Painting Pestilence - Blightking WIP

Today I have something special for you.

Throughout the last weekend I worked on painting a Games Workshop Blightking that I converted a bit to make it even more unique than the standard options allow me.
He sat in the queue for a few months after I painted the other two blightkings 

I had him primed in Black and Grey using my Airbrush, but all of the following painting procedure was done solely using a brush..

On saturday I finally started and went into full painting mood. I picked a small detail to begin - the head he carried on the armor -  and worked my way outward.
 

 I thought that taking pictures of my palette would give you a good impression on the colors used. Bottom to top we have:

- Dark Sea Blue (VJ MC)

- Imperial Blue (VJ GA)

- Hexed Lichen (VJ GA)

- Dark Green (VJ GA)

- Armour Green (VJ MA)

- Hull Red (VJ MA)

- Black (VJ MC)

And from the left to the right edge:

- Cork Brown (VJ MC)

- Tan Yellow (VJ MC)

- Dark Flesh (VJ MC)

- Ivory (MC)

VJ = Vallejo

MC  = Model Color

GA = Game Air

MA = Model Air

Most of the intermediate colors where created by mixing these to different degre, as we will see when the palette changes as we go along.  I´m not even sure if I touched the Dark Flesh at all.

Next you can see how I started to build up the red armor. Before I did this I put in some edge highlights in white onto the black-grey gradient, hoping it would shine through and create some depth. In the end I added another edge highlight later on, so that was a bit of a waste. 

Apart from that, it was just several thin layers of Hull Red.

After that was done, I had a nice coat of red on the armor parts.

Next time, I´ll show you how I built up on that, so stay tuned to see the mini taking shape!

I you like this format and would like to see more like this, let me know in the comments.

Tough Girl - Another Militiawomen

You might already have seen this mini recently in a smaller version, but in case you haven´t - here she is again for you to behold, and a bit larger than on the other picture:

The Long March - YPJ Fighter

Today I´ve got another YPJ Fighter for you.

I painted Urban Camo on the mini, using varying shades of blue-grey and black to create the pattern. The base color for the uniform were Dark Sea Blue, White and Black, I created everything I needed by mixing these up into the required shades.

It´s actually not as hard as it looks, just give it a try and experiment a little :)

"I´ll be late today, honey..."

I´m back again with another lady from the combat zone.
This was a bit slighly more straightforward paintjob than the other ladys:  A bit of Khaki, Russian Green and Black for Uniform, Pouches, Hair and Weapon,  a dab of Cork brown as basecoat for the face,  my dark brown homebrew wash, and re-highlighting with basecolors + white.

The only exceptions to this procedure are face and the wooden part of the rifle, where I added other colors (namely Tan yellow + Iraqi sand  and several layers of Bright Orange mixed with varying degrees of Mahagoni on the weapon)

Let me know what you think!

Calling Home - YPJ Female Militia Leader

Today we continue with some pics of the new Female Militia set.

On this figure I attempted to emulate MARPAT Woodland Camo and I think it turned out ok.
If you want to try it at home, the recipe can be found after the jump.

 

Communication is Power - SAS Radioman

What´s better than bringing a lot of heavy firepower with you?  Having it flown in by Aircraft or Long Range Guns, of course.   Apart from that, your Com-Link is very handy whenever you want to report back home, whatever the reason - status updates, pickup, support. Being on your own is a very uncomfortable situation.

Hence it´s always good to have a Radio Operator with you!

The Gimpy - SAS Machine Gunner

This is probably one of the more odd choices for a support weapon set.  It´s lot like carrying a GPMG into combat is your first choice of action in most cases. Special Forces often need to cover long distances and already carry enough heavy gear. However, in some more direct action missions, bringing the firepower of these machineguns can be invaluable. And again, it´s been done historically, especially if transport is available.

That´s how the SAS GPMG-gunner came to be. 

Female Militia - New Releases!

