Painting Table Update March 2012

Its been a while since I cast my eye across what I have stacked up, and as get to the end of March my stash of painting projects is finally growing thin.

Currently I'm still working on the rest of the Devastator squad to go with the chap I finished up for the step-by-step, but as I may have already mentioned my Mass Effect 3 playthrough has been getting in the way. Still, they're getting there and I should get them done over the Easter break at the latest. These mark the end of the xmas spend splurge, and a huge expansion of my Blood Raven force. So what next?

Well, doing the Leman Russ i used to test powders has made me itch to do some Guard again, but first, I think I'm going to bite the bullet and try my hand at a minor conversion. gulp.

The plan is simple - I really XV8s but the posing on them is awful. It doesn't look too hard to chop the arms and legs up at the joints and repose them, so thats the plan. Sounds simple, but we'll see....

Step-By-Step: Blood Ravens Devastator

Forgive me, Blogger, for it has been a couple of weeks since my last update. This is mostly because of Mass Effect 3, if I'm being totally honest, but I've also been building and painting orks with my eldest son, which has been pretty good fun.

On a more serious - serious? i did just use that word? argh! - front, I've been taking stage-by-stage photos of a Devastator Marine as I worked through him. Partly this is for my own reference, and partly in the hope that people passing by this blog will find it interesting. I don't pretend to have any great answers on how to paint a Blood Raven "look", or indeed anything else, but this is how I do it, with my thoughts on colour placement and markings. Any comments or critiques are always welcome, and the pictures are under the cut.

All Your Bases...

So I've been having more fun with powders, this time on the basing work I've done on my Terminators. I will probably stick up some long shots of the completed figures at some point, but my toy of the moment is definitely the weathering powders, and they are great on basing material. All my Blood Ravens have so far have been based on a sort of rocky, deserty gravel material, and the larger bases for the Terminators just meant a little more details. This time it's rocks and the odd hit of grass tufts, to give the effect of a marginal scrubland, and powders have been used to blend the rocks and the lower legs of the marines in to the surface.

Anyway, here they are:

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

One of the things I've been meaning to have a play with for a while is Weathering Powders. They come highly recommended by all sorts of people, and look like a fun and different way to achieve a "look" on a model. My chosen victim was the Leman Russ I got for xmas, which got a good lot of work done on it last weekend and then again on Wednesday night when i was in on my own.

It's important to note that this is really, really messy. I spread a lot of newspaper to do this own, but even so it went all over my hands, clothes and so on, so be warned! But lets let the pictures do the talking!

We started here - painting done and a bunch of normal scratch/dent weathering applied, as well as some wash to darken down the recesses in the tracks and around the hull plates.

Rust! Actually i think this is slightly over-applied on the tracks but it's a lovely effect overall. I think i was expecting to be able to spread it around more easily from the initial application site, but I quickly learned that i got effects from dabbing the brush around rather than using it like a "normal" paint application. 

And then a mix of soot and dark earth scattered around the place. I should probably do a sides-shot (though you can see the Chimera hull in the background) so show it's heavier around the base. I was expecting it to be heavier still, actually, hence the less-subtle-than-it-could-be scratches on the plow that i expected to be more heavily obfuscated.

that said, i've falled slightly in love with weathering powders - they're a ton of fun to apply, have a really nice effect and I'm off to try them on a couple of figures next...