Scout man!

This one's not done by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought you guys (and by you guys, I mean "Forrest") might want to see the latest result of painting under the influence of no sleep.

No highlights yet and things like the random splash of red on his face need to be cleaned up, but I think this guy should be ready soon to fight a veteran Ultramarine Terminator for control of a strawberry gummy bear or two.

Also wanted to point out that I drilled out the gun barrel which I think looks cool. Take it from me, the bad-boy of little army man painting: little details like these are what make the ladies wet. Nothing like a detailed little army man to get them excited.

Rise from your GRAVE... so you can... be trapped inside a giant robot... forever.

Here's a little look see at my upcoming Army Mans! I has to be said that the spray gun is really paying for it's self at this point... and from the noises I heard last night... perhaps thinking for it's self as well...

Behold! It was as if a great shadow was cast upon the warp!

It looks like the Space Marine commander and Commissar Yarrick are getting into a little squabble. SHHH not in front of the Dreadnought!

MORE ARMY MANS!

Terminators: The Blue Period UPDATED!

Tonight's update comes in the form of Storm-bolters and Power Fists! I wrapped up the Terminator (mostly... after taking these pictures I noticed a few areas that needed a teensy bit of love).

But enough of this laffy taffy, down to the nitty gritty.

Primer: Chaos Black
Base Coat: Mordian Blue (foundation, airbrushed on), Boltgun Metal, Shadow Gray, Tin Bitz, Shining Gold, Mechrite Red (foundation).

Top Coat: Face and Skulls and such: Space Wolves Gray, then a Skull White, Blood Red

Washes: Delvin Mud

Highlights:Mithril Silver, (for the body) A larger edging of Ultramarine Blue then a finer edging of Ice Blue, Dwarven Bronze, Burnished gold

Burn the Heretic!


I'm in your kitchen stealin' yer foodz!

Hey... are those gummy bears!? I will literally shoot you if you don't give me a strawberry one! LITERALLY!

Objective secure!

Eldar army man part 2!

Being the bad boy of army mans painting is not all fun and games; I have problems just like all other non-bad-boy army man painters out there. My most pressing problem at the moment is that I am a terrible sleeper. I am unable to accomplish on a regular basis what even infants are capable of: falling asleep. I failed once again this morning to bludgeon my consciousness into... uh... unconsciousness, so in true bad-boy fashion, I decided to take up my paints and army mans and give you, the loyal reader, some more pictures to look at. Behold:

For those of you keeping track, the eyes were done in Enchanted Blue with just a dot of Ice Blue in the middle. The gemstones were done with Mechrite Red and highlighted with Blood Red. Edging of the armor plates was done with Codex Grey and the base of the figure is Bestial Brown.

A few lessons learned from this little session:

• When highlighting a black basecoat, I think that keeping the highlights as small as possible looks better - you want to define the edges of the armor plates/fingers/backpack aerials/whatever, but you don't want to distract too much from the pure black.
• Along the same lines, when you highlight something with white, try to keep those highlights small as well - the white is just an accent.
• Don't paint when you haven't slept because your vision is going to be blurry and your paint job is going to look like crap. You think you're being productive because you're using your awake time to paint instead of lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, but really all you're doing is making errors that you'll have to spend time cleaning up during your next army man painting session.

I can't wait to look at these pics later and see what I need to fix. On the plus side, at least my closeup photography skills are getting better.

ARMY MANS!

*UPDATE*

By overwhelming demand, here's a shot of the guardian (along with his mortal enemy) from a bit further away.

An Eldar army man!

While Forrest was off playing with his cool new paint thrower and virtual army mans, I was busy painting up one of the Space Elves... I mean, Eldar. Not quite done with him/her/it yet, but here's a shot of the work in progress:


As you can see, the base is white which means yes, I did prime him with white spray paint. Why did I prime white for a predominantly black color scheme? I don't know. I just don't know. Also, please note that Bleached Bone is a pain-in-the-ass color to get a non-streaky look with. Just a little warning...