It´s time to reveal the new December Releases! As of today, two new Sets of Female Militia are available at my store.  These were commissioned by customer who chipped in some funds to get them made to his specifications.  As always, they are now available to the public as well.

Here´s a quick view on the sets, the new Miniaturse will be shown in detail throughout the next few days, figure by figure

Advancing

Leaders:

 

Furthermore, I renewed the SADF-Section with R4-Rifles and the African Insurgents with AKs - they´re now avaible as well replacing the old sets - but unfortunately they are not yet painted: 

 

Click on any of the pictures to go to the shop.

Let me know if you like them!

Raining Fire - SAS Grenadier

An underbarrel grenade launcher is a weapon you don´t want to miss in your arsenal. Being able to hit enemies by indirect fire after suppressing their positions or - heck - just lobbing a grenade over a distance of 300m!  -  is a very powerful capability.

That´s why my SAS support weapon packs naturally had to include one of these. Apart from the fact that it´s historically accurate of course ;) 

Minimi-listic Design

The daily showcase continues with Cold War SAS troopers.  Again, the set is already a few months old and didn´t get painted so far.   The rough quick-inked figures didn´t show the models full potential.

I painted my Woodland camo using a very similar approach as outlined in my Tutorial on How to Paint DPM/Woodland Camo - I used a much darker wash than in the tutorial and slightly different colors.

Yet the approach is very similar - paint basecoat, wash, re-highlight, apply blotches in a sandy color, add brown splotches and draw very fine lines with a dark brown. The trick is in applying the right color in the right places, which can be very tricky.

New French and Portugese Support Weapons

Okay, time for a small break on the painted miniature streak  - we´ll continue with that tomorrow.
I wanted to show you some progress on the sculpting part as well. 

It´s already been a long time since the release of my Portugese Colonial War infantry, and though it´s long been requested and I always wanted to add another Set of support weapon, I never got to it because of higher priority work (commissions, replacing old sets, fleshing out other important ranges).

Now I´ve finally started to create another set of Portugese for Colonial conflicts, carrying a few heavy weapons including a light Mortart a light Machine Gun and this guy:

The other figures are still top secret, but I´m sure there´ll be more pictures at some point ;)
I´m also planning to add more Support to the French, including this Marksman as well as an AT4 Antitank-Soldier among others.

 

 

That´s it with our short sneak peek on the new minis, tomorrow I´ll have more pictures of painted minis for you!

Eye on Terror - The Marksman

On to the last figures of the Special Forces Set - the Marksman!
Actually, I´m not sure what to say about him apart from the usual stuff.

So let me share some trivia about the set. My original intention was to put a SAW-Gunner into the group, but the sculpt turned out so horrible that I had to scrap him. If I´m not mistaken, he´s found his resting place in the box of failures where all the bad or unfinished stuff is collected. 

I don´t remember which figures finally replaced him, but I believe it was this marksman?

Keep Moving!

This guy was a bit unlucky during the photo session - he got into positions that make it hard to see the full extend of the paintjob. I messed up the angle a bit with the pic on the left, so you can´t see that much (though it makes for a cool effect)

That´s not a Chainsaw...

This guy again represents what I was going for with the set. Take away his weapon and attitude and he´ll look like a local woodcutter. Except he doesn´t carry a chainsaw

He got a brand new paintjob and I think the difference to the older models is visible.

Fight Fire with Fire!

This is the second figure from the SF-set that has an older paintjob.
I still like him better than the Grenadier, who´s had a rather plain color scheme with little variation. This operator at least got some interesting camo on the trousers, which unfortunately is hard to see on the photo.

 

The set of figures was created especially with this interesting mix in mind - Special Forces in Light gear, i.e. with a mix of military garb and hardware + local garment to conceil their true nature. 

Codename UGLy

I prepared the next set of pictures to keep this rolling for a few more days.
After taking a good look at the new Insurgents, we´re moving on the Special Forces - an older set that - again - was unpainted for quite a while.


