Foodmachine charity figure donation: Lord Exhumator Scaverous

Finally finished this one for Shawn Leblanc, 2nd place winner of Foodmachine at Connections.

First of all I have to say this model is very cool.  I normally dislike undead figures (mostly because everyone else seems to love them - I'm a hipster like that) but this figure is just large and imposing with a great sculpt and a menacing look.

I wanted to make him a little taller, so I started by adding cork to the base.  I glued the figure together completely and that was my first mistake.  After priming him (pretty terribly to be honest), I picked up the model to apply the first few layers of paint and subsequently dropped him on the work table, smashing him into smithereens... I then decided it would be good to pin the crap out of this model - something I should've done from the get go.  I did, however, keep him separated in two major parts: the legs and body, and the arms and weapon.  I don't normally do this due to pure laziness and the idea that "what is covered up I can't see anyways so why paint it?" but I decided to try something new.  I don't regret painting it in pieces.

Other than that, I pretty much knew what I wanted to do for this guy.  This was originally intended to be a Gottacon 2014 painting competition entry but I didn't finish it quite on time.  With the competition in mind, however, I wanted to throw as many silly gimmicks into this figure as possible.  I'm not one for "special effects" on figures, but I know judges sure like them (I'm looking at you Kelly Kim!), though I am a huge fan of technique.  Thus, I added NMM, which I wasn't originally intending to do, OSL, AND some silly airbrushed cotton fire just to really cake on the cheese!

I used my Skorne red, my Circle of Orboros gold NMM, my standard steel NMM, and some black cloth.  I got some GW skulls (because lets face it-  PP can't sculpt a decent skull worth crap half the time) for the base as well to add to the undead theme.  Usually I think putting corpses on bases is super tacky but I felt it suited this figure.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results and I'll have to kindly ask Shawn to borrow the figure for a competition of some sort in the future.  Which one I'll enter it in is yet to be decided.

My experience with thinning paint for use with the airbrush

I'm working on a commission project for Beautiful Warfare Studio of some really cool Forge World Pre Heresy Night Lords raptors and a couple vehicles.

For the main blue cote of these figures I want to save time by airbrushing it instead of hand brushing.  The biggest problem I've found with doing this is that after using my Vallejo Model Air paints to base a figure I have difficulty blending via hand brushing afterwards.  Sometimes the jump between airbrush to hand brush blending is too obvious for my liking or sometimes I want to go back to that base color to find that VMA blends in a completely different way than the normal P3 paints I tend to like using.

I want to use P3 blue colors for the Night Lords because, as I've said in the past, P3 just works for me and my method of feathering.  These paints are so silky smooth and, to be honest, have a little wiggle room for mistakes or imperfections here and there.  It's just their nature.

In order to avoid past problems with VMA-P3 / airbrush-hand brush situations, I decided to do something I'm a little nervous about: thinning the P3 paint and pumping it through the airbrush in the first place.  I've never had much success with this kind of thing yet (probably thinning the paint down TOO much to avoid dreaded airbrush clog) so naturally it's not something I'm confident in.  I HATE having to take my airbrush apart and it happens all too often with me.  I even keep the air flow continuous such that my index finger often hurts after a decent airbrush session but the brush STILL ends up clogging somehow.  I really need someone who knows their shit about airbrushing to sit beside me and give me some pointers about what I'm doing wrong.  I've kind of learnt everything on my own thus far...

At any rate, I took the P3 Exile Blue, added some Vallejo airbrush thinner and then by accident dropped a whole bunch of water in the mix.. So then I added more paint and a little more thinner and got something akin to what I expected: a not too thin but not too thick mixture that covers well and doesn't clog the brush.

I used the Vallejo polyurethane white primer to first coat these figures.  This is a strange primer and I'm not sure if it's ideal for use outside, or maybe just not for the climate of Vancouver?  It tends to spray on to the figure messily with easy to identify "drops" all over the model.  After a couple of these cotes the problem fixes itself I guess but I'm still not sure if I'm using it correctly.

I added some of my Exile Blue mix and it went on poorly at first but after a second cote really saved me a lot of time.  I still clogged the airbrush, however, though this might have been due to some primer getting stuck (the primer is a tad on the thicker side itself).  I really get frustrated airbrushing.  I sometimes wonder exactly how much time I'm saving when it seems at least twice a session I'm taking the needle out of the brush and wiping it down... sigh...

The 5 raptors are all very blue now and quite solidly at that.  All the detail has been retained (though I don't usually have a problem with this in the first place).  For the vehicles I plan on going even further with my airbrush experimentation and doing something I've always seen done but have never experienced myself: extreme blending with the airbrush.  To be precise, I mean starting with a light color in the 1st quarter, corner of a panel, then using a few mid tones with the airbrush in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of a panel, and finally using the darkest color (in this case Exile Blue) in the 4th quarter of the panel.

I will have some pictures of the project when I deem them suitable for photography... Until then, let the trail and error commence!