Death Guard Predator W.I.P part 2

So since I last posted, I've done a bit more work on the ol' predator.

I know I was massively grumbling about finding the painting of vehicles massively boring, but I think I may have to readjust that statement:

Painting the base coat on vehicles is very boring. Doing the later stages is... kind of OK.

So basically, since last time I did some shading around the detail and in the recesses with good old reliable Devlan mud in bountiful quantities.

After that had dried up, I did some tidying up with the original base colours.

A problem that I've encountered on this one is that the flash on our camera is a trifle militant, and it can make things come out pretty bright.  You'll be able to see on a couple of these shots what almost looks like snail trail type stuff. It's actually the devlan mud reflecting the light back towards the camera.  Annoying.

Another side effect of the flash is that's shown up a couple of places where the grey undercoat is still showing through. This is kind of good, as I can now touch up these previously hidden spots before I move on to the next stage of painting...

First off, three pics with the  main turret off:

And now some with the main gun turret on:

Well, next up, I'll be bringing the Dheneb Stone up to off-white, and mouldifying (that's not even a word) the green.  I'll also be adding some rust to the metal work, and if I'm brave enough, try my hand at some weathering... Fortune favours the brave, but the sensible don't want to make their models look even worse than usual!

Death Guard marine #6 (or is it 7?) Who's counting anyway...

As promised t'other day, as we say in't'North (even though I don't live in't'North any more I am reliably informed such phraseology is still common), this post is about my latest Death Guard marine.

This one is another model from GW's finecast set. It's the second one I've done from said set.  Interestingly, on both models, I was a bit unsure what direction my painting was going in, even though I was trying to tie in the colour scheme with the Forge World models I'd already worked on. Somehow, they've both come together and I don't think they look out of place alongside the Forge World stuff.

Somebody looks like he's been having a rough time of it.  There's a couple of bits on the chest piece that I will do a little more work on later.

Quite like the odd shoulder piece on this arm.

There's not really much point to this, I was just experimenting with cropping  pictures. I thought it looked alright,  so I put it in.

Death Guard Predator - W.I.P - flat base coat only

Morning all.

Over the past week or so, I've been putting a base coat to my Predator for my Death Guard.

Anybody that knows me will know that I don't really like working on tanks, so I tend not use 'em. Well, as I am working on my first 40k project in years, I decided to try and change my opinion.

To cut a long story short, it took absolutely bleedin' ages to even get this far.  The surface area on these things is actually massive.  When I get to the Rhino, I suppose it'll be slightly less irritating to paint, and when I get to doing the Land Raider, probably massively more (although this supposedly will be a fun conversion, so hopefully not too irritating - I'm not convinced though...).

Anyways, I primed this in grey.  The greens are Knarloc Green thinned with Vallejo thinning medium in a roughly 3:2 proportion. The beige colour is Dheneb Stone thinned in the same proportion.

The metal areas were base coated in Chaos black, then given a heavy over-brush of Tin Bitz. Basecoat finished off with a rough over-brush of Formula P3 Pig Iron (I love this colour).

And that's that, the flat base coat is done. I'll probably do my first wash of recesses, edges and that later on today.

Here's a fairly non-exciting picture from above:

Too many hours of my life have thus far been spent on this. I see a bright future for this vehicle of being consistently blown up in turn 1 of every game I play.

By the way, if anybody is still encountering difficulties with the different bits on this blog overlaying on each other, please let me know (including specifically which bits) and I'll try and sort it.

M.I.A

Sorry folks, I've kind of been missing in action for a little while.  Rest assured that I'll be making a couple of blog posts this weekend, though. I've been working on another Death Guard marine, and also on a Predator (which is very much a work in progress).  I've also been chucking ideas about with my good mate Tim on a Land Raider conversion.

In the mean time, here is a picture of a bloke with a toad on his head:

This type of thing has actually happened before, and last time one man died.

For some reason I also had 5 Magics by Megadeth in my head last night for no good reason...

Ye Skaven of thee vile Clann Cheeseboarde - part 2

As anybody with even a passing familiarity with skaven doubtless knows, they are cowardly yet cunning creatures.  Hence, the combat oriented heroes they have are all a bit crap.

They do, however have some nasty magic tricks up their voluminous wizards' sleeves.  With this worthy arcane knowledge in mind, I obviously had to have a few spell casting rats in my army.  Here are a couple of them now...

This is the grey seer from the screaming bell kit, to which I added a hand holding a grimoire from the plague monks  accessories sprue

In this shot, he looks like he's leaping over a fence.

This one includes a poor attempt at free hand on the pages of his grimoire.

Overall, I was reasonably happy with the job I did at the time.  If I was to paint him again, I'd probably do a few things differently.  For anybody that's remotely interested, a couple of those arcane symbols are recreations of some of the cave paintings in Twin Peaks.

The Grey Seer Thanquol model.  Good fun, even these days, even though his hands and feet are well out of proportion.

From another angle.  Come to think of it, his staff has a  fairly  thick haft. Ah, the halcyon days when  it was too difficult to do a thin spear or staff without it being too delicate to even consider...

I called this plague priest the Stinking Bishop. I love this model.

Mmmm, gelfling?

I do like that they sculpted this model with a hunch back.

Ye Skaven of thee vile Clann Cheeseboarde - part 1

I was having a bit of gander (a "look" for the non-Northerners) at my external hard drive the other day, and I stumbled across some Skaven that I painted a couple of years back.  So I thought I'd share them with you few that are following / lurking on this blog.  Plus, I think you probably deserve a break from the Death Guard stuff...

Therefore please meet some rat ogres, by the unlikely names of Klaus, Heinrich and Schnitzel.

Klaus unfortunately went blind after biting into a discarded warpfire thrower, which as you might expect exploded in his face. Overwhelmed by a level of pain and frustration his tiny mind just couldn't cope with, Klaus has become very belligerent and has to be goaded carefully in the correct direction whenever his handlers take the field.

Klaus is a very large and powerful rat ogre and often breaks his restraints.   On one  rather memorable occasion he burst free of the sewers & ran amok in the gunnery school of Nuln. Non were left alive, and several drunken guards were hanged for dereliction of duty.

Schnitzel is quite possibly one crazy experiment too far.  Having  a comparatively  agile mind  for  a rat ogre, Schnitzel  has time and again shown an almost calculated taste for simplistic cruelty.  His higher level of intelligence can probably be attributed to the mutating essence of the huge lump of warp stone that has been implanted in his shoulder.  Having said this, it unlikely he could surpass the typical village simpleton in most tests of rudimentary intelligence.

Schnitzel has a warpstone and steam powered enlarged surgical blade affixed to his arm.   He is able to distinguish the difference between beating man-things into greasy paste with his fist and slicing them asunder with his blade.  Both of these outcomes please him immensely.

Heinrich is somewhat sedate for a rat ogre, although far from mild mannered - until threatened!  It is said in the vast corridors and tunnels of the Under Empire that  he has become the personal steed of a certain powerful Grey Seer...

I think my painting has probably improved a bit since I did these, so don't, like, judge me maaaan and all that jazz. But I did have good fun messing about with these.  If they were dogs, they'd probably be described as "big, lovely, chunky pups" or something.