Paints: The 'Hidden' Hobby Expense

News of newly purchased miniatures elicits a distinct type of displeasure from my wife. New paints on the other hand, are generally fine. This is odd though as paints are bloody expensive. I've not worked out how much this lot must've cost me, although it's easily over £150 - more, due to the price of the Daler Rowney inks:

It doesn't even look like a large collection to me (which is worrying...). How many paints do you have?

The simple truth is that I don't need to add to this money pit! I have a great selection of all the main colours I like to work with and what I really need is to be able to see them all when I'm painting to I can make the best selections.

I got them all out like this to sort through everything I had and to think of a better way of storing them - at the moment they sit in a rather messy huddle in a toolbox. I have to store them this way because I'm a nomadic painter without a permanent place to paint at home. A consequence of this is that I'm never entirely sure of what I've got. This is probably why I have 17 shades of green...

I'm determined to increase my productivity and quality of my painting so I'm on the look out for a neat solution... One that prevents me from adding to the 10 browns I already have...

How do you store and use your paints?

Dusk Green Trolls And The Snowbound Undead

Comic artist Mark Lone produces some great fantasy prints. Even though they're more 'cartoony' than other art work that I'm studying for inspiration, there is plenty to draw on here. Take the following for example. The balance between the greens and the black in the first piece; the black, green and fire in the second; the frozen blues and greens in the third. All very useful for seeing how great impact can come from a limited palette.

Blue Dragons and Purple Vampires

I've been delving into Deviant Art again and this time I've been looking at works by AlexBoca. From this impressive collection I've focused on certain pictures as studies in blues and purples to help me develop my work across my Slaanesh miniatures. These are really helpful in letting me explore the paints that I have, the combinations I can employ, and the ways that I can develop my brush strokes - I want to further evolve my loose blending and layering in ways similar to the colours on the thigh of the dragon in the first picture. 

As always, enjoy!

GW Makes The Satirical News: Looters Return Stuff To Games Workshop

The following article is from the British satirical news site The Daily Mash. It's not hilarious and it's oddly about 27 years off what GW produce today, but it does pick up on something I'm always told by family members or friends when trying to entice them with a casual game: "there are so many rules!" If you're British you'll also appreciate the sideswipe at faux-historical shop Past Times. (By the way, I dream of GW introducing D20s into their current games ;-)

Looters Return Stuff To Games Workshop

SCORES of disappointed rioters queued up this morning to return goods they had mistakenly looted from Games Workshop.

The crestfallen thieves had raided the store hoping for a PS3 or Nintendo bounty but arrived home to find they had stolen a box containing 300 unpainted Orcs and a board game called Beyond the Ultraforest of Kwang.

Martin Bishop, 19, said: “I am returning The Runering of Fangor.

“It includes two dice, each with about 40 sides and instructions on how to gain the trust of a ‘cloud wizard’.

“And yet somehow I’m the fucking bad guy.”

He added: “Nevertheless I am now immune to Dwarven magic, so it hasn’t been a complete waste of time.”

Meanwhile, historical kitsch outlet Past Times reported the return of a pair or resin bookends in the shape of the Egyptian cat-god Sekhmet and 254 teak statues of a fat, reclining Buddha.

And in Manchester, people who stole copies of Limitless starring Bradley Cooper have been setting fire to them and throwing them back through the window of HMV.

Roy Hobbs, manager of Games Workshop in Birmingham, said: “Welcome home my children. Let me bathe you in the healing milk of Fagnarbarak.

“I knew we would meet again.”

Artistic Inspiration From Deviant Art: Slaanesh, Nurgle, and Just Plain Crazy

Deviant Art is fantastic inspiration for painting miniatures. It's full to the brim of work by indie artists in a range of mediums doing some cracking work in all the fantasy and science fiction genres. It's been a while since I've posted anything that I've been looking at, so here for your viewing pleasure is a small selection of work by the Russian artist PabelBilly. There's Slaanesh and Nurgle inspired and just plain crazy! Lovely stuff from a very talented chap.

The Coming Of The Night Trolls

Everyone knows I have a weakness for monsters of pretty much every kind - trolls in particular - so my monster radar when off the chart when I saw this Night Troll that's on the way from Privateer Press. Even more than before I'm dreaming of a troll army for WFB. If these are the new resin/plastic material and can therefore be posed, I might be tempted to make a unit of these gnarly critters to kick off my very own trollmageddon!  

Slaanesh Chaos Goblins - Realm Of Chaos Warband Retinue

These Night Goblins will be in the retinue of one of the Champions of Slaanesh. They illustrate quite simply the three basic colours that I'm using right across my Slaanesh army. The good thing about working with these colours is that they can easily be blended and over-layered with the use of different glazes. Obviously I won't spend too much time on these guys as they truly are minions - on the tabletop I imagine one of the champions will join this unit and they will throw themselves in front of the enemy to protect him/her.

