Campaign Characters

Every DnD campaign needs some protagonists, and the most dedicated protagonists need fantastic models to represent them. Here are two!

This character comes from the tribes but he's taken up adventuring for reasons best known to himself. Maybe it's the impressive amount of gold you can acquire by slaying monsters and raiding tombs in the jungle. He was painted mostly with Contrast paints and because of the funny angle of his pose is really hard to take a suitable photograph of!

This dwarf has a wandering spirit that has taken him far from his mountain home. This was one of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure of painting - an absolutely stunning model packed with character and beautifully proportioned. I definitely want to get one for myself at some point. While a lot of people like dynamic poses of the jungle barbarian above I'm a big fan of more static, classic poses like this dwarf. Like the above, he was painted mostly with Contrast paints, which are great for browns. I think I mentioned this before but if you want to paint wood, leather, or anything that calls for a lot of different brown tones, then Contrast is a great tool to have.

I decided to work on my non-metallic metal for both of these guys. I used contrast paints for the gold but the steel was ordinary brushwork, and is my favourite NMM silvery metal I've ever done. I'm especially proud of the barbarian's sword and can't wait to do some more!

Anyway, I hope you like them. And I hope the players whose characters these will represent like them too.

Until next time, happy painting!

Slapdash Dwarf Thunderers Part 2

Waaay way back in this blog I introduced my slapdash dwarves with a unit of 10 thunderers. I'm sure you'll agree 10 is hardly enough for a dwarf army, and fortunately I had some more collected from Battle for Skull Pass sets! I painted these guys ages ago and completely forgot to share them, but better late than never I suppose.

These are all my thunderers, including the 10 from the earlier post, above. As you can see, I have a third champion masquerading as a rank and file troop in the back to make two units of 14, but I'm very happy with them nonetheless.

I'm also trying out my old photo background which I cut to fit into my lightbox. I think it's a good change, but I'll have to be on the lookout for some slightly darker card as it looks more grey than black.

Finally, you might have noticed there's a new feature on the blog - a contact form! As I mentioned in my previous post - I've decided to start taking on some commissions again to support my hobby, and now there's a way to actually get in touch with me if you're interested in having me paint something for you. While there are lots of examples of my work and style on this blog to give you an idea of what to expect if you commission me, I'll be painting some new models specifically to show the quality I aim for with commissions (definitely not slapdash!). They'll be coming up shortly.

Until next time, happy painting!

Slapdash Dwarf Cannon

With only a few models left to complete for my slapdash dwarf army, here are the first of my warmachines:

These models were painted a long time ago, but as warmachines now have bases in The Ninth Age I needed to source some 60mm round ones to finish the off, which I have finally done. As the crew were already based I decided to leave them serparate.

The cannon themselves aren't the best - they were painted long before the crews one lazy day when I just felt like slapping paint on something. I probably should go back and touch up the metal with some washes and another highlight, but that's not really in the slapdash spirit, so they'll probably get left as they are. A couple of models have also collected some fantastic dust (the rest have only collected respectable dust), which is yet another reminder that I need to invest in a proper display cabinet. (They clean up just fine, but I've too many things to work on without retaking photos, so they'll just have to be a permanent reminder to also dust better before photos.)

Anyway, I hope you like them. I'm just looking forward to having a fully painted army for once.

Until next time, happy painting!

Playing with Contrast Paints

AAAAAAND WE'RE BACK!!!

Been away for a couple of weeks and all hell breaks loose in the painting world as Citadel Contrast Paints hit the shelves. Unfortunately I was out of the country when they came out so I'm a little late to the party, but I've had them on my painting table all day and can't wait to share the results.

I decided to prime up some spare dwarf models from my slapdash dwarf project to see how the Contrast Paints compare to my usual process. Here's how they came out:

They were grey this morning!

I used Snakebite Leather, Wyldwood, Warp Green, Fyreslayer Flesh, Skeleton Horde, mostly neat without medium due to my laziness and to see what I could do with undiluted paints. (Primer was VMC Black with a generous zenithal highlight of VMC Desert Tan.)

For speed I'm really pleased with how they turned out. The Snakebite Leather came out a little patchy - I was trying to add texture by blotching it on but next time I'll just keep it smooth. The Wyldwood is a little dark - that paint needs to be thinned with medium! (Actually I have a better recipe for dark leather with contrast but it didn't really keep with the slapdash colours.) I'm really impressed with the flesh and the green is great, but I would have liked to use a darker contrast green.

I've obviously painted the metallics with ordinary paints. I've also used washes here and there to darken areas I thought needed it and to give the beards slightly different tones (although it's only obvious on the champion). The flames and highlights on the candles are also ordinary paints and I think they work well with the contrasts.

When painting the skin and green, I also mixed a little VMC Ivory into the wet contrast paint to build some highlights before going over again with more contrast paint (thinned with medium for the flesh). I'm really pleased with this effect as it means I can get even brighter highlights than the undercoat beautifully blended with the contrast, and also work out any blotches that might be forming in the contrast paints. I look forward to refining this with future models.

In addition to painting some dwarves, I wanted to try out Skeleton Horde for painting, well, a horde of skeletons. If you recall my bone recipe is painfully slow and, while I have painted all the skeletons I need for my 4500pt army, I still have a bunch more in need of some love and I want to try a new - and faster - recipe with them. I decided to prime a tester with some VMC Desert Tan to see how using contrast might look. A little drybrushing after that and here's the result:

I was skeptical about Skeleton Horde having seen some less than impressive results online and in stores, but was delighted with how this guy came out. The bone is just one coat of Skeleton Horde over primer, and a light drybrush of VMC Dark Sand mixed with Ivory.

