Five Billion Thin Coats

I have heard it said that red is a hard color to paint. With my Adeptus Mechanicus army, this difficulty is combined with the fact that cloth is also hard to paint. Over the course of the last year, however, I think I've finally created a method that gets me pretty good results, so I figure I'll share it with you.

Step One: Zenithal Highlighting

 

Shown here with the basecoat on, but you can get the picture. Zenithal highlighting means taking a model, priming it with a dark color, then adding a lighter color from the top. When you apply the semi-translucent basecoat, some of the light shines through, giving you a little boost when you start laying down the lighter layers later.

I believe that this technique is sometimes called "undercoating."

Step Two: Basecoat and Shade

No picture here, because who doesn't know how to put down a basecoat and slop a wash on it? For my dudes, I'm using Citadel's Khorne Red and shading it with Carroburgh Crimson. Make sure to think out the Khorne Red a little so its semi-opaque, otherwise the zenithal highlighting will have been a waste of time.

Step Three: Thin Coats

The next thing I do is many thin coats of Wazzdaka Red.

Many thin coats.

So many thin coats.

More thin coats than you thought humanly possible.

Normally, I'd use the coats on edges and upper surfaces, but because of the shape of these coats, I like to alternate between thin edge highlights and thin, almost wash-level applications over pretty much the entire surface. The way thin paint tends to pool on these coats reinforces, rather than washing out, the way light would pool on the flared bottoms of the coats and has the added benefit of smoothing the transition between the different levels of light - cloth has notoriously smooth transitions, which is part of what makes it harder to paint than armor plates.

It will take many thin coats to achieve this effect. Put on a podcast, have a couple of other projects on hand to work on while they dry, and be ready to add layers over the course of several days.

Step Four: Edge Highlight

The last thing you want to do is add some edge highlighting to make the folds of cloth really pop.

I think he looks pretty good, if I do say so myself!

Airbrush or Hairbrush?

The last thing I should do is admit that I am a recalcitrant weirdo. A lot of people have told me that it's easier to get this effect with an airbrush, to which I say... so?

Personally, airbrushes aren't ideal for me for a variety of reasons: my wife has asthma so I would have to be scrupulous about setting up an (expensive) ventilation system, I tend to paint in little spurts rather than sitting down for a long time, and airbrushes rely on numerous finicky and breakable components, which just plain irritates the hell out of me.

And of course, I think I've gotten pretty good with the conventional brush. You'll have to be the one to judge.

Action Shot!

A gaming buddy of mine got a great shot of my minis in action during Game Two of our FLGS's Kill Team campaign. Here are two of my Skitarii rangers sniping out my opponent's Astartes scouts.

I am really enjoying a) Kill Team and b) the Adeptus Mechanicus. They've got a good combination of gonzo special rules that make them fun to play and models that are both neat and gribbly in ways that make them fun to paint and convert.

Perhaps it makes me a bad person, but it doesn't hurt any that I am tearing it up in Kill Team. In the game pictured, I ended up losing two guys and killing most of my opponent's models. Any faction that relies on melee, multiple wound models, or 24'' or shorter range guns is going to really struggle against Adeptus Mechanicus 6+ bonuses, 30'' range basic rifle, and other nastiness.

But most importantly, I'm glad to finally get a picture of some finished models up on this blog, even if it's just a pair of lowly Skitarii rangers.

A Little Wednesday WIP

Let's have a little fun with some works in progress.

I am really proud of this dude, though I can't claim credit for the original idea, which I stole off someone on Facebook. The base model is a rotbringer sorcerer. As you can see, I've sliced off his head and right arm, replacing them with the head of a ruststalker princeps and a tech-priest dominus, respectively. I filed down the buboes on his tummy and generally reshaped his torso to make him look fat rather than bulbous (and stuck a purity seal on one spot I couldn't get quite right), hacked off his elephantine foot and replaced it with some spindly mechanical claws, and gave him a backpack from (I think) the kataphron kit [NOTE: not the kataphron kit, the ruststalker kit], a claw that's definitely from the kataphron kit, and the niftiest servo-skull, the one from the tempestus scion box. I also had to chop off the weirdo tentacle he had for a left arm and tuck some claws in there to hold the scrolls he's carrying. You can't see it, but I also had t do some greenstuffing on the back to fill in the vario//us evil symbols carved into his cloak.

