A step by step: Dark Age Saint John's Bane

Here's the promised step by step images that I discovered the other day.  When you see this, you are looking at the very early development of the shaded basecoat technique.  This was done even before GW came out with their glazes.

Step 1 began with the lighter colors being applied first, as I do now.  This was a long time ago, so I will be pretty fuzzy on exact colors, so bear with me!

These darker glazes were applied the "old fashioned" way, with watered down paints.  Obviously I approach this differently now, doing more 'shading', and using multiple controlled layers of glazes from GW, Reaper and Vallejo.

The final darks are applied, and then you can see me starting to work back to the middle tones. The deep burgundy was done by mixing a blood red with regal blue, while the greens were snot green, shaded darker by mixing in a very dark blue.

The face is mostly finished, while I develop the white on the cloak.  I probably used a lot of bleached bone on that.  These days, I would probably use Dheneb stone and Vallejo khaki.

You can see the difference working in the middle tones makes, particularly on the greens.  I used some of the bleached bone to lighten them as well.  The brown on the leggings was lightened with some of the brighter greens.

Now the armor is getting more developed.  I can't remember what I used, probably GW terracotta.  These days I have Vallejo Carne Marron, probably mixing it with Vallejo Brown Rose.

The metals were done mostly with snakebite leather, lightened with space wolves grey and bleached bone.  I finished off the little gemstones on the leggings at this point.

So, it was time for final highlights, any last minute darks, and other fine details.  Then we had ourselves a Bane ready to go on a base!!!

Here's the original post with pictures of finished Banes, in case you didn't see that!

http://wappellious.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-bane-of-your-existence.html

Forces of the Forsaken: Saint Mark

Here is a faction of Forsaken led by the character of Saint Mark.  The Forsaken are divided into those various Saints (you saw a lot of St. John yesterday).

These are some Banes painted in the St. Mark color scheme (you might recognize the snakebite leather based colors on the cloaks from the Privateer Press post last night).  These were also sculpted by Werner Klocke.

The group shots...

And Saint Mark himself.

The first of the Saints, Mark is an ambitious, cunning and charismatic individual.  Regarded by some as an emissary, by others as a ruthless brigand, he now finds himself embroiled in a bloody war against the alien Dragyri.  Nowhere are the casualties as high as in the Western Crusade, and seemingly endless caravans of civilian fugitives flee for New Ashkeleon from the West.  Mark's elite Reavers and Shades are masters of subtlety, and when necessary the assassins can be backed up by the immensely powerful Junkers.

More Banes from Dark Age

Now for the rest of the Banes.  Again, some minis that could serve several purposes.  They can always make good Inquisitor retinue figures, as I have done that in the past.  A chainsword here and a purity seal there...

If you check out my Demonhunters posts, you will see several Dark Age figures that were converted in such a way.  I may even have some of them still!

Here's the group shots...

Captain Haley and Friends

Here we have the last of the Iron Kingdoms RPG minis, Captain Haley and a few other ladies.  Sorry the images are somewhat small... this goes back a ways.

The robes on this were pretty crazy to paint!  I think it would be a little easier with my approach today.

I enjoyed working with the limited palette of browns on this piece.  It was an intentional effort to work more with earth tones after a discussion Cathy and I had regarding our color choices.  She worked a lot in earth tones and greens, while I trended towards the brighter blues, reds, purples, golds, etc.

I enjoyed working the various warm and cool browns.  If I get a chance to try something like this again, it would be great.

This was an exercise in greys.  I think it was the Witchfire character.

The Bane of your Existence

Some more Dark Age for you today.  These were some of my favorites, sculpted by Werner Klocke.

These are from the Forsaken faction, painted in St. John color scheme.  I was considering using these for at least one of the painting videos, as the robes are very extensive, with lots of surfaces.  

I thought these would be good candidates for using the powders as a painting/shading tool, as opposed to just weathering.

I always thought that with some conversion, the female versions of these could make good Sisters of Battle!

I discovered a step by step painting guide I had made for these, which I will post tomorrow.  You can see the Shaded Basecoat technique in its earliest stage of development.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee...

Here's an interesting set of minis from Dark Age Games.  They are called Stingers.

I really enjoyed the greenish grey color scheme.  The blasted concrete bases are also lots of fun!  Just a nice thick sheet of baked sculpey broken into pieces...

The Dreaded Golthias Tree!

Hey D&D fans!

This was one of the very first things I ever tried to make out of sculpey.  I had done a few small treemen for blood bowl teams, but when our GM requested a Golthias tree for the big climactic battle of the adventure, I had to invent some new techniques!

I had been painting a bunch of twig blights as well, but this was the big deal!

The Vampire Tree was set in a 3D world, complete with walls and so on.  We kicked all the players out of the room, and set everything up.  It created quite a sense of dread!  When they all walked into the room, they were amazed to see all the minis representing them positioned in the hallway.

They had to negotiate around curves, with surprises around every one.  That was so much neater than simply drawing out the map, or even using those color cardstock 2D representations.  The bad guys were actually there, instead of just being plopped down onto a map or something.

It was incredibly dramatic as things drew to a close, as one of the characters had been shoved onto the tree, and his life was sucked away by the Golthias tree, a little more each round!  He barely survived.  I had also painted a few special characters for this final battle, shown in the image above. 

This just arrived today!  It's a huge monitor (at least for me), which will make so many things easier.  As you can see in this image of photoshop, I can have so many windows open!  At at full size.  Normally, I have to shrink the images down to create my multiviews.  I have even lost track of an image or two over time in the confusion. :-)

It will make filming and editing the videos a whole lot easier as well!!!