Getting the most out of your yellows...

Here was the exercise for working your yellow colors beyond the "Yellow Space Marine" effect.

Just like the previous color theory videos, this one describes how to use those warmer and cooler versions of a color to create contrast and interest.

I made the feathers the lightest and most 'pure' colors, with the amber gem on the end of the staff, with the idea of making that a focal point.

Many of your 'shadow' colors are brownish, but making these redder or greener allows you to get a whole range of colors.  I also used some leaves to do more orange yellow.

This was very fun, since I have only been using yellows as part of NMM or painting Imperial Fists.  The one color set I left out was the fluorescent paints, which is a key component of the Gold NMM.

Bones and Vampires... a box arrives from Reaper

Let's just say that hours were spent in the attempt to open and organize all the miniatures that came from Reaper on Monday. :-)  Considering that all the miniatures inside were plastic, that was one heavy box!

It was all ingeniously packed to get a maximum amount of stuff in a smallish box, without compromising the safety of the contents.

On top were some of the 'extras'.  These were the elementals that I was hoping to use for the glowing fluorescent paints.

Later this year, or early next, I would like to shoot a painting video of making the dragon come to life...  that would be very fun!  My initial thought is to have him perched above a lava canyon...

Then it was on to all the major bags of figures.  We went through each one...

And tried to separate them into some generalized groups, which would be broken down further.

The elementals were just as neat as I thought they were going to be.  The clear plastic that was used on them is a bit stiffer than the white plastic, which is helpful!

Some of the piles were put in boxes until I could get some smaller ones to isolate the final groups.

It took up all of my currently unused boxes that I had been saving to group them all!  Even then, some of the boxes have multiple categories inside.

Here are a few groupings.  The first was a collection of figures which we thought would make great Zombicide characters!  My favorites were the park Ranger and Disco Stu.  Zombies invade the Possum Lodge!  We will have to add hockey stick weapons to go along with that goalie mask!

I was surprised at how many we ended up setting aside!

Oh, and there were zombies, too!  Maybe we won't run out of walkers so quickly...

This set was also fun.  A little support for an Imperial Guard army.  These were going to be the original camo figures for that video, and may still be used...

Stormtroopers!

There was so much more.  I will try to do some other posts like this when I get to the elementals and other fun figures.  

While we would all love to go back to the days when you could get a nice metal figure in a blister for around $2 (or even less), that is just not the world we live in anymore.

These were quite nice, and will be very handy for all kinds of future projects!

I hope you enjoy yours!

Another trip to Home Depot!

Well, not really.  We did have to go everywhere else, it seems!  My apologies for the delay on the post.  Picking up the new laptop and getting all the polystyrene tubing took a lot longer than I thought.

So, here we have the bases from the Mosaic Tile video.  I love doing these!

In this case, these were done using the painted on method.

I think you guys will have just as much fun!!!

Keep your stick on the ice...

Here's another example of the shaded basecoat in action.

You can see most of the colors that were used spread out all over the palette.

As usual, these colors were made much lighter than they would be in the end.  That's because many layers of glazing awaited!

And here we see some of those glazing colors.  Most were Secret Weapon washes (algae, soft body black, armor wash, dried blood), but there were also some GW washes (the orange and burnt sienna), and a Vallejo sepia...

Even this image really gives you a sense of what those glazes do, even in the first pass.  You will see that I vary my glazing color, usually taking my cue from what color is already on the mini, although sometimes I go the opposite direction.

Each of these subsequent images will show my working my way around the figure.

You have seen me in past posts show how I will wipe away certain parts of my washes, with either my finger or a paper towel.  This helps to preserve many of my lightest shades...

I try to keep working within clearly defined areas, just as I wold with a watercolor painting.  This lets me drag an existing wash into the next area of tinting and shading, so that no crazy edges or water marks occur.

Putting those darker glazes on the 'teeth' really made the glow shine!!

I also worked in some brown liner and some other opaque dark colors into the still wet washes.

Doing so let me get some very nice dark washes that flowed quite nicely.

Here is a new experiment.  I mixed the fallout wash from Secret Weapon with my Vallejo fluorescent paint.  This was to see if it could give me some darker shading in my glowing area, but keep that high chroma feel.

It really did what I wanted, and then some.  I discovered that I could also use this as a way to paint some subtle OSL effects on nearby surfaces.  Normally, I would have to put that in with layers of opaque paint!  Very cool!

I think our treeman is very glad that hockey sticks are made from composite materials now!!

That was amazing.  To go from worry about a game seven, to worrying about overtime, to celebrating a win in mere seconds was incredible.

Many thanks to the Hawks for getting us through so many rough spots in the arena of sports this year!

Birds of a feather...

Here we go!  The Griffon.

I think this was my favorite of the CoolMiniorNot Big Birds.

The face was especially nice to paint!

As with the others, there is a lot of repetition and tedium in the wings, but it is always worth it.

Now this is something I never got to do last time around!  Having all these beasties together in one image!!

So, we move on to more big guys... and Tanks!

What should be interesting for people watching the video will be seeing scenes of the palette such as this...

And this become what you saw in the other images.  Patience is the key.  You just have to know that you are building up towards that end goal, and that you will not have that nice little progression from one stage to the next.  You have to set up your subsequent layers of paint with those initial colors, even when they seem incongruous.

So more painting!!!

Team Wappel strikes again!!

Well, I think you have heard me talk about how, over the years, Cathy and I have bounced all kinds of techniques and ideas off each other.   This really happened a great deal with basing techniques.

It was her idea to bake the sculpey and then carve it, instead of trying to sculpt details into the smushy clay.

You remember that I was baking sculpey a few weeks ago, and that I had tried out something new.  Cathy needed bricks and stones for her project, and I thought that I might be able to make some nice bricks en masse, instead of having to carve them individually from one big block.

I had seen some people make some moulds and casts of bricks, but this seemed to potentially be a much faster prospect.  We thought that you could either pre-weather the stones/bricks, or leave them mostly intact and do some minor cracks and such after they were glued in place.

Cathy was the first one to try out the new technique, and these photos tell the tale!

She took some of the larger blocks and positioned them just so... the other nice aspect of making the blocks this new way!  Pre-assembly!!

In addition, the blocks were all the same height... another benefit of the way I cut them out of the original roll of sculpey.

Cathy positioned her miniature in the scene, and then wisely numbered the blocks.

In the background, we have had lots of History Channel DVD's of the Crusades, as well as Kingdom of Heaven as reference.

She weathered each block one by one with the standard wood carving tools.

The carved blocks back in place!  She saved some of the larger chunks of sculpey to use as rubble and shattered blocks...

It was amazing how closely she was able to make those blocks look like the broken remains of the walls and towers she saw in the videos!

Now it's time to glue them in place!!!

I think you can see the mosaic that Cathy carved on the floor of the diorama base.

A closer view really shows that off!

One more view from behind.

So, kudos to Cathy for working some serious magic with those new sculpey blocks.  I will try to work some of this into the appropriate basing videos, although this calls for a video of its own :-)

I hope you don't mind me posting something that Cathy actually sculpted, but it was a team effort in the end!