Bloodletter test

Hi there. This Christmas I treated my self to some plastic drugs. I more or less walked in to the local hobby store and started picking out boxes of models I have wanted to paint for some time. The only restriction was that it had to be infantry as I have way to many big models left to paint and I need something I can finish in one sitting. Amongst the models that ended up in my shopping cart was some bloodletters. I have had my eye on these for some years but never gotten around to actually painting them. Well to make a short story short, I assembled one this evening and gave it a quick paint job to try out the paint scheme. After having a look around the net I decided not to go for the traditional light red bloodletters that GW and most other people (on the net) are doing. Instead I wanted some contrast as I had decided that the whole model would be the same colour to represent their demonic nature. I am quite pleased with the look, but it is quite far from a traditional bloodletter, so what do you think, should I paint the rest the same way?

Dropship done

Finally I have finished the Dropship. I am very pleased with the over all look, but I have learnt a lot about plasticard and the importance of symmetry. More measuring, less cutting. I hope you like it.

Fallen Dark Angels Champions

Just a short update. This week and last? I have not had much hobby time. I am still painting away on the dropship but progress is slow. I have just started preparing the engines which are the last part of the dropship proper. Then I just need to paint up some missiles and missile pods to finish it of. In the mean time I have tried to finish the chaos champions from the Dark Vengance set. As I have shown before, I choose to paint them up as fallen Dark Angels and I think they look good together with the rest of the FDA. I also tried a new way of painting the power/demon weapon on the leader. On the FDA terminator sergeant I painted some lightning pattern which turned out ok, but not great. So this time I thought that I would try some drybrushing to get I nice glow to the weapon. It did not turn out exactly as I had envisioned but I am still very pleased with the result. I think the blending is rather smooth if I might say so my self. I might try this out again for other power weapons in the army.

Prgress, dropship and Fallen Dark Angels

Once again I have been travelling with work and has not had much time to paint or blogg. Add to this the tedious work with large surfaces on the dropship and we are in for a bit of a wait for some clear progress. I have also been adding some time on the fallen Dark Angels and their serfs just to break up the paint scheme and add in some models I actually can finish in an evening. All in all I am happy with the result, now I just need to finish the last parts of the dropship and I will be free to work a bit more on the Opus and some other builds I have in mind. I have learned a lot during the dropship build, both a bout plastic card, scratch building and painting scratch build parts. One thing about building with plastic card is that you have to file the edges. When you snap the plastic card after scoring it with a knife, the edges are really sharp and will stand out when paired with casted parts that have more rounded edges. I have also noticed that the plastic card surface is much smoother than normal plastic kit parts and are more sensitive to scratching when painted, so one thing I will start doing in the future is to roughen the surface with sand paper to get the paint to stick better. Another thing that I have found to be true is that as with paint, plastic card needs atlest three layers to look believable, be that three sheet layers or two layers with ribbons or one layer with two layers of detail. Anything less and it tends to look flat and not blend in with the rest of the model. That beeing said, the most important par is to get the things symmetric and make it fit well together from the start, it is really hard to cover any gaps up with green stuff and any asymmetry really sticks out. So even if I am happy with the over all look of the drop ship it will not stand up to any closer inspection. But I will take these lessons to hart when working on the opus.

Fallen Dark Angels serfs

Well, I needed a break from painting on the dropship, all that sand colour, so I put some chaos cultists together to have some variation.  Two of the models have been presented before and it is only the guy in the middle that is new. Nothing fancy, but is nice to do some other colours and actually paint and blend on the model instead of drybrushing.

Dropship with wings

And now, with wings. As I had painted most of the under side of the Dropship I decided to paint the undersides of the wings too so that I could attach them. I have also started a little on the top panels but all in all not much has happened, painting is slowly progressing.

