OSL test

I wanted to test airbrushing OSL before I tried something similar with Mohsar's potion underneath his scythe... So here's what I came up with.  The photo to the left is a cities of death lamp I had kicking around and was a perfect opportunity to practice with.  After glueing it to a spare base and putting some debris scattered around I was ready to start.  I began with drybrushing the entire thing gray for the dull cityscape look.  I then airbrushed around the light and ground VMA white, orange, and gold yellow.

I thought it looked a little dark so I tried going up a stage in yellow.  I think this produced the best look so far.  I only applied the brighter yellow in the actual glass panes that the light itself is behind.  Its times like this I wish I had someone to buy Badger's Freak Flex tint products with.  Les from awesomepaintjob on youtube makes them look SO easy to do OSL.  He simply airbrushes white where he wants to apply the OSL shine and then airbrushes any color of tint overtop and BOOM the tint is clear and just makes the white colored. I tried to mimic that a bit with just paint but I think the effect wasn't as good...

And on this side I wanted to see what it was like to go up to white.. If someone is daring enough they could even leave a comment and give me their opinion on what looks better!

this is Mohsar's potion before I ruined it... lol

And here it is after I ruined it.  I figured it wasn't good enough as is so I decided to touch it up with some hand paint.

And there's the final product.  I basically did the same thing as I did with the lamp earlier with the exception of brightening the potion itself up a bit with some bright yellow mixed with white.  I'm not too sure how I feel about it.  Oh well.. like anything in this hobby it's a learning experience that I'm sure I'll be practicing more of.  I have to figure out how I'm going to tackle glowing runes on circle wolds...

Starting Circle...

So I've acquired some Circle models and have made myself a golden rule for them: I won't buy anything new until what I currently have in my list is painted.  With that said, I scored a good deal from my friend on his small Mohsar the Desertwalker force.  Although most of what he had isn't what goes into my ideal Mohsar list, the models will eventually be used in other lists anyways with the exception of only a couple.  Here's the list so far (also thanks to my friend Martin for giving some tips with Circle).

Mohsar the Desertwalker +5
Ghetorix -11
Warpwolf Stalker -10 (soon to be considering switching this for the new Riphorn Satyr)
Woldwarden -9
Gorax -4

Full Tharn Bloodtrackers + Nuala - 10
Swamp Gobbers Bellows Crew - 1
Shifting Stones + UA - 3
Shifting Stones - 2
3x Gallows Groves - 3
Blackclad Wayfarer - 2

Of these models, I own a stalker and mohsar, so they must be painted first! 

Speaking of which, here's what I've done so far with Mohsar.  I have mixed feelings.
 
So I wanted to go somewhat traditional hippie green for my army mainly because I think painting green cloth is fun.  I also liked the browns I used in this scheme.  For the weapons I wanted more of a stone/iron look because most of circle's weapons look primitive and thus steel
wouldn't be in their arsenal. 

I'm not overly thrilled with the freehand vines on the cloak.  I was going for something like the old Games Workshop Beil-Tan Falcon Grav Tank freehand vines with a little more color than just black.  But in retrospect I think I should've gone with black and just highlighted up to grey instead of going for brownish yellow.  Oh well not changing it now.

I'm so-so on the gold.  I like the shoulder pads in particular.  I'm not too hep on the cloak trimmings.  I have yet to practice with this gold recipe; it's mainly vallejo and therefore a little trickier to feather blend at times.  Vallejo can be a bit fussy for my main blending techniques; I find P3's are really the perfect blend for me!

I've yet to figure out how the little potion slung under his scythe is going to look.  I'm going to test something with my airbrush first on a model that I don't care about before I go for the OSL on this.  I want to go for a subtler orange yellow glow as per fire would look.  I'll test it out and get back to this but other than that I don't think there's much else I can do.  Not sure how happy I am with the gnarled wood of the scythe either but I didn't want it looking too similar to his brown robes.  I feel I could've done better giving the wood grain some depth but oh well.

LIFE UPDATE!

So while this isn't really hobby related (other than the reason why I haven't had much hobby time the past few days) this is pretty big news!  My son Lukas was born early Saturday morning and taking care of him and giving my wife a break has been top priority!  Grandma and grandpa are doing a good job helping us too and providing tons of clothes for him.  I am the most tired I think I've ever been in my entire life and haven't slept hardly at all.  We just came home yesterday after spending a couple nights at the hospital while the nurses made sure Lukas checked out fine.  So far, so good!  He's gained weight since birth and eats and poops and makes noise and does all those baby things.  Without further delay, here he is!

 First night in the hospital room.  I believe this was taken when he had only been born a couple hours.

 Finally coming home yesterday, I was very relieved because during the stay at the hospital I was sleeping on a shitty fold out mattress on the floor beside my wife's hospital bed.  And there was no where to escape the crying unless I wanted to leave the room entirely! Home is much more comfortable and there are many places of refuge and more hands on deck to do babysitting.


For those who don't know me personally, my wife is Chinese so naturally Lukas is half Canadian half Chinese!  It sounds cliche but he'll have the best of both worlds: gifts at Christmas and money at Chinese New Year.  Two languages will be a big bonus for him as well.