I am kinda proud of this guy so far though; in the past, I never bothered with shading or highlighting - I just tried to paint as neatly as possible - so it's cool to see what a little bit of shading can do. Looks like the next step will have to be edging the armor and painting in some of those gemstones.

ARMY MANS!

Trust in your War Gear!

Like any good rugged space marine/rebel Army Mans painter you're only as good as your war gear and with the crazy amount of work facing me it was time for an upgrade... or a lateral move depending on how you look at it.

So I took my Rhino transport down to my local Game Kastle...by the way these Warhammer 40k references doing anything for you?... no? Anyway, since I have so many minis to paint , I picked up THIS:

BEHOLD The Citadel Spray Gun! Sure your standard beginner airbrush is 6 dollars cheaper but it doesn't look like a GUN now does it? It looks like some little girlie quill from 17gofuckyourself30.


Here is the instrument of destruction and all it's parts. And if you have a keen eye you'll spot it's first victim, an Ultramarine Terminator.


I couldn't find official Citadel brand propellant so I had to use this one... which is manufactured by badgers, or so it would seem. Sort of a delightful little mental picture when you think about it.



It's raining outside so I had to conceive of a way to do my spray gunning indoors. Luckily for me, my lovely wife had done some air brush work in culinary school and she suggested I use a large Tupperware container placed on it's side. Let me tell you, this is a great way to work without ruining everything around your tiny little Army Mans.



I didn't want everything covered in a coat of the Mordian Blue so I used blue painters masking tape for "delicate surfaces" to mask off some of the large parts I wanted to keep black. Now before you say anything, I thought the fingers of the power fist were supposed to be metallic... but I turns out they are blue like the rest of the damn thing. Too bad I found this out AFTER I put the gun away.
Oh well!



Now, the guns in all the product pictures I've seen the spray gun is black, but I imagine they changed it for distribution in the US because there's that law about tiny "realistic" looking flame throwers, you know the one.


And here is the result! A super smooth super even coat of base color. It's so nice I don't even think I'll need a top coat.

Here he is after I added the rest of the blue by hand, The whole process only took about 20 mins!

ARMY MANS!

Behold!

I've been playing around with the Army Mans painter in Dawn of War II and look at my first creation. BEHOLD The Razor Frogs!

Blood Angel army man!

Just to prove that the bad boy of little army man painting does more than remove paint from little army mans, here's a Blood Angel marine I've been working on:


I freely admit that I am not anywhere near the painting power level of awesome arty-man Forrest, but I think it's looking okay. As a side note, if you decide to take pictures of your painted army mans with an SLR camera in RAW format with a zoom lens, be prepared to see tons of stuff you messed up on. Doh.

VICTORY IS MINE

While my esteemed colleague Forrest is busy experiencing success by putting paint onto his miniature, the bad boy of army man painting (me) is finally experiencing some success as well... by removing the paint from his. Behold... the miracle of Simple Green! We go from this:


To this:


It took a little scrubbing with a toothbrush to remove the caked-on gesso, but the results were worth it and now my little army man stands ready for a new layer of primer. Now if only the wind would actually let up in my part of the world and allow me to spraypaint something. Durn you wind! Durn you to heck!

Kopter Final! I guess... maybe

The thing about painting complex pieces is it always seems there is a little bit or bob you forgot to paint. It sits there nagging you to address it, never letting you sleep!

Anyway here she is! This was really fun to work on because, as I said before, everything associated with Orks is messy, chipped, and pounded together out of bits of scrap. With this in mind it's your duty as an Army Mans painter to really show that history!

Here's what I used:

Primer: Chaos Black

Base coats: Scab Red, Boltgun Metal, Desert Yellow, Orkhide Shade, Scorched Brown, Tin Bitz, Bleached Bone, Lich Purple.

Top Coats: Blood Red(lots of it), Goblin Green, Golden Yellow, Skull White, Warlock Purple. 

Washes: Delvin Mud

Highlights (edging): Mithril Silver, Dwarven Bronze, Camo Green, Snakebite Leather, Vomit Brown, Ice Blue.

