Ready for the shot

To play that last game of wild West Exodus, I needed plenty of Hired Hands... of the close combat variety.

They are the least expensive, and have more of a multi use than the long range Hired Hands.  While their marksmanship is not up to the long range HH, they can pump out lots of close range shots.

It does present a few different situations for an opponent.  In each fight thus far, I was able to use a few of these to get in the way of big characters, buying me just enough time to either get out of the way, or bring up my own heavy elements and take them down!!

The Great Beast

And yes, this thing is a beast.  One of the hands is just as big as a regular 28mm figure!

It's another one of those items where you have to paint most of it in individual pieces and then put it all together for the dramatic finish...

While the legs and arms are hard to position, the ammo feeds are a huge nightmare.  The double row makes it brutal...

I had to hit it with a hair dryer until it was almost at its melting point, and then grit my teeth as I forced it into place.  Let's just say that it was mighty toasty on the fingers!  Using gloves was not an option, since you would never be able to get the thing into the position that you need.

It is a little mind boggling to think about how many pieces there are in this guy.

Quite a pile of resin!

Combined with the base, it's pretty heavy.

And guess what... there's another one on the way!!

Island hopping

The the majority of the US tanks I am doing are meant for the Pacific Theater expansion of Memoir '44. I wanted to make some versions that had a bit more rust on them, as well as some foliage.

The rust bit was no problem, as there were many ways I could do that.  The foliage would be a different challenge, since these things are really tiny.

I ended up using Army Painter poison ivy.  It's a material I had already used on some infantry for the Pacific Theater.

As it turned out, it was not a bad size.

I was going to use some of my dried foliage, but that was just too large.

Here's a comparison to the last set of early war vehicles.

It's definitely interesting doing all these various experiments... I have learned quite a bit!!!

Old Bones, new tricks

And now for the shots of the finished Reaper Bones mini.  Obviously, the original metal version (which I have) is going to sport some crisp details which the BONES material might not translate.

However, it's not fragile in the least.  I demonstrated that by bending the staff and 'wings', and then tossing it across the room.

Also, being this lighter plastic material means that he can more easily reside in the big unit of Tomb Guardians.

It was interesting using the airbrush as the basecoat.  Since it had been so long since I painted any Tomb King stuff (or even looked at it), I could just play around with spraying colors here and there to see what would happen.

Here we have him next to a few of the actual Tomb King minis...

Speaking of throwing minis across the room, the Tomb Kings army has made me consider that once or twice (or more) during a 1-2 turn game!

Another Reclamation Project

Recently a friend of ours, new to both 40k and Dark Eldar, acquired a huge set of old timey Dark Eldar minis.

Those of you familiar with my Dark Eldar army know that I enjoyed combining the old kits like these with the new ones.  Seeing the original ancient minis painted with loftier new techniques is always very fun!

I dug a few out of the box, and set down to do a quick sample mini.

First things first... away with the nasty gravel/grass base.  Replace it with a simple piece of cork, with a Secret Weapon skull!

Right away... significant difference, and not lots of work either.

Very basic colors applied to the base, trying to set up the figure...

On that topic, the new owner said that she wanted to keep the black/green theme, with the red accents.  I wanted to keep things as similar as possible, but also make it something she could replicate on her own if she wanted.

The major idea I wanted to show was the combination of metallic paints and regular paints.  That is, to make the green have a shimmering effect.

You can see the difference enhancing the reds made in this image.

Here you see a few greens out on the palette, with the metallic paints ready to mix in.

Here are a few initial layers of that combo, with the repainted red accents.

I continued to darken the shadow areas, as well as put a few quick freehand designs on the skin.

I also enhanced the red glow of the eyes, and painted the little spirit stone stuff on the splinter rifle.

Here we have a little side by side action to give you a comparison of what was, and what could be.  The metallics were also redone on the blades.

One final image.  My apologies for the paper towel backdrop... I was not in the studio, and thus had to come up with something on the fly. :-)

Messing around with the air brush

Joe and Jen were kind enough to have Cathy and I over to their Hobby Palace once again.  We had fun participating in the 72nd Screaming Heretic Podcast!

Later on, Joe set up his airbrush stuff and said that I should try out the new Vallejo Airbrush paints.

Here is his setup.

As I have mentioned in the past, I spent many years working with an airbrush on my 2D watercolor paintings.  This would be very interesting, since it had been over 11 years since I last held a working airbrush in my hand!

I only had a few things ready for painting that had not already been well under way, so I grabbed a few things.  I decided to paint over the big gun thing from a Thanatar that's also got a good amount of paint on it.  I wanted to see what kind of lighting effect  I could get in a timely manner :-)

This is after about an hour of spraying.  I began to recall how fun it was to put one color in the funnel, and then add another one on top of it.  As you kept spraying, you would eventually get a color that was mixed together by default.

So, I kept adding new colors into the funnel as I would go along, following a rough plan of attack

The idea was to see what kind of shaded basecoat I could achieve as opposed to my normal hairy sticks.  For all intents and purposes, it was not all that different.

I knew all along that I was going to go back in with my usual glazing process.  You can see them here with some initial glazing and tinting.

There was a lot of activity going on around me, so I chose a Reaper Bones figure which was going to be painted in my Tomb Kings color scheme.  Out came the fluorescent paints!

I kept working the mid tones, altering colors here and there, going more purple, and then more magenta... transferring to teal and cyan...

 I wish I had a few of my actual Tomb Kings minis with me, but I had to basically go from memory.

I think this was meant to be the new Heirophant, which would be situated in the new Tomb Guardian.

Once I get him home, I can get some dullcoate on him and some nice shots on the backdrops with the other Tomb Kings!!

Malware attack!

Here we go!  The final member of the Wayward Eight.  Otherwise known as Marcus Wayward.  Or perhaps a certain captain that thinks he's good at swordplay.

His color scheme was pretty straightforward, for obvious reasons.  However, the compressed range of colors meant that I had to play with warmer and cooler variants on the brown shades.

Sometimes I would make the brown more reddish, yellow, or even green.

He's keeping a very watchful eye on Jake, who might be forced to make an unexpected stroll through space without a suit...