Well, unpainted is not true. Two minis had been painted more than a year ago, but I never got the remaining three figures coated in color.  We´re starting off with the least impressive, the Grenadier who was one of the long-painted figures that is barely good enough to still be acceptable without a repainting session.

But I promise the next few figures are going to be better painting-wise.

Taking the Shot!

And now the last figure of the set - the kneeling Rifleman. 

Again, massive improvement over the old figure as I didn´t have a good understanding of the pose when I worked on the first iteration of the set.

That´s it for the Insurgents.  But other pictures are in the pipeline already! Stay alert!

Babai is Back!

This guy was already a nice figure in the old set, but I think I managed to bring him to a new standard with some small tweaks and improvements.

 

This guy was inspiratio for the mini back in the day when the original was crafted: 

And again, the old set for comparison:

"What was that noise?" - Insurgent Rifleman

Here we are again with the second figure of the reworked Insurgent set.

 

Again, compare to the old figure - though it was one of the better candidates of the old set, there´s still a massive improvement with the new mini.

Tomorrow, I´ll show you the most impressive figure of the set: The Leader aka Babai!

"Scan the Horizon" - Insurgent RPG

Hey all,

As promised, it´s time to reveal some of my painting results throughout the next days. First, we´ll start with a batch of Insurgents.  These are from the renewed Insurgents set released in October.

 

If you´d like to compare with the old set... here:

  

Stay tuned for tomorrow to see the next painted mini from the set!

A quick glimpse onto my desk...

Hey folks,

I´ve been silent again for a while, mainly due to holidays. There´s a lot going on both in my regular job, on the figure front and I´ve recently spent some more hours playing PC than I did throughout most of the last months.

Figure wise, I´m preparing to release the new batch of miniatures that I´ve presented recently. I´m also trying to push ahead on the painting front, getting some more figures painted up for the shop.

During October I tried to mix in some Renaissance Warfare stuff again - this Blog is called Rifles and Muskets after all, as it was always my intention to dig into this era as well. I somehow never managed. Still, my very long term project of building as Muscotive Army for the 17th century has come ahead somwhat - I´ve produced a few custom 15mm models for that purpose, but I´m planning to purchase a sizeable force at Totentanz Miniatures sometime in the future. They´ve recently released very nice Cossacks both foot and mounted that are fabulous for my purposes.

 You can see my current progress if you look closely, the infantry bases will finish my first regiment (yay) and the cavalry is the first step towards a mounted unit.

In the foreground, my figures being painted up for the shop.
As you can see, I´ve made good progress throughout the last week. As soon as I have a large enough batch prepared, I´ll start a photo session.  You´ll get to see each of these miniatures in detail, I plan to take pictures of every one of them, maybe even reviving the idea of a mini-related christmas calendar?

We´ll see how my productivity keeps up and if I´ll be able to pull that off!
Stay tuned for more. :)

Quick Shots of new Masters

Hey folks,

time to show some more masters for the impending new releases. These were very quick shots taken before I packed everything for shipment to the foundry.

This is the third figure on the new YPJ-Leadership set, which also contains these two girls.

 

 Then, we have the remaining three SADF-troopers with R4 rifles, who are part of a remodeled SADF-02 set that has been phased out this summer.  These SADF-guys will make a reappearance in November in a new set of 8 troopers.

And another view of the same minis.

Shelled Trees

Quite some time ago, I had started on a rather small terrain piece to create some very localised rises to enhance the otherwise flat playing surface. I never finished it and actually held it in my hands once to discard it.  This weekend I picked it up again and changed my original plan by adding more interest to the pile of dirt I had originally planned.

Unfortunately the picture doesn´t look as good as the original as I screwed up with the light settings this time, be assured it looks a lot better in reality. I was just too lazy to assemble the camera again to take a better photo.