I may have missed a few colors in there some place... but that's the majority. Just to let you know how I did the metal parts: I painted them with Boltgun Metal, then washed everything with Delvin Mud, and finally I highlighted everything with Mithril Silver.

On a sort of funny side note I was playing Dawn of War II today and I named the main character after me (of course, since I'm such an awesome rebel army mans painter) and this was the first loading screen, the text describing "me" made me laugh...

ARMY MANS!

Kopter Progress

I've got the undercoating done and I've just applied my first layer of top coat. I also washed the metal in Delvin Mud. There is still plenty of cleanup to do and then I've got to apply a second top coat in some areas. After all that is done I will then do a detail pass and get all the edging and chipped paint in there. Anyway here she is!

We's gonna blow dem all up boss!

ARMY MANS!

Never fear!

When painting little army mans, it is important to have certain supplies on hand - like paint. If you don't have any paint, you can't paint little army mans and if you can't paint little army mans, then you're liable to feel left out when you read the title of this blog and discover that you can't participate.

I wanted to paint some little army mans, so I ordered some paints. Since the Post Office has something against delivering things addressed to me to my apartment, I went down there this morning to pick up this particular pulsating package of paints and saw this printed on the outside of the box:

My reinforcements have arrived? I would have been far less embarrassed if the shipping address was "Bob's Porno Hut" instead. They might as well have written "you're not going to be touching a woman anytime soon either" right underneath.

Thank God the people at the post office are illiterate; otherwise, I would have been really ashamed if someone read that.

He learns the rules... just so he can BREAK THEM

When you're a bad-boy painter of little army mans like me, you don't play by the rules. This blatant disregard for the rules may seem exciting and sexy at first glance, but it can also lead you into trouble.

Take for example my recent bad-boy attempt to prime my army mans not by using the safe, established method of spray painting them, but instead by painting on gesso (developed for priming art canvases) using a brush. Other people on the internet have reported good results using it, but apparently my bad-boy brush technique is lacking:


I don't know which bothers me more - the streakiness of paint or the bubbles that formed in the recesses of his armor. This one isn't much better:


The black gesso is a bit better, but it filled in too much detail and the way the coat dried, it now has the consistency of pumice. Not really the effect I was going for.

What do I do with this minis now? Simple: strip the paint off of them. I picked up a bottle of Simple Green cleaning fluid which, according to the internet, is supposed to be good for stripping paint from plastic as well as metal miniatures, and we all know the internet is never wrong.


The Simple Green will go into a small plastic hummus container because there's nothing bad-boy miniature painters like more than hummus.

I'll be back soon to let you know how this experiment horribly backfired. ARMY MANS!!!

Step 3: Lemons into Space Lemonade

As you know from my last post, I was in a pickle. The casting of my first Deffkopter was slightly off which created some pretty serious separation. I tried to glue it together, shave off excess plastic, cut the pegs used for snapping together... nothing seemed to work.

GAAAHHH WHY!?

"She'z gonna shake 'part boss!"

So, after mulling it over, I decided to just go ahead and glue it together and figure out what to do later. For the solution I finally decided on using Green Stuff to fill in the cracks and maybe add a little bit of personalization if I was feeling CRAZY!

Phew!

Added a little metal patch on the front in honor of the fix.

I then added a little more primer and I think the end result was pretty nice, if not perfect. It's official, however, I'm in love with Green stuff.

He feels whole again!

"Dem gobbos did a good job boss"

ARMY MANS!

Step 3: Have her Open the bo... I mean Vehicles!

Part A:  Well we're off to a somewhat rocky start. Sorry for the no pictures the camera has been stolen by pirates... SPACE PIRATES! That or Georgia took it.

Anyway I put together deffkopter today and , due to how it's molded, things did not go as planned. I ended up having to cut off all the pegs that were meant to snap the pieces together (I guess you don't need glue TO ASSAULT BLACK REACH!) and there is still a little bit of separation, especially on the back of the mini. 

