"Suppressive Fire!" - PKM Team

These were the latest addition to the Soviet forces, painted as the last batch after all the other infanrymen were finished.

On this team I tried to speed up the process somewhat and experimenting with a mix of painting shadows and washing. Instead of using pre-made washes, I mixed my own acrylic wash with the colors I needed and slapped them into the most recessed areas, carefully selecting the right color for the area i wanted to hit.
The more visible and "important" shadows are still hand-painted however, so these are hybrid figures, but finished within a single painting session  - and still looking good I think.

Next up: More infantry from the main batch.

"Alfa - Advance!" - Soviet Assault Team

And here we go again:

On this picture we can re-examine the contrast between figures painted with different techiques. One the left, we have a single minis from the first batch (washed with oil) and three guys without washes.


On this picture, the contrast is less visible than in the command group.

"Initiate the Assault!" - Soviet Command Group

To demonstrate what I meant with the two different painting styles, here´s a side by side in the form of a Soviet command group.

The two figures on the right were in the first batch I painted using an oil wash over a basecoat-highlight. They are looking quite good, but applying the oil wash is always a bit of a mess, it stinks, needs a lot of time to dry and usually needs some cleanup afterwards.

The figure on the left is one of the later batches with shadows painted by hand. He´s missing the rugged, dirty look of his fellows, but the contrast is less stark on other pics, so I assume some of that is due to the lighting conditions.  You could probably invest some more time to improve the shading and give him a more realistic look.

Town Gossip

Hey folks,

I know it´s been a while since my last post and even longer since putting in content on a regular basis. I´ve not been idle in the last few months, but my output has been slightly reduced recently.

However, as I didn´t put anything here, there´s a batch of figures just waiting to be photographed and uploaded - and that´s exactly what I did this morning. So, I´m finally able to present to you the results of the last few months of irregular painting sessions throughout the next few days.

I´ll be starting today with a group of Elhiem Afghan Civilians, very nice minis and a pleasure to paint.

As I experimented with new techniques and painting styles, I found that the usual strategy of basecoating, washing and re-highlighting started to annoy me, no matter if the wash was oil wash or regular acrylic wash.

So I started manual shading, i.e. painting the shades with the brush instead, and I think I´ll stick to it. It gives so much more control over washes and allows me to use several hues of color on different parts of the minis. Some tutorials for traditional 2D-arts and some deeper understanding of color theory laid a solid foundation for these experiments - and I can only recommend the aspiring painters to delve into these topics, it will greatly enhance your painting!

My initial concern was that it might take too long to invest brushwork into hand-painting shadows. But after doing quite a large batch of figures without using any washes, I don´t think that´s true. The fact that you´re saving the entire step of re-applying the basecoat over your wash pretty much compensates for the time required to paint shadows.  Furthermore,  don´t have to wait for the wash to dry to continue working. 
It´s probably NOT an assembly-line technique for finishing an entire platoon in a day, but the end result looks much cleaner and better and you can finish even larger forces pretty quickly.

Throughout the next days, I´ll be showing you some Soviets, of which only 4 or 5 figures were painted with a wash before I switched to the other style. All of these were painted within a few painting sessions spread over about 2 weeks.

Stay tuned!

Terror of the Night

Hey again,

today I´m finally back with some photos after neglecting the blog for quite a while. Though I did get stuff done, I somehow didn´t felt like taking photos, retouching the photos and putting them up here, somehow didn´t seem worth the hassle for a few Soviets and single 20mm figures.

For sculpting, the same holds true, after finishing the masters I usually pack them up safely, so I´d have to unpack them all to take some photos and repack them again, so I skipped this step with the last few minis.

However, during the last week I experimented with some 28mm large creatures again that have been sitting on my workbench for quite a while now. Funny enough that the figure I started last got finished first.

So here we are now, with the first Terror of the Night (GW Vampir Counts Vargheist) finished:

 

Having a full pack of three available and no intention to use them for gaming that would require a uniform color scheme, I chose to experiment with different themes.
This one is my "pale skin" version. Originally intended to be almost albino white and with a red-orange fiery hair, I decided to go with a very cold, stoney-look along the way after the skin turned out a bit too rock-grey.

 

With a more gargoyle-like appearance, I didn´t think red would fit quite so well and decided to give the Vargheist a bluish mane, adding to the cold and dead appearance. 

On the base, I decided to put in some rubble to underline the gargoyle-theme, dead, shattered ground with very dark colors, probably a destroyed cathedral, monastery or somesuch?

Anyway, that guy was very fun to paint and I´m currently working on the other two, who will be quite different in appearance as I am testing some dark skin tones...


Cheers
Robert

More Modern British Armed Forces

Hey folks,

just a single pic today to show what I´m working on at the moment:  More British Infantry.
While the photo is not ideal, it should give you a basic idea what you can expect in the second set of these guys.

Special Forces

Hey folks,

it´s been silent for a long time, I know. Now that I´m working full-time there´s a lot of stuff going on and even if I feel like painting and actually finish something I am rarely in the mood to take pictures and post it up.  Same goes for sculpting,

However, having a sunday with not much else to do enabled me not only to finish some models but take some pics of the results.

So here they are:  Some Elhiem Australian SAS painted up in a deserty-fantasy-camouflage posing as generic SpecOps in Light gear for my collection.

These guys were actually quite hard to paint because I went for a monochromatic scheme with a sandy base color all over the figures. Only the weapons and shadows would provide some contrast here. For this reason, I had to revert to a trick and create contrast by giving the bases a darker color and adding some subtle colorations (which you probably can´t pick up with the naked eye on these pics, but they do their job) to make the figures pop.

It actually worked out better than expected, for some time I was worried that I might have ruined these figures, but the result is satisfactory.

I also funneled some of my newly earned money into another order at Elhiem to continue the buildup for my Cold War Soviet force. 

And I dispatched a shipment of new masters to my caster, hoping to release some new figures just in time for christmas. Fingers crossed and no promises, he is very busy at the moment.