrobe pondering their outfit choice. "Should I wear the snakes today or the feathers?"

 

A few work in progress photos of the Bastiladon. Nearly done now. Should be all finished up by midweek. Excuse the fingers. In the last shot I did a bit of an experiment with weathering the painting detail. I'm really happy with the effect and will probably apply it to all the ornaments across the model.

 

Love the weathering effect! The paint looks old and worn off! How did you pull it off?

 

This looks awesome! That is deep blue in the shell is great. And the details on the solar engine look fantastic.

 

Your carnosaur is beautifully painted, I really like how you painted the green scales.

I also really like the amount of pure detail you put into the solar engine's inner workings. The jade devices on the photos are beautiful, and the little lizard-heads on the sides I never even noticed before I saw your up-close pictures. Thanks for posting!

 

@Jorgik. I'm really happy with the weathering effect. I did it by painting it all pristine first and the a very firm one stroke dry brush with rinox hide brown and then the same again with scar white. Totally random that it came out like that, but I guess real weathering would be like that too.

@Bowser and @Warden, thank you for the kind comments. In the end I think I had more fun painting the details on the solar engine than I did painting the bastiladon!

 

Hi everyone, I've had a good couple of days of modelling and painting and gotten a lot done.
It's so nice getting back into the hobby. Having something relaxing to come home to after a day at work is so rewarding. Previously, after a day at work, I'd probably just sit on the couch and play video games or watch something on Netflix. Now, I come home and I get to paint for an hour or two, be creative, imaginative and actually have something tangible and real that I've made in my hands at the end of that time.

It's incredibly satisfying to me in a way that video games weren't. I'm sure that I could argue that beating a new level on a game is tangible and creative, but it doesn't feel like I've used what little free time I have in a constructive way. Immersing myself in the painting hobby and AoS world, and to an extent writing and maintaining this blog feels like I am improving myself as a person by cultivating an artistic side that is completely unrelated to my day job.

I've been listening to podcasts, watching youtube tutorials and trying new things, thanks to this hobby, and, in no small part, thanks to the wonderful community on lustria-online. I don't think I know a single person in my social circle who is into the miniature painting hobby, or tabletop gaming hobbies. So it is wonderful to be able to come here and seek opinions, advice and feedback from people who have been immersed in the hobby much longer than I.

One of my best friends is back in town at the moment after living over seas for a few years. I told him that I'd been getting into painting miniatures and I showed him some of my stuff. He asked me why I stuck to the lizardmen if I'm not playing the game, why not paint whatever I wanted instead? Superhero busts of war figurines or art pieces that aren't reliant on the game. At the time when talking to him, I wasn't really sure and I said that Warhammer was the brand I knew as a kid and was what I was used to, but I've thought about since that conversation and that's only part of the reason.

I think the bigger reason why I've stuck with painting warhammer, AoS miniatures and not branched out into those other spheres is the community. The AoS community, and more specifically the seraphon community on this website and on social media in general is what has kept me from branching out. It's a welcoming community, a sharing and generous community. I'm glad to be a part of it. So, thank you!

 

It is a great community! Too bad you don't have anyone in your circle to try the game out with, but maybe you can find some people at a local game store.

 

Philosophising aside, here's what I've been up to this week.

I've finished the base on my carnosaur and with that it is display/game ready:



I've finished off the Bastiladon except for the base - I've run out of the textured paint so I'll have to restock on that before finishing that off completely, but I had a lot of fun painting this model. There are definitely elements on this model that I would like to improve, such as the crystal and I would like to get better at my colour theory, I feel that, despite the pink and red colours the model is overwhelmingly "cold" in palate. Also, next one I paint, I'll definitely do much more sub-assembly work:



Then it was on to the saurus warriors and knights of the start collecting box. I got all of these assembled - the knight's I've assembled just the cold-ones and the riders legs, separately I've assembled the knights' torsos, heads, weapon arm and shield arm without shield. I've primed the cold one part but not the riders' torsos. I've primed and base coated the warriors - and here is where I've run into some problems: I'm not sure they go with the pink skinks. I'm not sure that a casual observer would be able to tell that they are from the same army as the skinks.

 

So I tried to lighten up the purple to get it closer to the pink skink colour and then they just kind of looked grey, so I panicked and reundercoated the flag-bearer pink and gave it an ink wash - and it looked so dreadful.




It doesn't look half so bad in this photo, but in reality the pink just does not work with the darkness of the saurus' scales. I've got to find some way to reconcile the pink of the skinks and the purple of the oldblood and get these models to a midpoint between the two. I want them to look like a cohesive army but the pink on the saurus warriors I just don't think will work like it did on the skinks.

I've ruined the flag-bearer with the pink and the wash, I'll see if I can paint over it, but I'll probably have to strip it down. I'm much happier with the progress on the drummer model and the photo of the flag model before the poor decision to pink him. This really got me down. I felt like was doing some very nice work on the bastiladon, just goes to show I'm still learning.