Anyway, onto the original pile I added a lot of treestumps with rugged edges to represent a part of the landscape that took some damage by recent fighting in the area.  Adding the trees also allowed me to make it look individual on the battlefield, rather than just another pile of dirt, without putting much effort into it.

It´s large enough to give cover to a fireteam or machine gun, and will count as hard cover in my games.  Looking forward to giving it a place on the next battlefield.

"Watch your Step" - IEDs!

These devices were in the pipeline to get rebased on thin, synthetic cork bases. They are very early designs, left over from an age where I wasn´t as adept in painting and modelling.

To rebase them, I essentially rebuilt them completely. It´s very simple to create these IED-markers from scrap. Take some plastic sprues (preferably round pieces), cut them down to the right size and glue them onto the base. If you have thin wire, you can use them to further enhance the model.

Here I chose to paint them green, like discarded artillery munitions, but you can probably use all sorts of colors to create piles of junk where explosives might be hidden using the same building blocks cut from leftover sprues.

I painted the wires blue and red for an extra eye catching effect. The rest of the piece is created using the usual basing techniques.

Tomorrow,  I´ll show you more terrain.

Suspect Individuals

Here we go with the next minis which I actually finished last week. Again, these were long time residents on my rack of to-do figures which I picked up and finished rather quickly.

These shady individuals will make a nice addition to my Afghan Insurgents or Civilian groups, creating all kinds of confusion on the battlefield.

Painting-wise, I´m not too happy about the skirt on the right figure, I certainly overdid the contrast and created an almost metallic look with too hard edges. I tried to fix it several times and finally fed up with it and left him be.  It will probably not hurt too much when looked at from a tabletop. distance.

Tomorrow, I shall reveal what these two have been up to...

"Falke, hier Adler - Kommen!"

Over the weekend I´ve been trying to get some paint on figures that have long been sitting on my paint rack to get rid of some of the figures in the painting backlog. My rack is still filled with a lot of stuff that needs to be done, but little by little I´m churning through the pile.

This weekend I picked some 20mm minis and terrain to finish up.  Pics will be appearing here throughout the next week.

We start today with an NVA Funker (Radioman) by Elhiem who was sitting around with a basecoat. I took him, smushed over a thin brownish wash and rebuilt the colors from there - very basic paintjob, finished in a short period of time. 

African Rebels & Women Militia

After a long time without an update here, I´ve got another set of pictures for soon to be released models.

As part of a commission, I´m currently working on another set of three Women Militia fighters. The first batch of two sets with 7 figures will be released when these are produced. The entire commission is planned to be around 20 figures strong, but the buildup will be very slow as the customer wants to pay them bit by bit and I need space in the production moulds for other figures,  The sets will be publicly available when released, which keeps the cost down for the commissioner and still makes it worthwhile for me.

 The third model is almost ready, I´m sure a photo will appear in very short time :)

Furterhmore, I have prepared a replacement for the very old  African Insurgents with Kalashnikovs.
The old set was among the very first that I produced - I´m hoping that more people use them as Opfor now that they have proper models with a nicer look.

Both sets are probably coming Late October or Early November!

Walking Pestilence

Hey all,

I´ve been silent again for quite a while, but by no means idle. I´m silently sculpting and painting more figures to show you soon, but not taking many photos - I guess I could work on that if you´re interested in seeing more WIP pictures?

Anyway, today I got a finished model after putting many hours of work into it: The Second Blight King has been completed!

I´ve been experimenting heavily with this guy, working back and forth on different areas until I achieved a look that I´m happy with. I started with an airbrushed base to establish the basic values and colors and worked up on that with many glazes and detail-brushwork to add depth to the figure.

The most challenging and also the most rewarding part was the experiment I did on the kneepad - the Non-metallic effect using a horizon line and reflections of the environment turned out quite nicely I believe.

Most room for improvement is still on the base. I put it together without considering the footprint of the mini, so most of the work on the swamp water is probably lost to the observer. A shame, as the base itself looked quite decent, but was covered up by the monstrous mini and just leaves the less impressive elements (rocks and tree) to be seen.

