Dinotopia

Here you have it!  The entire group of six dinosaurs!

As I have mentioned over the series of posts, these presented some very unique challenges.

As for the colors, the task was to take some very grey/brown paint jobs and give them more life.  I really had to dig down into my own thought process and whatever reference images that I could find.

I have no problem doing these kinds of colors on fantasy figures, such as my Lizardmen, but I have been fed the same kind of "traditional" color schemes since I was a kid, and I kept wanting to paint them in those very same colors...

To help free up my own mind, I painted these while I was painting fantasy style creatures, such as dragon men, etc., to force myself to see them in that manner.

It did help a great deal, especially when I had worked my way through several of the figures, and getting differences between them and avoiding repetition became ever more challenging!

Sword and Shield

This was an interesting experiment in utilizing the combination of Badger Airbrush Ghost Tints and the Secret Weapon weathering paints.

I was able to set up a variety of interesting color shifts while doing the "primer painting" phase by adding a few drops of ghost tint to the primers.

From there, I was able to work off those initial tones with several glazes of the Secret Weapon paints, mostly in the "rust" range, and the wood weathering colors.

The last piece of the puzzle was the Reaper Clear paints, which helped to enhance those glazes with even more intensity.  The Clear Blue was used on the sword, while the Clear Purple made an excellent dark tone when mixed with the Secret Weapon Rust colors.

As usual, I had fun with the Object Source Lighting, and doing a bit of freehand on the shield.

Check out the Secret Weapon paints, which has now expanded to over 30 colors!  I will continue to do more facebook live sessions utilizing those.  You can get the Badger primers and Ghost tints here, and if you use the discount code "Wappellious", that will be a 42% discount.

http://webairbrushes.com/

Sub Sandwich

Step aside Puggy Baconbreath... we have something more "official" for the Halflings.

He really puts the "club" in club sandwich!

Da Stug Bug

The very early version StuG D should be interesting in our upcoming Barbarossa games.  Compared to later war versions, this faces some interesting challenges.  Having just a single weapon, it's use will have to be very strategic.

As we have seen, vehicle mounted machine guns tend to do very well in Bolt Action, and I will have to re train myself on this one!  Of course, It's really meant for bunker busting, and that will certainly take place in a variety of the Barbarossa scenarios.

I did my usual "primer painting" with the Badger Stynlrez primers, followed by glazes and layers of the Secret Weapon weathering paints.  This had to be completed in a hurry for GenCon, so I had to make sure that the vehicle would be dry enough so that I could put mud and dust effects on as well!

I have a number of facebook live sessions that show how I used the Secret Weapon paints:

https://www.facebook.com/james.wappel/videos/vb.1056181987/10210892352838946/?type=2&theater

The mud and dirt effects were done with the Mig AMMO oils, adding some of the weathering powders into the wet paints.  Not only does this create a variety in the textures, but it helps to dry out the oils a little faster!

The leaves are actual leaves that were cut using the Green Stuff World leaf cutters,  I really love adding these, since it brings one more dimension to the vehicle.  Stay tuned for images of the Panzer 3 from early war!

Coin Flip

Joining the collection of the original Dwarf and Human refs from ages ago, we have the Goblin and Halfling versions.  These have a bit more character than the original counterparts, since they are really doing stuff that is either part of the game process, or more associated with that particular species :-)

I do enjoy the "Hospitality Funds" that are at this goblin's feet!

The Dog Pound

As some of you have noticed, I have really enjoyed the new miniature companies that have emerged in recent years.  I feel that they are doing very innovative sculpts, which have a very different look than the "older" companies that have been at this for a long time.

Here's a link to their website:

http://norsgard.com/game/about-norsgard.html

Norsgard have been making some outstanding sculpts, covering human characters and also one of my favorite critters... Wulfen!  This one is larger than most of the line, as he is mounted on a 50mm base.

The base was made during a Facebook live broadcast here:

https://www.facebook.com/james.wappel/videos/vb.1056181987/10209658916083798/?type=2&theater

A majority of the painting was done with oils, and you can check that out in this Facebook live episode:

https://www.facebook.com/james.wappel/videos/vb.1056181987/10209787049247047/?type=2&theater

Heads Up

The "Primer Painting" process continues with the Badger Stynlrez primers... all 12 colors!

Lots of mixing and tinting (with the Ghost Tints) was used to slap some colors on this giant BONES dragon.  As I mentioned in the previous post, I had no idea what I wanted to do with it in terms of color, theme, etc., so I simply started shooting mixes of primer at it to see what it would look like!

You can see that I tried to vary those tones all across the figure.  I think this image shows how the blues and browns intermingled on the rocks and on the dragon itself.

