Blog Strewart's Painting Log

[strewart]

Well, now I am actually going to need my LM in a more complete state (4500 points) for an upcoming survival style campaign, and given how busy (and mostly slack) I have been, I have decided to start a painting log to hopefully motivate myself to get some serious work done. This thread will work to hopefully showcase my whole army and with any luck see serious progress on it over the next month or two. So many of my half finished projects are collecting dust now, I've hardly touched a brush since I finished the carnosaur.

For reference, here are my old threads with work I have posted so far:

Converting Saurus to be more dynamic

First test model (Scheme will be blue and orange, not volcanic on the second page)

Stegadon thread, minus howdah

WiP custom energy palanquin for a Slann (forgeworld Slann)

And finally, my favourite model so far;
Carnosaur!!

Since I've been slack for a fair while, my aim now is to just get some more saurus done and practice my (somewhat complex) technique. I was going to post some more pics, but my camera battery is completely dead and at 2am I don't want to look for another. Just assembled 6 more saurus, will hopefully begin painting them tomorrow and over the weekend and get some more pics up soon.

After that, I have an interesting engine of the gods conversion in the works which I am dead keen to dust off and get finished. By then I should be thinking about an army list so I will have a better idea of what I need to work on.

Hopefully I don't get distracted by the sexy forgeworld daemon prince sitting on my desk asking to be painted, or the hordes of Mantic undead I have coming. Expect to see much more soon, or kick me up the arse!

 

[n810]

I just look through all your lava Lizies and I have to say that they are looking pretty good.
Hope you get some batteries for your camera soon.

 

[strewart]

Charged up with new batteries, 6 saurus on their way. The blue areas are 'done' as far as my scheme goes, but I'm not happy with them. Might highlight a bit more on top of the ink.

Hopefully will do orange part today or tomorrow.



(Full size image)

 

[Marsdreamer]

Things are coming along great man, I hope to see much more of your army painted.

The Carnosaur looks bad-friggin-ass too
If you don't mind me asking, how did you paint him?

 

[strewart]

Cheers mate. The carnosaur had a fairly simply base pallete actually. Scab red, blood red, mechrite orange and bad moon yellow. He started almost as a sketch; I basecoated scab red then just did 4 simple highlight layers of approximately where I wanted the different colours up to yellow on the most raised areas. From there I used various mixtures of the paints (Think I ended up with 7-8 layers of paint in total) to blend the areas better. Also to aid in blending I made liberal use of black ink, red ink, and devlan mud almost between every layer of highlight to set what shade the model was at that step and blend the darker areas before adding a lighter one.

The scales were a bit simpler, just highlighted from black up to codex grey and finally fortress grey then added devlan mud as a 'dirtier' and badab black to get in the cracks. Sorry I can't give you more exact step by step processes (I'm not trying to keep it a secret! ), but it has been nearly a year and I never wrote anything down. I literally just made it up as I went. After each layer dried I decided whether an ink/wash would be best or a lighter layer of highlight. It took a lot of work but I loved painting him and am pretty happy with the result.

Right further update, I decided that highlighting individual scales 7 times for some 100 saurus and skinks, maybe more, would get extremely tedious and frustrating thus I decided to try to speed up the process using drybrushing and washes instead.



Unfortunately, I do not like the result at all, hes got nothing on the skink I painted last year. I couldn't do it to my army. So it looks like I will indeed be highlighting each individual layer, but I should be able to get it down to 2-3 layers of careful highlighting after just drybrushing and washing up to blood red. I'm going to focus on getting 1 saurus 100% finished before going back and working on the others, so hopefully in a couple of days I will have better looking pictures than this thing.

 

[Marsdreamer]

Are you going for a fire look on the scales? Kinda like the Carnosaur? There has got to be an easier way to do that rather than highlighting each individual scale!.. I would die

 

[strewart]

Yeah a kinda really intense bright striking magma look. The skink test model thread is exactly what I am aiming for. He had 7 layers of highlight plus a couple of ink/wash. :S

Its going to be a veeerry long process making this army. Thus I have no further progress so far, and I'm too drunk now to make any more.

I'm surprised so few comments on the threa.d Several hundred views though.

 

[Barotok]

Lookin' good man! I'm anxious to see the finished product. Once I have a full army, I might decide to go back and do another up that takes forever to paint. But even then, I'm taking forever to paint the one I have, just for different reasons.

 

[Craken]

I not sure of the color scheme Honestly, the yellow gives the blue a strange contrast. That being said though, somehow it works well on the test skink. Anyways Hope to see more progress soon.

 

[Marsdreamer]

You could try doing the reverse colors of the skink's scales. IE, light outer edges to darker inner edges as opposed to darker outer edges and lighter inner edges.

I haven't done this on scales before, but if I did, this is how I would do it.