Apart from that, I probably could have added more shine to the helmet, shoulder blade and axe. My original intention was to make them  look dull, dusty and aged like they do, but the contrast to the kneepad makes it look a little odd.

I hope you enjoy this figure, painting it was a fun experience and I´m looking forward to starting the more heavily armored guy next:

Ruling Elite

Small update for today - I finished painting the African Dictator Set that has been recently updated in my shop.  Also commenced work on some new figures, but they are too early in the WIP stage to show anyhting meaningful.

So, only one picture for today:

Website Relaunch, Product Updates and SALE!

Hi all,

after several months of invisible work, I have successfully launched a new and reworked site, which is now online.
A fresh site was required as several features were broken due to my lack of skill and knowledge while building the site back in 2014. With new experience and learning from past failures, I was now able to build a much more streamlined site that will fulfill my requirements for the next few years.

The most important new and repaired features that didn´t work as intented with the old site are:

• A working search function - try the "search" field on the top right!
• Better Paypal Integration -  Now using Paypal Express checkout
• Better visual layout and design - making navigation on site easier I hope!
• Working Email notifications -  Automatic emails on order updates. These will keep you informed about the progress of your order and allow me to concentrate more of my time making miniatures instead of writing mails
• Working order history -  was broken on the old website, is now back to normal function
• Coupons -  I´m now able to use coupon codes to discount orders. Not yet in use, but will get utilised sooner or later.
• New Administrative functions -  not directly visible to you, but I´ve configures some admin views to my requirements, again allowing me to save time on administration that can be used to make more minis.
• Multi-language-capabilities - the site is theoretically able to handle multiple languages. Right now it´s only english, but I could now think about doing translations for a german version

Unfortunately this update comes with a small drawback:
All customer accounts that were registered on the old site have to be re-registered.

I made a change in the way the adress is configured and I had the bad feeling that importing the old user accounts into the new databse would be a lot of trouble.

To give you an incentive to re-register (or register for the first time) and to celebrate the new Website, I´m offering a Sale on all Sets in Stock.  Throughout the next week (until August 20th), all products are 30% off.

Furthermore, a new batch of figures has arrived while I prepared the switch.
This time, all releases are re-modeled old sets.


The Following Sets have been replaced: 

INS-04:   Insurgent Cell with Leader now contains 3 completely new figures and a reworked Babai-Model with a bit more definition than the old one.

AFR-02:   Dictator with Bodyguard  now contains 3 completely remodeled figures to replace the aged set

AFR-INS-03:  African Irregulars with  FN FAL  now contains 2 completely remodeled figures and 2 massively overhauled figures including new weapons, arms and faces.

That´s the big news blob for today.
I hope you enjoy the new website - if you experience any trouble, drop me a message (PM or Mail)

Thanks!
Robert

Guardian of Old

Hidden in the mountain caves of the Diamond Mountains, the old Dragonkin dwells - decendants of ancient dragons, they are the Bulwark against the rising Chaos Brood emerging from their hellish pits.

This was a first test mini to establish the color scheme and technique to use for the rest of a small force of Fantasy Dragonkin Warriors. Right now, he remains the only one of his kind, but more troops are being raised as I post these pictures.

 

Demon Brood

Latest pictures with a new camera and some photo editing of some minis I painted not too long ago.
I wasn´t very satisfied with the pictures that my cellphone produced, so I shelved them without posting any results here.

Now, I think the outcome can be presented in a way that does the paintjob justice.

 First, a Putrid Blightking wading through swampy terrain to spread corruption among his hapless victims:

A  Bloodletter rising from the hellpits of Chaos, yearning for slaughter...

A Pink Horror stalking for prey...

Fortunately, the Forces of Chaos have not yet gathered their full strength to overwhelm the Guardians of our earthly realms...  stay tuned to see the protectors of the old order tomorrow ;)