Dropship underside

This week I have focused on getting the underside of the dropship painted so that I could close up the top. Things are coming together but the fit of my custom parts could have been better. Have to keep that in mind for later projects. To be honest I have not had so much time to paint lately so the progress is quite slow, but I can start to see an end to this build. Then I have some more defiler knights to paint and a chaos warlord to build.

Dropship misc parts

I am currently painting some different parts of the dropship so that I can assemble it for the external painting. I need to get the sliding doors done before attaching the roof as this will lock them into place. I also needed to paint the tail section as some of it will be hard to get to after assembly. The same goes for the undercarriage housings. I also need to get the landing gear sorted to that I can put the model down without damaging the paint. It is quite a large model and it is getting harder to paint as it grows. I might have to get an airbrush at some point. Especially when it is time to start painting the Opus Magna. But so far dry brushing is ok. I also realise that some of the plasticard build could have been neater, I really can see now where I became sloppy with the details. Lesson learned.

Dropship interior

  I have been working on the interior of the dropship  so that I can close it up and start on the outside. One thing I noticed is that it is a pain to paint the interior details on an already built model. So if I am ever to paint an interior again it will be before assembly of the whole thing. That was of cores not an option in this case as I did not know how it would look in the end and I had to build it before painting. But if I am ever going to do another I will do the inside first. I will try to do some touch ups but I am afraid that it will look pretty much as it does. The big thing in the middle of the CIC with the screens is the VTOL manifold if anyone is wondering. Since I added the intakes with turbines on the under side of the fuselage I had to put something on the inside to represent the air duct the leads to the downwards pointing exhausts. It looks abit out of plase but it will do.

I have also done some work on the Opus Magnas flight deck and will hopefully have it assembled shortly so that I can post about it. Right now it is more or less what was in the other post but with more details...

Dropship update

Just to end the day on a more positive note I post some WIP pictures from the painting of the inside of the Dropship. This is before adding any wear and tear or internal electronics. I am just putting the base colour in before starting with the details. As soon as the inside is done I will seal it up and start with the outside. I have already started somewhat with the underside of the tail section and the landing gear.

Know thy self and stick with what you know.

I have been visiting a site called www.coolminiornot.com for some years, looking at the stunningly painted models presented there and getting inspired. There is a great span of models on the site from pro painted to ordinary players putting up their favourite mini. I have also thought about putting some minis up on the site to share my work on a dedicated painting site.

So the other day I created an account and put some pictures of Joluns Wrath up there.

So what is the problem? Well it is me. I do not play games like cards, monopoly, trivial pursuit etc.. or for that matter much of 40k, because I get competitive, not that I need to win, but I get the adrenalin pumping and I do not like the feeling of being in a competition as I cant relax end enjoy it. And this is what happened. As the models on the site get a score from viewers I started to compare my models with other models with the same score, and it became competitive and it took all the joy out of painting and displaying my models, which is to bad because I like what I have done. Now I start to view my models according to the score and not what I really think about them.

So I am a bit out on the question of whether I should remove the images and forget about the site or just leave it for a few days to see if I can get over this feeling of being in a competition.

The point of this post is not to be winy about the actual score of the model, it is what it is, but about listing to yourself and what feels comfortable with how you present your work.

Putting my work up on this blogg has never bothered me as there is no score and the comments I get here is positive and constructive and they only relate to my work. I do not have to care about what score my models would get. The only feed back here is the number of visitors which is kind of an indicator about the interest of my work.

Well this was just some rambling from my side. Now I will get back to painting on the dropship so that I have something new to show you all. Until later.

Northern Ghosts Titan shoots

 The other day while on a business trip I scanned through my old posts and discovered that I never did take any "final" pictures of the titans as I promised to do. So today I took them out of the cabinet and put them in front of my photo background. The lighting is sadly not as good as it could be but the models are so large that is is hard to get an even bright illumination. But at least here are some pictures with a non cluttered desktop background.

So here they are, The Northern Ghosts titan legion.

Joluns Wrath

Unbearable Desire

Wolfish Perversion