Kommandos Komplete!

So, a bit picture heavy, but I wanted to give the kommandos a bit of an extra photoshoot because I really like how they came together as a unit.

Have some close ups of the boyz. You'll see all of them have a little bit of extra character.

 I really didn't much care for the price label on the proper kommando miniatures, and as I like to keep my regular boys pretty clean of extra gubbins, I had a lot of bits to play with for these lads. They have all sorts of things I scrounged up out of my bits box. Including some very old stuff from 1st edition.

You'll see on the special weapons boyz an axe and a kettle from the 1st edition battlewagon. Everyone needs a brew up after a hard day of infiltration!

The boys have been a bit magpie-like in their collecting of trophies and shiney kit. I'm quite inspired in their loadouts from something I see in my other hobby airsoft: folks just want to take everything with them "just in case". So these lads as a bit like that too. 

A touch I particularly like is how many of them are clearly jumping out and shouting at a surprized enemy, even while Boss Snikrot has his finger to his lips shh-ing them.

Now in the pipeline is a unit of lootas. These lads have been waiting a while, again because I've been a bit nervous about them. Those big deffguns are quite off putting. I have spent a few months looking at them trying to get my head straight about how I'm going to pull them off.

 Something that has already vexed me is the state of the undercoating. As ever, I've been cheap and got them off ebay, from several different sources. I've been finding that fairy powerspray is good for taking off the actual paints, but the spray primers seem to just stick in there no matter how much I scrub. and some of them have been sprayed black, others yellow of all colours. With these first three I thought I'd just crack on, but there is a noticeable difference in the way the colours tuned out.

 My plan for the other 12 lootas is first to try out a different stripper, maybe dettol, and iff not go over them with an airbrush primer I have, just so they are all the same, even though this will loose a little detail.

While I'm doing these boys, I have a unit of burna boys waiting in the wings, but I'm actually planning to do another build with some bits to do some armour plated 'ard boyz. I've looked at the things I have left over and I've had a rather fun idea, so watch this space.

5 Months without posts! Argh!

Oh my, So long without updating, a fine blogger I am!

Summer is gone and evenings are now far more conducive for painting, so I've been stuck right in the last couple of weeks. Been working on Boss Snikrot and some Kommandos. (Warning, Huge Pictures!)

Have been learning a lot about painting just lately, particularly from threads on /tg/, much though that realm lies within the internet wild-west. One of the biggest influences was some comments on just how far one really needs to thin paint: "so you could drink a quart without getting ill" was one. Particularly on the base colour, this advice has been golden. It does such a better coat and preserves a lot more of the miniature's detail.

For the highlights I find I need a slightly thicker consistency, just thick enough to stay where its put. Also for speed I tend to go a bit thicker on troops, but not too much.

I've also taken on board some criticism of my basing. So I've been trying to add a few more features. I'm still fond of the flowersoft, and I want to stay consistent to the whole army, but I've been adding some rocks. I don't want them to distract from the miniature, so I've been keeping them simple.

Bad Dice

Again, not about painting or sculpting, (will have the dakkajet finished in a few more days,but it's dragging on), but had my second games night of 6th edition.Was great, but I realised why I'm so glad I don't play marines: Bad dice.

After my first games night I got home and was straight on ebay to buy myself a bucket full of distinctively coloured dice. Orks tend to roll a lot of dice, I think 60 should have me covered for almost any eventuality. But there's a facet of ork play I hadn't really pondered, and that how you tend not to worry about bad dice like you do with any other army: there is hardly any critical if-I-don't-get-a-good-roll-now-I-lose-the-game moments.

I was playing against the Space Puppies, and it seems that for them, every dice matters: all those Hunter Killer missiles, plasma guns getting hot, etc... A space Marine player gets so used to expecting good results that every bad one is a disaster, while as an ork player I just assume terrible rolls when I make my plan, and overcome them by chucking a bucket of dice onto the table, so what happens is most of the time my dice rolling exceeds my expectations.

Perhaps the only "bad dice" for me was my D3 for how many shots my lootas got. Every turn they fired I got a 1, so each of the 15 boyz only got one shot. Even with that they dispatched a Razorback and a Devastator Squad before the battle moved off to the other side of the table and out of their range.

For my opponent for the night, the dice were very much against him. Too many times he was rolling the ones. To the extent that in a 1,500 pt game by the time I waaaagh'd into melee on turn 3 he had only thinned my boyz down by 6 casualties. He conceded the match before we resolved the combat. I felt at the time a little bit robbed that we didn't get to do the stomping, but on reflection it was a mercy to him to end the pain sooner. Long before the end of the match I was groaning with him every time the dice went wrong for him.

Developing Airbrushing Skill

So I've been learning a lot more about the airbrush. I'm getting pretty excited about it if I'm honest, as it is turning into a really promising area to massively expand my skill set and also is speeding up bulk painting immensely.

The latest batch of Nobz (see previous post for finished results) were part of a larger number of unpainted nobz I had, 35 in total. Many of them the Black Reach 3 part models - head, one arm, everything else - and this configuration does not lend itself to the separate parts method I detailed previously. So I tried something different: trying to airbrush different areas of the same piece. And with a little trial and error, I found a method that definitely worked, and has me really excited for future projects.

Basically the challenge in blocking in separate areas of base colour on a single piece is getting a crisp edge. My paint scheme helped me here in that a lot of areas are divided by a black border, so I went in using that as my margin of error and if I went over the lined I'd brush in the black later. The obvious example of this is the black belt between the brown of the trousers and the cream of the vest.

But with a little more adventure I found I could do more. With the airbrush hardly pressed I could get a really crisp edge, so I had a go and the green of the arms and the black of the boots. Angling the model away helps, and always keeping in mind what is behind what you are spraying. For the first time on my blog, I'll add a video of this for the boots.

Blocking in colour before inking, highlighting and detailing is the most tedious part of painting in my opinion, so cutting down the timeit takes is very helpful psychologically. But the finish that airbrushing gives is also really nice, its flat and thin, so it leaves even more detail of the miniature and also takes further paint really well.

 In the above photo, all the paint you can see has been airbrushed. The metallic needed another coat as you can see at this stage the green still showed through.

In this photo, I have brushed in the black belt and braces, and the yellow details on the arm, and then airbrushed the whole miniature with a brown ink, even over the green.

As I've said, its not just about the speed now, its about how nicely everything else goes on after, so in the future I think I'll use the airbrush even for small runs and single miniatures.

This week: Nobz! (One even has a Big Choppa!*)

Just a little show of my latest work.

Photoshoot and clever editing by my lady.

*Fnar!

Game Night

A nice little photo of my boyz waiting to be deployed for their first game night

Was a good night. As it was my first go at 6th edition, we did an allied game of 2vs2. With each pair having a player who was very familiar. We won by one VP! :)

Compromise

Resistance has collapsed. I was invited to a games night, and will have to field some incomplete miniatures. The rest of the week will be about airbrushing and inking... No naked resin though, I still have some standard... I keep telling myself.