It'll be alright though, I think I may go pick up some green stuff to smooth things out before I begin painting, though I may not have to as the gaps are so small.

Either way I'll update you with the next step as soon as I venture out to take it!

ARMY MANS!

Building a solid foundation so I can muck it all up later

I'll admit, I'm not a very good shot with a can of spray paint: when trying to prime minis, most of the paint ends up on my hands or in my lungs. This would be fine if I were trying to get high off of the paint fumes, but everyone knows that crystal meth and heroin are my drugs of choice - when I pull out the can of paint, I come to PAINT suckas.

Bearing this in mind, I tried something new today: I actually left the house and picked up a few containers of liquid acrylic gesso. This stuff is normally used to prime canvases for paints, but I've read a few reports which state that it's not too bad for priming minis either. Here's what they looked like after the first coat:

Yes, all of the detail has been completely obscured. No, I'm not panicking. Apparently, that's just how this stuff goes on and it will dry very thinly in 24 hours. That's what they say, anyways. You'd better not be wrong, internet.

Step 2: Section B: Gettin' Orky wiff it

So the Ork Tester is all done, though I noticed when looking over this photo that I got a little red on the poor buggers face, I guess that's why it's a tester.

It's always a good idea to test your ideas on one of your minis before you commit to the whole set, you'll find out what works great and what doesn't work as well. For instance I probably won't edge the leather out with Vomit Brown in future Orks. I think it looks pretty cool and makes sense in regard to warn leather, but I prefer a little more subtle highlight.

Either way I'm excited about the Red Vs Blue theme I've got going here, the black and silver scheme that they show on the box is okay, but I find it a little boring. 

The Process!

1. For the Ork I painted the skin areas with Orkhide Shade base coat. For the armour I used Scab Red and Boltgun Metal for the silver parts. I used Scorched Brown for the leather. The rest is black, which is good because that's the color I Primed the mini in. For the gun I started with Scab Red, Tin Bitz, and Boltgun Metal.

2. Then I layered on a coat of Snot green on the arms to start defining the muscle shapes, I left the Orkhide Shade only in the deepest nooks of the muscles. I then started layering blood red on the armour and I added a wash of Devlan mud to all of the metal. The lone exception to this was the sword, which only had the parts that weren't sharpened washed. I painted the teeth with Desert yellow and painted the various skull ornaments with my trusty Bleached Bone.

3. Finally I added a layer Goblin Green to the muscles and the face to really bring out the raised areas, to add a little bit of yellow into the mix I went over the skin with a final dusting of Camo Green to really bring out the highlights. Then I mixed Blood Red with Bleached Bone and edged out some of the armour plates. Using Mithril Silver I edged out the various metal items and bolts and added the nicks and scratches to them. Next I used a few layers of Golden Yellow to make the checkered pattern. I added Skull White to the various emblems on his armor and Bleached bone to the points of the teeth. Lastly I edged out the leather in Vomit Brown and Terracotta and edged the paints out in shadow gray.

And here is a profile shot so you can see the muscles

Tomorrow I'll begin a step by step paint-along Vehicle! Learn wif' me lads!

This color scheme would be effective camouflage on a planet made of pee

Since I'm waiting on some inks to arrive in the mail, my Blood Angels are on hold for a day or two. This works out nicely as it lets me satisfy my ADD by starting a completely different chapter of Space Marine. Behold: some Imperial Fists (without arms or guns or backpacks):

As you can see, I'm trying something different with these guys: I'm going to paint their component parts separately and see if that makes things any easier or the paint job better-looking. So far, it's been helpful; one of my problems with painting marines has always been getting the chest eagle colored correctly because the bolter is always in the way, so not having to deal with that is a huge plus. Now if there was just an easier way to get a smooth coat of yellow paint, I'd be set.

Step 2: A Work in Progress.

Unlike my much esteemed colleague, Henry of Do-saphine, I prefer paints at their very thickest. Maybe it's because I'm a Van Gogh fan, or maybe it's because I prime with black primer and I need my paints staying right where they are. 