A Century Of Little Wars: HG Wells Celebrated By BBC News

Most of us might not fire match sticks at our friends' armies these days, but this rather charming piece on the BBC website looks at the origins and continuing devotion to HG Wells' Little Wars. It's good to see war gaming getting a fair-to-positive representation in the mainstream news. I particularly love the photos of games spread across garden lawns and in the shadows of castles - 6' by 4' look piddly in comparison!

Champions Of Slaanesh Take A Vacation

Painting on holiday at the in-laws is a rather hit-and-miss affair. I'm working up the Chaos Champions for my Slaanesh warbands that will travel with me to the Oldhammer event. In the following weeks I'll do their retinues, which I'm simply going to pick for variety and interest as opposed to rolling them up. That way I can work on figures that will slot into the units of my larger Realm of Chaos Slaanesh army.  I'll wait until the end of the week for an up-date, by which time I hope to have written up something for each of their backgrounds.

Decor supplied by 'the folks'

Zombie Week: Day Seven

Day Seven... "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me..."

Time really is the killer when it comes to having this hobby alongside a busy job and a full-on family life (son 4, daughter 20 months, wife beautiful with reasonable levels of maintenance...). It might not look like I've managed to do that much here, but believe me, this took some effort. Being a hobbyist in circumstances like mine, you find you have to steal time with guerilla tactics, or negotiate it like a slippery politician. Every moment counts.

This has been an incredibly worthwhile exercise. Not only have I got a unit up to a basic tabletop standard, I've developed a new painterly technique that I'm still happy with after a few days (this really IS an achievement!), and I've set a new era of productivity in motion. Sure I'll still flip flop between projects but so much more will happen between flips... with minimal flops, I hope.

I'll put the final touches to this lot after the compulsory summer week at the in laws, which begins Friday, and will see me focusing on my warbands for Oldhammer day.

Apologies for the slightly blurred picture, it was raining so I had to be quick

Shock! Some Dwarf Miniatures I Actually Like... Well, They Are From Avatars Of War!

These new Dwarf Pathfinders from Avatars of War look really great. No surprise because they're the next in a long line of amazing looking minis from this company. These guys are really setting the standard for GW to follow, particularly in their more 'neglected' fantasy ranges. Any chance of some Wood Elves?

Zombie Week: Day Six

Nothing at all glamorous today as I completed all the black edges on the bases.

I feel like this is essential at this stage so that the unit looks at least minimally 'complete' come tomorrow.

That also clears the final day of this mini challenge for highlights and shading.

Day seven photos will be accompanied by a few philosophical thoughts on painting targets and techniques.

Gosh, you're excited, I can tell!

Zombie Week: Day Five

Day five... Ah, the grim realities of painting large regiments for WFB. On day four I enjoyed the discovery of a new way of using wet brushing and glazes to achieve a hugely satisfying Blanche-type effect. Oh how the mighty have fallen! Yesterday and, I must admit, a little bit today I slogged through daubing the bases in sepia ink and white wet brushing all the remaining human zombies. What a chore. There truly is no glamour in painting the regiment way. It's easy to see how people who just admit to getting painting 'done' struggle to feel motivated or even bothered sometimes. I do gain some solace though from that fact that my usual WFB play from now on will be in 3rd edition, where smaller units are more common. The undead, however, need to be fairly horde-like in all editions. Maybe in future the trick will be to paint a regiment for 4 or 5 days, then spend a couple on a character? 

The New Lizardmen Bastiladon Will Make A Perfect Feral Ork Squiggoth

I'm really glad I held off on getting too deeply into my new Feral Ork project because the new Lizardmen Bastiladon has arrived and it will make the perfect smaller Squiggoth. I'm not certain exactly how they compare size wise, but with plasticard and Forge World guns I can surely turn this plastic kit into a living Battlewagon. This project just came alive!

Zombie Week: Day Four

Day Four... Last night I brought all the rotters up to the same stage with basic washes and highlights, and added black edges to some of the bases. I must say that while the Titan Forge undead trolls are rather neat, the zomblins are of a much lower standard. It looks as if the casting hasn't work properly, something like that. This is disappointing but I'll focus on them tomorrow and see if I can get them up to a reasonable standard.

With the models in the picture you can see the effect of my white wet brushing, a technique I'm using to give an multi-layered 'John Blanche style' look to my work. This - like so many good things - started as an experiment. I'm now slightly realigning my plans for the overall look of the army and getting an extra burst of excitement!