When I look at this dude, I imagine that he's some kind of specialist tech-priest, not a tech-priest dominus or an engineseer or a or anything else currently in the game. He could be a magos biologis, here to study some xenos dudes, a transmechanic carrying important information, or an explorator with forbidden lore. Of course, I'd have to write some stats to use him on the table, though I could also use him as an objective marker for a rescue-the-prisoner kind of game.

This dude was originally a titan tech-priest. Most of his conversions began as matters of necessity. Resin is a great material, but it's fragile and bendy. Forge World's sculpts are great, but sometimes they scale weirdly when compared to GW prime models. When I got my titan tech-priest, he suffered from both problems, with a warped axe-head and a spindly servo-arm that I eventually got sick of trying to get right. So, I went into my bits box and got some replacements - and as a bonus, I got to customize the model some! The new axe head is from the tech-priest dominus box, as is one of his two loyal servo-skulls. The two servo arms - one big and clawed, one small for delicate work - are both from the kataphron kit as well.

My plan is to use this guy as an engineseer. However, I think the model is so neat that I also have plans to occasionally use him as an inquisitor. Inquisitors can come to the Ordos from all sorts of backgrounds, so why not a former tech-priest?

Of course, that makes me think about getting some Imperial Guard bodies and using spare Skitarii bits to make them into a crew of enhanced lasgun-toting acolytes... but that's a project for another day, especially given that the Skitarii I already have will do quite well as proxies for acolytes with hotshot lasguns or plasma guns, thank you very much. So long as I don't want to use him alongside my Adeptus Mechanicus army, anyway.

Thanks for coming to look at my models! Don't hesitate to drop me a comment and let me know kinds of content you want to see more of.

Only the Tiny Plastic Dead Have Seen the End of Tiny Plastic War

A long time ago, I started a Tumblr. I called it "Tiny Plastic Dead," as in "only the tiny plastic dead have seen the end of tiny plastic war." That's a riff off a quote from the Spanish-American essayist George Santayana - not Plato as it's sometimes thought - and although it's damn depressing, it's also got some poetry that I have always enjoyed

Fast forward about a decade. Tiny Plastic Dead has become much more of a catch-all Tumblr that I use to argue about politics, but I'd still kind of like to post some pictures of models. What's a guy to do? Start a new blog.

What are you likely to see up here?

Warhammer 40k

I play Adeptus Mechanicus (Forge World Lucius), Imperial Knights (House Ohrlacc), Space Marines (Exorcists chapter), and Inquisition. Also inside the world of Warhammer 40k, I've got a huge pile of unpainted Escher, some old, OLD school Battlefleet Gothic models, and I'm going to get into Titanicus one of these days.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar

I love the entire Death faction, especially ghosts and skeletons, but also vampires and ghouls. I've also got some Stormcast kicking around who I'm going to paint up as Anvils of the Heldenhammer.

Dropthing

I have a bunch of Shaltari stuff. I've always enjoyed the space hedgehogs and their evil tricksiness. Dropzone and Dropfleet Commander appear to have some life in them, and I'm eager to see what comes next.

Dungeons & Dragons

I don't get to play as much D&D as I'd like, but I love to paint D&D minis. My painting time is usually pretty swamped by wargaming minis, but I get the occasional adventurer or monster painted up, and I'll post them here when I do!

If you're interested in pictures of minis, WIP shots, discussion of painting techniques, battle reports, and other random brain droppings related to these games, this is the place to be. And if not, get the hell out of here.