Mechrite Red over the scales
Drybrush Dheneb Stone brushing the scales somewhat heavily, but maintaining a red center
Drybrush Blazing Orange lightly (it will only become most prominent on the Dheneb Stone areas of the scales)
Drybrush Dheneb Stone again, this time much lighter so that only the edges get coated.
Drybrush Sunburst Yellow lightly. (This will have the same effect as the orange, only being most prominent on the Dheneb Stone portion of the scales)

And if you really wanted to, drybrush Dheneb stone AGAIN, even lighter, and then add a thin drybrush of white.

I dunno if that would work, ( I may test it on a random Lizardmen mini) but it would certainly be faster than individually highlighting each scale. Also, I think if done correctly it could look pretty good.

 

[Slanny*are*tranny]

just found this by randomly searching strewart if you dont mind thats what ill call you now are u still doing this or are you like me not motivated

 

[strewart]

Yeah.... To start with I had trouble getting motivated, then the thread disappeared into the depth of the board and I really forgot about it, or hoped it would be burried for good since I didn't get much done. Its a combination of motivation, being very busy with other things in life, and when I do sit down and hobby have been assembling a huger undead army and more recently a Dark Eldar army. However, looking at what I have posted to this thread, there are a few things I can add to it.

I have started making a terradon unit out of Tyranid gargoyles, saurus parts and greenstuff. It seems everything I attempt for this damn army is extremely time consuming and rather difficult, good for my skills but bad for motivation. A few WiP shots:





Scultping the scales is the worst and hardest part.

And here are a few more saurus painted.





I also have about 20 more in various stages of painting, 2 kroxigor 70% done and more skinks done, but no photos. Not all that interesting.


I am actually right now working on LM again, so maybe its a good thing to see this thread again even if I very much underachieved. Right now I am converting two salamanders from razordons, which will hopefully look cool. Straight after that I will be working on (and have already started) 2 or possibly 3 unit fillers for saurus, have a couple of nice ideas. After that? There are a LOT of things that could use some attention so who knows. Plus I am planning to buy a massive orc army in around april when Mantic releases their orcs. Some of the early shots I have seen look awesome, and they are aiming for better than their undead which was a fantastic range of models.

So yeah... Thats where I am at. Moving forward, but very slowly, and constantly getting distracted by other things. Looks like I have at least one stalker fan.

 

[Josh Ichimaru]

Yeah.... To start with I had trouble getting motivated, then the thread disappeared into the depth of the board and I really forgot about it, or hoped it would be burried for good since I didn't get much done. Its a combination of motivation, being very busy with other things in life, and when I do sit down and hobby have been assembling a huger undead army and more recently a Dark Eldar army. However, looking at what I have posted to this thread, there are a few things I can add to it.

I have started making a terradon unit out of Tyranid gargoyles, saurus parts and greenstuff. It seems everything I attempt for this damn army is extremely time consuming and rather difficult, good for my skills but bad for motivation. A few WiP shots:





Scultping the scales is the worst and hardest part.

And here are a few more saurus painted.





I also have about 20 more in various stages of painting, 2 kroxigor 70% done and more skinks done, but no photos. Not all that interesting.


I am actually right now working on LM again, so maybe its a good thing to see this thread again even if I very much underachieved. Right now I am converting two salamanders from razordons, which will hopefully look cool. Straight after that I will be working on (and have already started) 2 or possibly 3 unit fillers for saurus, have a couple of nice ideas. After that? There are a LOT of things that could use some attention so who knows. Plus I am planning to buy a massive orc army in around april when Mantic releases their orcs. Some of the early shots I have seen look awesome, and they are aiming for better than their undead which was a fantastic range of models.

So yeah... Thats where I am at. Moving forward, but very slowly, and constantly getting distracted by other things. Looks like I have at least one stalker fan.

That has to be the awsomest teradon i have EVER seen, Im far to lazy for converting but these are soo good im tempted to try it.

 

[Didymus]

I might have to steal that terradon idea.

 

[strewart]

Thanks guys, yeah I'm pretty happy with the terradon. Very time consuming though, I plan to make a unit of 10 eventually but will take a long time I think.

Anyway, I bought a scar vet on foot ages ago, and thought recently if I ever use one I will just use my Chakax model. So what to do with the Scar Vet? Make him into a unit filler for my saurus! On a 50mm base, he will stand out as a nice model (it is a good scar vet sculpt) and count as 4 saurus! I'm actually not happy with parts of it.. Still don't really like the moss effect, and a few minor errors need fixing, but overall good enough for the standard I'm aiming for.

 

[stormshaft]

That Teradon/Gargoyle is WICKED.
Looks utterly badass. Well done sir, well done.

 

[lustria]

HEY STREWART
what ure doing is absolutly amazing, i think that if i had to paint all those scales for just one regiment i would completly give up for stleats 2 years, it would be awsome if we could have a pic summary( all your army in one pic with some closeups of what you like most

just a suggestion
Lustria

 

[Total AnOrky]

Great idea with the terradons. I just happen to have some Tyranids lying around and may be able to loot this idea for terradons as well.