As you can see, the model is actually supposed to be a zombie (of sorts), being made from a spare, old-style skeleton body and GW zombie bits. The rest of the model (apart from the metal) is also painted with contrast paints, drybrushed the same as the bone, and for just a few minutes work it looks pretty damn good. (The eyes and teeth were picked out with Ivory and washed with Sepia.)

Overall I am thrilled with how these new paints work and I am very happy with my investment. The best part is, there'll be more colours coming - I'm waiting for the rest of my order to come through when the "big sellers" come back in stock. Until then I'll just be toying around with what I have, and I'm sure I'll have more to show you soon.

Until next time, happy painting!

Guard of the Slapdash King

Still working my way through the backlog of dwarves I need to photo. This time it's my King's Guard:

These are, of course, the longbeard/hammerer models from Games Workshop, but I intend to use them as King's Guard if/when I play with them as a T9A Dwarven Holds army. I decided the hammers and flat helmets looked too over the top (and a flat helmet just seems like a bad idea).

These guys got a bit more effort put into them, partly because they had more detail but also because my idea of "slapdash" has evolved as I become a (slightly) faster painter. That said, I was hoping to do the metal more quickly using the new gloss washes from GW (well, they were fairly new back when I started them!) but after a couple of tries I couldn't get it to settle right and went back to ye olde washes and more effort highlighting. The banner also got a lot of attention, freehanding the Hold's sigil as practice for my BSB and because a big banner like that deserves something extra. Totally worth it - I'm really proud of the result.

Overall these gorgeous models were great fun to make and paint. I don't really need a bigger unit, but I'd like to get my hands on just one more to make another champion to use as a character. (Actually I have another model in mind that might wind up replacing the leader of this unit, but that's for another time.) If the Ironbreaker models are as nice to play with as these I'm tempted to add them to the army...

Anyway, hope you like these guys. You can expect more dwarves in June. Until then, happy painting!

Return of the Slapdash Dwarves!

Some of you might have thought my slapdash army project forgotten, but we dwarves have long memories...

Welcome to another instalment of my speedily (and somewhat messily) painted dwarf army. Though it's been a while since I've posted any, they are very much an active project and are currently my most complete army! Over the next little while I will be dusting off those models I have neglected to take photos of and remedying that with my new photobooth.

To begin, here are my slapdash miners:

I loved painting these guys, especially the candles which make them really stand out from the rest of the army. The old Battle for Skull Pass set had so much character - despite the limitations I have a weakness for simple, mono-pose models like those dwarves and goblins. Somehow I have 18 of them with a command (and a second champion model pretending to be an ordinary miner near the back!) but I'm not quite sure how, as I thought I only ever had two sets of them (they came as a unit of 8 in the box - 5 regular and 3 command).

As I said, my dwarves are my most complete army right now. The only models I own that I have yet to paint are a unit of slayers, two war machines, and my characters. I hope to have the slayers and warmachines finished by the end of the summer, but the characters will take a little longer - they're a collection of metal models from various eras and I'd like to do them justice, even if it means they don't quite match the slapdash theme of the rest of the army.

Until next time, happy painting!

Slapdash Dwarf Warriors

So it's time for another update on the slapdash dwarves - the mostly BfSP army I'm working on. I'm pretty happy with the progress of the army, but how the hell do you paint these guys' eyes? Honestly I don't know which bit of the face is supposed to be the eye, which is supposed to be just face. In the end I decided just to paint the easiest bit as eyes, but if anyone's got a definitive answer I'd be interested in hearing it. Anyway - photos!

Next on the project list is some TT+1, some more vampires, some more TT+1, and actually updating the gallery! Until then, happy painting!

Slapdash Dwarf Heroes!

Some months ago I left you with a little teaser:

Now, wonder no more! The time has come to reveal what the model to the thunderer's left - the right hand side of the photo: confusing, I know - is. Drumroll please!...

It was, of course, a dwarf slayer! (OK, admittedly that wasn't much of a teaser. Next time it'll be harder, I promise.) Actually it was one of two dwarf slayers that have been sitting on my shelf waiting to be photographed for some time. Why have they been waiting? Well, I wanted to get them together with...

...their thane! This guy had been sitting almost complete for ages because I forgot how I painted the bases on the others. Eventually I decided to just come up with a scheme that matches closely enough and got him finished. Since then I've kept detailed records of my painting recipes for the army models, particularly my vampires because I really want them to look uniform. It's definitely worth having a record of what paints you used in what order if you're prone to experimenting with mixes!

These models, like most of the dwarves I own, are from the 7th edition starter kit Battle for Skull Pass and despite their simplicity I'm rather fond of them and pleased with how they came out. There's more to come on the dwarf front soon, but before then I think we'll be seeing a little 40k. :)

Finally, some of you may have noticed the new tab at the top of this blog. That's right, I'm adding a gallery! I've been looking for instructions for one I like and finally decided I'd just learn some simple code. Right now it's just a prototype, but I'll be filling it with photos as soon as I get a chance.

That's all for now. Thanks for looking and, as always, happy painting!

Slapdash Dwarves

So in addition to my vampires, I've been working on my BfSP dwarves that have been collecting dust for a while. I'd painted some of them before but decided I didn't like the colour scheme, so stripped them down and came up with a new one. The idea was to make them simple and quick to paint, so they're a little messy and I don't think they're the same standard as the vampires, but they look decent on the table. Anyway, photos!

(What's that to the left of that last dwarf? Coming soon...)

As you can see, I'm still using my vampire book as a background because I'm too lazy to put up the cloth one every time I'm taking pictures. Luckily it contrasts well with the green.

This is the first unit of about three BfSP sets, so got my work cut out but at least they don't take long to do. Until next time, happy painting!