The one downside of painting with a black primer is it takes a lot of under coating and top coating to really build up a color, but with enough dry brushing you can get the desired effect without it looking too chunky. 

Of course the advantage with painting Orks is that they are anything but tidy so they give you a greater opportunity for creativity. On this guy for example I made one of his wrist straps leather and the other one is red... leather. DIVERSITY!

Anyway here he is, a work in progress to be sure, but still looking pretty cool. I've added some nice details to the choppa' and little places where the paint has worn off on his armor.

One thing I can't stress enough when you're painting or texturing anything is to give it history. Unless you're Orks just got out of Ork training camp, chances are they've seen a few scraps (even if it's wif da' ova' boyz) so make sure to communicate that by adding some scratches and scrapes to what otherwise look like a brand new suit of armor (the same thing goes for the Space Marines though a little less so).

Also as a side note, if you are working with Orks and any sort of metal, USE A WASH. Washes are the greatest thing ever invented in regard to adding history, it's like history in a paint pot. Washes are your very best friend. See how I added coats of wash to the inside of the blade so that it looks like the metal was sharpened in a very crude way? HISTORY!

I'll post another pic tomorrow when I finish him up.

Water: It's not just for drinking anymore!

It's been a while since I've painted any little army mans, so before I started out on my quest, I looked up a bunch of painting tutorials online. The one piece of advice that everyone keep repeating was "water down your paints... no, really, water down your paints, dude." I never did this before but decided to give it a go and run a little experiment.



The Blood Angel on the left was painted with paint straight from the pot while the one on the right was painted with watered-down stuff. It's tough to tell from the improperly-lit picture, but while the marine on the left seems to have a flatter, streakier red color, the watered-down paint has crept into the recesses of the marine on the right, which is a look I prefer.

Watering down the paint will force me to use a few additional coats to get the color I want, but since the overall look is a bit better, I think the extra time will be worth it. What I'm trying to say is this: "Water down your paints, dude."

Terror from the Infinite Blackness

In the grim darkness of the future, humanity is beset by countless alien forces from the infinite blackness of space. None, however, are more vile than the foe depicted below.



We can only hope that mankind can summon the strength to ward off this fearsome destroyer of worlds.

Every Journey Starts with a First Step: Painting the Assault on Black Reach box set.

Step 1: Testing the Waters.

I guess in the future there is not only War, it would seem that there is also a crap load of painting.

Here is my working space:

Yeah that's a lot of plastic. First I need to do a couple of testers, let's start with the Space Marine. We're going to paint this set as Ultramarines, because the box told me so.

So here he is all glued together and ready to go.

I primed our marine and put together an Ork while I waited for this guy to dry up...

And below is the final product. I applied a base coat of Regal Blue to all the blue areas and made sure to leave all the nooks and crannies black to give the mini depth and interest. That didn't always work out like I planned so I made sure to go over the areas I wanted to have that look using a very thin brush with just a smidgen of Chaos black on it.

For the gold areas I applied a base coat of Shining Gold, for the eyes and seal I used Scab red and for the various skulls and arrows I used Bleached Bone.

To finish the model off I dry brushed on a few coats of Ultramarine Blue and then added wear on the edges with a little Ice Blue and some Skull White for the tips and other highlights. I used Blood Red on the eyes/seal and Burnished gold on the gold areas. For the various skulls and other white elements I finished them by dry brushing Skull White on the raised areas (except the arrow on the shoulder which I edged). Then, to finish the mini, I applied some highlights of Shadow Grey to the boltgun and edged the silver areas with a mixture of Boltgun Metal and Bleached bone (about a 2/1 ratio). Ideally I'd like to use Mithril silver for the highlights but I don't have any so I'll go and pick some up after work.

1 down 16 more to go.

I'll probably die a horrible death! WHEEE!

And so it begins again

After a long hiatus, I am now back on the wagon.

Behold... Space Marines with a layer of primer on them! So far, so good.