Vylka Fenrika - Test Model

As you may know from a couple of previous posts, my brother is a Space Wolf player who doesn't paint a lot. Or, you know, at all. So I've been trying to come up with a quick and easy way to paint his troops for him. The idea is to airbrush the armour and then let him finish the details. With that in mind, here's the test bloodclaw!

For a model that takes maybe 30 minutes to paint, he doesn't look too bad. All the details are painted with a simple basecoat, wash, drybrush formula, except for the metal (no drybrush), and the face (extra highlighting). I've already airbrushed 4 more grey hunters for my brother, so hopefully he'll get round to painting some of his own later this month. And, if not, maybe I will if I find the time.

This guy was actually finished a while back, but I didn't have time to post him until now. At the moment I'm still working on a bunch of elves (first batch is finished, second batch is under way) and until they're done all other projects have been halted. My poor Eldar will have to wait a little longer for some love.

Anyway, I hope you like this model. Until next time, happy painting!

Here be Dragons!

Title gave it away, didn't it? Yep, it's a dragon.

Potato shot from above. I need a better camera.

Look at that egg!

Or maybe it's just a really round, blue rock...

 Disassembled for posting - all those bits pin together!

I finished this piece a short while ago and had a lot of fun trying out new things, especially with an airbrush. By far my favourite detail, though, is the egg. I wanted to give it a mottled look as many real eggs have to aid camouflage, but I did make it blue because hey, it's a dragon egg and they don't actually need to hide from anything. In any case it was a lot of fun and gave me a great idea for a whole army painted like this which I hope to try over the summer.

Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to warn you about poor quality resin and how much I hate it. Seriously, this thing broke so much I almost gave up on it. And when the little pieces broke they didn't just snap off - they shattered into dust. Luckily it didn't detract too much from the dragon, just made it look more battle-worn and aged, but it was a huge pain. Some pieces even managed to break during posting despite careful bubblewrapping and tons of packing peanuts. As this model was bought from eBay, I'm thinking it may not have been a proper one from Forge World (hey, mistakes happen), which might explain its fragility. My friend's Sicarian tank certainly never shatters (can bricks of plastic even do that?). In any case, if you're buying resin try to buy the good stuff and be wary of eBay. At least if you buy Forge World you'll have some excellent customer service to rely on should things go wrong.

Anyway, until next time, happy painting!

Space Marines!

Well it was fun while it lasted, but as predicted I couldn't keep the one update per week rate I'd accidentally established. So here we are five weeks later with another post! (Let's try to be positive about this.)

With the arrival of the new Space Marine codex I thought I'd share some Ultramarines I worked on a few months back and never got round to posting. They're from the Assault on Black Reach box so they're fairly basic, but I wanted to see if I could do them to a reasonable tabletop standard in a short space of time. They took less than a week, including the shoulder pad icons which are all individually freehanded (because the friggin' GW transfers don't actually fit a normal marine - grr!).

Anyway I hope you like them. On their way are a dragon and some more Astartes goodness - already photographed, just have to get them up here - and I have on my workbench a whole heap of elves and eldar that should be finished soon.

So for the next five weeks, happy painting!