Lastly I've tried my hand at some green stuff. I've used the paint-on green stuff for filling gaps, but this was my first time using green stuff proper. I would see it in White Dwarf magazines as a kid, but it was never an advertised games workshop product. It was this almost mythical material that expert painters and sculptors would nonchalantly mention in their articles "oh I just used some green stuff to sculpt individual leg hairs on my ork warboss to give him a more textured look".
I could see it on their photos, there was definitely green bits to their models, but I had absolutely no idea what it was. I remember trying to recreate the effect using blue-tack coated in superglue on some space marines and creating a hideous amalgam of machine and blob. It was meant to be the imperium's finest, but it looked like it crawled out of the deepest pits of chaos.

Now, I finally got my hands on some green stuff - or rather, it got all over my hands. This stuff is not at all how I imagined it from the pictures in those well-worn childhood White Dwarfs. It's sticky and cumbersome to sculpt and took an incredibly long time to harden. It went terribly. I'm not even going to post a pic of the snake-priest because I'm just going to do that again, but here is my attempt at bulking up one of the saurus knights' torsos to make them into a scar veteran on cold one. Any and all comments, criticism, advice and help is very much needed and appreciated!

 

The carnosaur and bastiladon are incredible! I think the purple saurus look pretty good with the pink skink. Green stuff is tough to work with, but looks like you're doing quite well with it so far!

 

Love the carnosaur base!
Regarding the taurus and skinks, you can paint them exactly as you do with the skinks and then apply one (or more) light coats of shade to tone the purple down. Other thing you could do is using the same last-highlight colour on both taurus and skinks, such as Ushabti Bone or Screaming Skull (bone looks pretty good as highlight on pretty much any colour)

 

Perhaps dark purple Saurus, with pink spines, and maybe a few pink scales ?

 

I couldn't agree with you more ! I love it as well, never been as active to the hobby as nowdays and this site is one serious reason for it

 

Hi all. The weather has turned a little nasty here down under, so I've been unable to prime any of my new toys
This week I have persevered with my purple sauruses (sauri?) I've got them to a point where I'm happy with the way they look and the process I went through to get them there.
I tried out some new paints including one of the new GW 'edge' paints, which initially disappointed me because it said it was a purple but in actual fact made the model appear grey. I ended up only using this paint for my very extreme highlights. A slightly different process I took with the saurus models was to dry brush the scales. Because I was batch painting the whole box (see conga-line below) - doing one painting step on one model after the other before moving on to the next step - I felt that edge highlighting every scale in one painting session would make my head explode.



In future I think I will tweak my process slightly. At the moment my skin painting process is:
1. base coat.
2. wash.
3. base coat again but not going into the recesses filled by the wash
4. mid tone highlight.
5. highlight.
6. highest highlight.









I think I can speed up the process and blend my colours better by instead taking this approach:
1. base coat.
2. mid tone highlight with dry brush
3. highlight.
4. wash.
5. highest highlight.

What do other people think? What's your work flow?





I still need to black-line the rims of the bases and touch up a few spots on the saurus, oooh - add the shields! And fix up the abomination I created with the banner bearer.

The Bastiladon is also finally based and can join his buddies in my growing Pink Skink inc. army.






I think I could have done something a bit more exciting with the base - I think that overall this is an area of my model making that I'd like to improve. Back in my youth it used to be a two step process of covering your bases in PVA glue and then dipping them in green flock. Apparently all battles that happened in the grim dark future of the 40,000 millennium took place on pristine green meadows. I've seen some great bases on this forum. I think I need to up my game.Cork board seems to be a valuable commodity...

 

Moving forward from here, I have various bits and pieces in differing stages of completion.

The saurus warriors are nearly done need their shields and touch ups.
Saurus knights,blot toad and skink snake priest/chief are primed and ready to paint
Chameleon Skinks x5, Eternity Warden and Ripperdactyls x3 are assembled and ready to prime.
Slann Starmaster, Saurus Guard and another Chameleon Skinks x5 are awaiting assembly.

So, my army is growing.

Slann Starmaster,
Skink Starpriest,
Skink priest/chief,
Eternity Warden,
Old blood on Carnosaur
Bastiladon with solar engine
Skink skirmishers 6x blow pipes. 6x clubs 12x javelins (I realise that I'd probably have to get more of these little dudes and do them all with blow pipes to make them viable)
Saurus warriors x12 with spears and shields
Saurus knights x8 with spears and shields (1 converted to be a scar veteran on cold one)
Saurus guard x15 with polearms
Ripperdactyls x3 with 1 blot toad
Chameleon skinks x10 with blow pipes

Phew! When I write it down like that it's a lot of stuff! Is this at all viable to transform into some kind of coherent list? Looking at it now, there are a lot of saurus units considering that I initially thought I wanted a predominantly skink army. I kind of just wanted to paint one of everything and see what I liked painting and what I didn't. I think I'll buy more skinks at some stage and probably more rippers too and soon I might even play a game...