Even for something as simple as the horns on their heads, I could rapidly experiment with which way the light to dark shading would go.  That is, starting dark at the head and working to lighter at the end, or the other way around.

Eventually it became clear that I wanted to have them be lighter on the ends.  A simple adjustment to make with the primer and airbrush!

This was part of the Ghost Tint experiment that I have been talking about.  In this case, I took some of the Golden Yellow Ghost Tint and mixed that with one of the light tan primers.  This created a very intense shade of primer, and gave a more saturated look to the colors on the dragon (and even an Italian tank!).

You only need a few drops of the very intense Ghost Tints to alter a primer color.  We mixed the blue tint with the metallic primer to create a fantastic blue metal, and also used the purple Ghost Tint with white to make an incredible intense purple primer.

The Ghost Tints were also mixed with the primers to do some "regular" painting with a brush.  I did this to show why you don't have to limit yourself to airbrush only.  I painted some details on the heads, such as the mouth, teeth and eyes,  to show how the primer can still be brushed on.

I mixed some of the lighter color primer with a few deep red Ghost Tints, which made some excellent pink tones.

You can see some of those added elements here.  I also mixed the green Ghost Tint to make some eyes, and to drop a few test brush strokes onto the scales...

If you look at the head in the upper right hand corner, you can see the greenish tint as compared to the other heads.  That makes a nice contrast to the reds in the mouths, and to the deep purple darks used around the eyes.  Again, this is just setting up layers of paint that will be added... since this is only "primer".

You can see some different shading on the wings here, reflecting the different angles which they are set once they are in place.

Look at the top dragon head closely, and you can see some greenish brush strokes on the ear and the scales on the back of the head.  Here I was taking advantage of all the subtle dark reds that the airbrush had placed in the shadows and mid tones.

By using the greenish colors on top of that set up was far easier than trying to mix all those colors and applying them with a brush into the crevices and around all the obstacles!

I will be going over this with my regular oil paints and weathering powders, along with putting it on a wooden plaque to create a base.  Stay tuned!

Also, here is a location on line where you can get the Ghost Tints and Stylnrez primers.  If you use the discount code of Wappellious, you will get a 42% discount.

A link:

http://webairbrushes.com/

Wing Span

Among the many thing that I prepped and brought to GenCon for painting in the Badger Airbrush booth was the massive multi headed dragon from Reaper Miniatures.  It had been part of the BONES 3 kickstarter campaign.

Here you see some of the final setup in the booth on Thursday morning.

In addition to the BONES minis, I had a collection of Bolt Action tanks, weapon teams and infantry.  This would be used to show how to effectively use the "primer painting" method that you have seen me using lately.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with the dragon.  An idea to make it into a Fire Dragon was even entertained, but I just decided to start spraying various colors of primer at it to see what developed!

I made a few dark mixes of the Stynlrez primer, a favorite product of mine from the Badger line.  I took black and let that mix with some of the dark brown primers for the deepest recesses.  At my usual high PSI of around 40, the paint had no problem reaching into those hard to access areas.

Once the darks had been established, I went back in with lighter mixes.  There are 12 colors of primer to choose from, so you can make just about anything!  I even mixed in some of the blue primer here and there.  

I showed onlookers how they could position the airbrush and the figure itself to get instant highlights on raised surfaces like the wings.

Another experiment was performed, and that was to mix in a few drops of the Ghost Tints with the primer.  This created some amazing colors an effects, and I will definitely be doing more of that!

You can see how I focused on those darker areas to begin with in this image.

Also, while I had this set of primer colors going through the brush, I worked on some of the other miniatures and vehicles.  When I do an airbrush session at home, I often have terrain pieces, figures, vehicles, planes and monsters all lined up, just in case those colors could be used on any of those items.  It really maximizes your time, and the amount of paint you need.

This image shows some of the tinting that I mentioned, including some blueish colors, and even hints of red.  With so many elements of interest on this giant figure (not the least of which was 5 heads!), it is very important not to have huge swaths of similar colors.

What I like about doing this primer painting with the airbrush is that I can experiment on the fly with all kinds of colors in a matter of seconds.  If I don't like the result, I can simply primer over it with a different set of colors.  This was done with a dragon that had been painted green at World Expo.

You can see some of that tinting and adjusting here.  I had to make some changes on the areas where the wings met the main body, mostly tinting them more reddish and making them darker.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where I will discuss how regular brushes were used to work from the basic colors created with the airbrush, and mixing the primer and Ghost Tints!

For those of you who have asked me over and over again where you can get the Badger primers on line... I finally have a location for you.  That is at webairbrushes.com.  If you use the discount code of "Wappellious", you will get a 42% discount.    Just click on paints and scroll down to the Stynlrez primers!

A link:

http://webairbrushes.com/