Hanging out with dad at home.  He looks like a penguin cuz his clothes are a bit too big

Sporting some new clothes from grandma and grandpa today.  He's dirtied them a few times already and they've been through the washer equally as many times.  Of course, he's still rockin his OG toque from the hospital.



So hopefully within the next couple weeks I'll have everything sorted out and develop a better schedule to have some hobby time once again.  I'll have to work on a way to bring my painting stuff a little closer and more on-hand where I can watch Lukas and do some hobby work at the same time.  There's still L&L coming up that I'll be painting a few models for... and next month comes the Mammoth!

Update on Privateer Press parts replacement

Here's the part replacement I ordered.  It came within what.. 2-3 weeks?  Thats pretty decent knowing that with all the colossals and gargantuans and battle engines floating around nowadays there are probably many people requiring replacement parts.  The only beef I have with this is they didn't actually tell me ahead of time they were sending it.  In fact, other than me sending the initial message, there was no contact between PP and I at all.  I guess the main point is they sent it but what would happen if it didn't reach my place and was lost in the mail - I would be sending a 2nd request after who knows how long.  Maybe they usually do send emails prior to mailing the replacement part, or maybe it's a function on the website that I have to log in to to see (I could've just forgot I made an account which is almost certainly the case).

In other news! Look what I got today! I've read through the first story so far and am almost through the Trollblood fluff section.  I've been waiting for this soooooo long and holy crap are there tons of cool stuff in here.  I'm definitely more stoked than I was after getting the previous expansion, Hordes: Domination.  I'm really happy with almost everything Skorne got but don't know what to think of our new warlock yet.  It seems her spell list and abilities really reward getting into the thick of things but that honestly isn't my style with warlocks.  This game is won and lost on that single entity living or dying so throwing your warlock up front really is counter intuitive most of the time.  However, she is quite survivable and should have plenty of fury on her for transfers.  Skorne has access to a wide variety of great defensive animi to boot so we'll have to see. 

Testing archidon scheme

So i had tons of fun today messing around with my airbrush.  This may not be as cool as some of the archidons floating around on the privateer press forums that are painted up like avatar's leonopteryx but this was inspired by a velociraptor scheme.  the velociraptor theme was pushed by my friend so I thought I'd make him happy.   i first primed the model skull white.  i then airbrushed VMA "sand" all over the model's skin.  i then used VMA "flat tan" in a stiped pattern going along each wing, back and front, and on a few spots on the archidon's back and legs.  this was followed by a smaller, more delicate layer of VMA "rust" and finally i took a crappy brush and 'flecked' on some VMA "green-grey" to break up his skin a bit more and make him look kinda speckled.  I'll have to play around with very thin paint to shade the VMA "sand" tones as well as highlight some of the "green-grey" areas up a bit.  this is the worst part, cleaning up and layering with brush-on paint afterwards because you run the risk of ruining your fine airbrushing.  this will be my biggest hurdle i think: developing a smooth transition from airbrushed surfaces to brushed-on surfaces.

I finished Lord Arbiter Hexeris.  I'm quite pleased with his overall look, though painting the NMM silver is getting a bit frustrating.  I think this is mainly due to me not having a solid mixture ratio for stages between Shadow Grey (a super annoying color but cool if you get it looking right) up to Space Wolves Grey.  I blame GW paints.  I'm starting to see more and more how P3 paints really lend themselves to my style of feathering and layering.  Vallejo and GW paints truly need to be watered down to almost nothing otherwise just wet blended.  Gw is just so.. chalky I'm finding these days. 

In other news I went to Imperial Hobbies today for their 25% off fiscal year end sale and only picked up a 2nd morthitheurge willbreaker and some 15mm scale trees for games like Flames of War and Warmaster Ancients.  I'm pleased with my restraint!  There are always 2 major Imperial Hobbies sales yearly so if I really need something I can wait until August. 

Sherry was over again last night with her epic camera and took some professional shots of eHexy and my Wampforum contest entry: Nekima the Dark Sibling.  Check em out!

Had to do an update today; Ehexy is looking pretty nice I think.  I'm really happy with the NMM gold and I think it turned out so well because I went in with a plan.  I always stress having a plan.  I planned on making the bright points focused on the middle of the shoulder pads, and I think this created quite a good metallic illusion.  The gauntlet's shine was quite nice too and worked out exactly like I was hoping it would.  I finished the gems today as well and was debating putting an eye slit in the two oval shaped gem slots but decided I didn't want to gum it up and just went for the standard gem.  I'm debating entering this guy and a few other battlegroup models for the Lock & Load P3 painting competition group category. 

Only thing that needs doing on this guy now is finishing up some black highlighting and the silver on Gulgata and some silver on his back rack.  Possibly finish him tomorrow if I don't get sidetracked.  I've also been horribly sick this week and have been taking 2 Tylenol every 4 hours to rid my aches and fever.  This is a really bad virus I got but I'm atleast feeling a bit better today.  I'm hoping to be completely rid of this virus soon because my baby is being delivered next weekend most likely!!! It's confirmed a boy and he will hopefully one day be a third generation geek in my family!  I shouldn't bestow that fate upon anyone.. I'm sorry..