Monday 28 November 2011

Forest Rangers II

Rangers of Middle Earth are one of my favorite plastic models from the LotR range so I was glad I had another chance to paint these guys. The main challenge was to keep the various shades of brown diversified while still making them look like a coherent unit.
Another thing to bear in mind was that these are rangers, which means they usually travel and scout ahead of the army. That's why I went for the "deep forest old ruins" theme for the bases. To further mark them as those that travel a lot I added weathering to their cloaks and tunics. I also finally had a chance to try a product from the Army Painter - wilderness tuft. It's very easy to use and looks nice and realistic once glued on the base. I tried to use a few different types of flock to achieve a look of deep, humid forest where lots of different types of grass and moss can grow. Now I plan to work on a few Faramir's rangers and then the heroes I showed earlier on.

Saturday 19 November 2011

...and Justice for all

Lady Justice's Crew was the first one that really drew my attention. First of all, there are the amazing Death Marshals, great sculpts and really interesting characters. Secondly, there's Lady Justice. Fluff is a really important part of Malifaux and I really enjoyed reading the parts which presented this character. Fluff aside, the model is great too. The overall quality of the sculpt is amazing with plenty of details. I like the "justice's blind" pun that's involved too.



I stuck to the original color scheme pretty closely as I simply like it and didn't want to change too much. I kept the colors dark and the highlights smooth. Painting her hair was the biggest challenge as they're very long and take up lots of space. In fact, if you look at her from the back that's the first, if not the only thing you notice. I guess when you look at her from the front, most notice also just one thing ;) Anyway, I knew that I'd need to pay extra attention to this element so here's how I did it. I started with basecoating the model black and spraying some brown paint over it for basic highlights. The whole hair area was painted using two thin layers of scorched brown. I followed it by applying a wash of badab black. Two colors were painted using drybrush then - once again scorched brown and bestial brown. After that I highlighted only using thin brush as drybrushing doesn't work well with highlighting small surfaces - the paint gets too evenly distributed over the whole area and all the shades are lost. The successive highlights were painted using: vermin brown, vermin brown mixed with some blazing orange, the same mix with a little bleached bone and pure bleached bone. The key was to keep the paints thinned down with water and apply two very thin layers rather than one thick.
I used a base insert with a tombstone from Wyrd Games in order to tie the model better with the competition I entered it in (The Rotten Harvest). I wasn't successful with this entry but I was with another one, which I will describe in my next post.
As for the choice of music - well, there simply can be no other for this one:

Wednesday 16 November 2011

Rotten Harvest

The title of this post may be misleading as there's nothing wrong with this harvest. In fact, it was quite fruitful.



I'm writing about the annual painting contest organized by Wyrd Games. This time I decided to give it a go and entered two pieces. I haven't taken part in any painting contest before so I was more than happy to find out that my entry placed second in one of the categories.
Congratulations to all the winners. There were many great entries so those that were chosen as best are really top notch works. I will write more about the pieces I entered soon so stay tunes. You can see all the entries here.

Sunday 13 November 2011

Sd.Kfz 251/16 Flammpanzerwagen


That's funny name. Try saying it 3 times quickly :) Lately I've decided to take a journey back to my hobbisitc roots, time when I started fun with models overall. Before I was engaged into war games I was wasting my time  with World War II's 1/35 models, mainly tanks and other armoured forces.




Now in depths of my I found  room , kit I've bought couple years ago i.e Dragon's 1/35 German APC by name of Sd.Kfz 251/16 Flammpanzerwagen. It's one of many variations o this 251 type APC which was equipped with flamthrowers (2 of them and third one for use of infrantry mounted onto back doors. It's rather interesting one so it should be fun working with it.

Model itself is really well done (Dragon's standard for yers now). It came in series of models with additional photo-etched , brass and other various components, which are to make it more realistic. Whole moulds are top notch , withhout excesive mould lines , fitted tohether very well, with additional 3 crew members attached.


Especially those minis would be quite a shock to anyone ho's been dealing with wargames due to material they're made of. It's neither plastic, nor metal but tan vinyl, which makes them a bit more detailed but harder to work with in terms of fitting and cleaning. I guess other detailed alternative would be resin, but it would increase overall cost of set (in addition resin miniatures are domain of Verlinden which makes  great one by the way). I decided to make that comeback to 1/35 scale modelling more interesing by trying to paint the model in winter camouflage.



My choice went to the 116th Panzer Division, also known as the "Greyhound 'Windhund' Division" which took part , among other operations, in Battle of the Bulge in 1944 (also know as battle for Ardens). I think it's project that will take me some time (mainly because I decided to work on it on weekend while at home so I guess 2-3 months will be the lowest estimate time in which I can complete it).

So now only glueing and painting is left to be done :) Don't worry next post will be traditionaly occupied by wargaming minis ;)

All pictures are borrowed from http://www.perthmilitarymodelling.com/reviews/vehicles/dragon/dr6202.htm where you can find entire review of set.

Thursday 3 November 2011

Justice is done, this time for good

Yes! Today I received something I ordered on ebay last week - Dead Justice set. I already have the original set but I liked this one so much I simply had to get it. It cost me an arm and a leg but it was worth it (and yes, I now it's available now at maelstromgames but I paid a similar price anyway).



The first thing that strikes me is that Lady J (aka Dead Doxy) is much smaller that the original sculpt which towers above the rest of the Crew. That's a big change, maybe she somehow shrunk in the process of resurrection? ;) Other than that, the (Dead?) Death Marshals look amazing and I'm really looking forward to painting them. The sculpts are very dynamic and full of character. The Judge is also top-notch and we finally get to see what he's hiding under the bandanna.
I'm really excited about this project and plan to paint it... this year. I'm currently working on a large number of models from Gondor but that's OK as I like most of those too (the Rangers in particular).

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Elves and Horses


This post is brought to you by One Ring's monthly painting challenge. It did indeed challenge me a bit to come up with something new. Especially since I saw some great entries there.
Kudos guys your minis are top notch. Also due to a fact that I had Arwen (mtd) waiting for her brush time I wanted to make her special. I decided to leave standard purple scheme I used with foot version a while ago. So I asked myself  "What's my second favourite GW colour?".



Dark Angels Green was the anwser. So I build the scheme around that. Also I wanted the mount to be some kind of unique , hence the idea of dots. I think it presents istself rather good though there's always room for improvments. Only thing I'm not totaly found of is the sword. I've choosen to  go with metallics this time, it'll be great but I think I rushed it a bit due to approaching deadline forentries in challenge :D Maybe I'll change it someday :)




Now it's the time to wait and see. I hope it will do good in poll.

For music corner I picked piece that I accidentally found a week ago and been listening to it ever since (yep 7 days...). It's magical :)
 

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Scavenger

Here's the last WM mini I painted a while ago but haven't had time to show it here yet. It's another character jack called Scavenger. Nice model that has all that I like about WM models - exaggerated features so characteristic for the tongue-in-cheek approach to sculpting that the guys from Privateer Press have.







I placed this one on a much taller base. I thought it would suit this one and add to the slightly comical effect of thin-legged robot with torn wings. I also paid more attention to the bone parts, using two different colors for its jaws and teeth, trying to make them look ancient. I also worked a little more with washes and glazes on the metallic parts. I finished the mini off with more colorful types of flock that will keep this one in the theme I chose for the army.






As for the choice of music, there's only one song that comes to my mind:

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