Heavy Metal at the Wandering Dragon...

Painting up this terrain would see some very rare use of metallic paints by me.  Since I was starting to run a little low on my black craft paint, I thought adding metallic paints could help extend the life of the painting session.

I was still painting the black brown mix on everything, with more brown on the rock outcroppings.  At the same time, I was using some of the ivory color mixed in to create more of a stone hue for the bases of the steampunk terrain.  I will be doing more on those later when there's time.

Once that was completed, I started to mix the metallic and craft paints together to paint the storage tanks, pipes and smokestacks.

I added some of the brown craft paint, and even some gold and copper metallics into the mixture as I worked lighter.

Another furnace ready for metallic paints...

Moving along, I added lighter and lighter mixes...

It was certainly odd working with the metallic paints.  By combining them with the non metallic paints, however, it was less of a shock to the system :-)

Each terrain piece was worked to the lightest set of colors one by one...

I tried to leave my darker, sooty areas as intact as possible to save time.

In the next episode, we will see all the rust and additional soot that was added.  Stay tuned!

Something really stinks...

Here is something from a while back that has gotten lost in all the frenzy of the last 9-12 months.

This particular FW item had an interesting quality to it, or lack thereof.  I had to resculpt at least 30% of this... from scratch.  The 'tail' section was gone... non existent.  Knowing that other instances led to either getting the wrong replacement part, or the same of something that I didn't need (you will hear more on that this week), I just went ahead and sculpted the part that was missing.

The trend in FW has grown more and more disturbing.  I don't know if demand is stretching them even thinner, which might be the case, but they won't get any more demand from me.  I heard many similar horror stories at Adepticon.

When it takes me less time to make something from scratch than it does to assemble the actual kit, that might be a signal that something is amiss in the production process.  We already have a Finecast ban in place.  That is why we have been moving further and further away from GW stuff in general.

I am sorry that this post is a somewhat petulant affair, but this morning's FW extravaganza has me wanting to toss that poo all over the room...

By the way, it was also much easier to paint the section that I sculpted.  These views show that back 30% quite well.  It starts from the rotors backwards.

A bit of "Punky" terrain at the Wandering Dragon

Now it's time for a little painting session at the Wandering Dragon Shoppe.  Most of you will recognize this terrain I put together for them right before we got nailed by the Norovirus.  It has been waiting for some paint, and that's what I did the other day.

This was going to be a very basic paint job here, since there was not a lot of time.  I used the same craft paints that I work with on the Dark Eldar army board.  The only difference was that I tossed in a few metallic paints here and there :-)

You can look through the older Terrain posts to see how I made these.  It was fairly basic.  Some pink foam  and empty pill containers.  I made the rivets with some plasticard and a hole punch.

I worked quickly with a big brush to make the various pieces have a coat of brownish black...

I have a few shots here of each terrain piece as I did this.  The main use for this terrain would be on Tuesdays for the Privateer Press game night.  That means Warmachine and Hordes!

While most terrain pieces look a little odd before they are painted, these guys were nothing less than bizarre!

However, one has to have faith in the Plan. :-)  Be confident that something silly looking like this...

Transforms itself quickly by just doing this...

It was really neat to see these turn into somethings else before your eyes!

At this point, I started to add in some metallic paint to that black and brown mix.

While I was painting the steampunk terrain, I slapped some colors on a few regular rocky outcroppings

More to come!!!