From the depths of the painting queue, Cthulhu rises!

Hi All,

  Well I finished that huge Cthulhu model last night so I thought I'd share my painting "notebook" of the process.

  I started with a plan.

I decided to use this picture as a reference and ran it through the adobe color custom palette thing to get an idea of the colors. I ended up skipping on the purples and blues, but that was mostly a time issue. Also I've done purple tentacles a couple of times already.

So here he is dry fit with Abdul Goldberg for scale. Next were some shennanigans with various putties.

I used a 50/50 mix of green stuff and milliput yellow until it got unworkable. I then tried to finish it up with Tamiya.

DO NOT use Tamiya putty on bones. It is worthless.

After chipping off the worst of the flaky Tamiya I just used straight up green stuff to salvage the mess.

Spray paint.

Brush on more paint because the spray paint feels tacky and leaves a powdery residue on your hands when you pick it up.

Slather it in a black ink wash to preshade and further try to seal things down.

I got the idea to do all the belly, under arm inner leg stuff the lightest color.

I wanted to transition but the edges were super hard. One issue with craft paint is that some are super viscous. Getting them to flow but also cover was a constant battle. Each color probably got 3 coats.

In the thumbnail i thought this might show the stippling of the transition layer, but it just seems to be a different angle of the last shot.

Decide that you're going to need a beer to get this @#$&ing thing finished. (Four Peaks Hop Knot for scale) Decide that three beers was maybe one too many to efficiently paint.

This picture shows the transition stippling on the belly and a little on the spine. Start stippling Zinc on the head, hate it and then go for it with charcoal all over using a size 2 brush.

Paint in the veins and eyes, then dry brush the gray parts. Then slather the whole thing in "grunge" wash. (4 parts Raw Umber, 2 parts Burnt Umber, 1 part Black ink) This batch of was is a little dark and I accidentally let it pool in weird places, but I think it got the look of being dredged from the depths.

One more shot to try and show the spots etc. I need to take some "studio" shots of these latest figures. After I varnish them of course.

Anyway, thanks for looking. If you have one of these bad boys I'd love to see how you paint him. Who knows he may even make it to Oldhammer weekend.

Paint Table Saturday 139 - Finished Chaos Warriors and starting Cthulhu

Hi All,

Just a quick update on this holiday weekend. Hope you're having a good one.

Earlier this week, Thursday night, I finished up those five chaos warriors for the Herohammer International facebook group.

I was trying to blend up the Green, Red and Pruple warriors. I thik the time spent to results ratio is not good but they've been sitting unpainted for decades, so I'l take it.

The Champion of Tzeentch in the middle I bought from Blue sometime last year. I was trying to build up yellow from orange. It mostly looks orange and not super smooth. He came out mostly how I envisioned but i ran out of time to highlight his horns. The Marauder guy on the extreme left was a repair and repaint of a miniature I gave my brother back in the day which he returned to me when I got back into the hobby.

This is what he looked like when I got him. I tried to pay an homage to the original paint scheme. Again, time was a factor, so I didn't get to work as many layers for his "black" armor. I also thought I had a good plan for the red chainmail, but it didn't quite work. Overall I think I captured the idea. The color palette is similar without being the same.

Today I have been working on that big honking Cthulhu.

I'm trying to build up tans and browns to give it a more realistic Octopus color scheme.

Hoping to get this guy done this weekend since The Bazaar of Crooked Wonders extended the June "Big Things" comp one more week.

I'll leave you with a link to an interview that Airbornegrove26 did with Nigel Stillman. Great stuff if you really want to know where Warhammer came from. Read it here.

Happy painting.

Zombiecide, more putty and a little painting.

Hi All,

Just thought I'd share what's going on.

We made it through the intro scenario, the zombies were worrisome. I got Clovis killed right before the end. The last room had 4 zombies in it. He had three dice to attack and missed all three. Was shredded by the zombies.

The second game was over quick. The necromancer and Abomination came out in the first two turns. Baldric took care of the Necromancer with a mana blast and Ann and Clovis burned the abomination with Dragon Bile. we were fortunate to find the bile and a torch pretty easily. I did wonder if we could use the inferno or fireball spells to ignite the bile.

Moebius Sphincter is coming along, I've got some ideas for working up his armor.

I fixed the gaps on the left arm and wings. It's still too hot outside to prime, so I'll do it in the morning.

I've also started mailing out the t-shirts.

Thanks for looking.

Paint Table Saturday 137 - Some success, some failure

Hi All,

Enjoying Fathers day weekend. I got a little work done at the table today.

Got the Chaos Warriors primed. Success!

Started trying to smooth the Tamiya putty I glopped on after my greenstuff/milliput mix wouldn't work anymore.

Failure! In trying to sand it smooth it just flaked off the bones material. I'm going to have to go back in and chip it all out and redo it in green stuff.

Such is the hobby.

Happy painting everyone.

Puttypalooza - filling gaps on models

Hi All,

Ok so in the past I haven't really shown build logs, but I'm trying to use the blog as a project notebook more. So here goes.

So I started with the idea that I was going to make a 50/50 mix of Greenstuff and Milliput.

Yellow and Blue make Green, Yellow and Brown (I think it's supposed to be Grey) make Yellow.

Mix them together for a light Green. You may have noticed that I coat the surfaces of stuff that comes into contact with the putty with Vaseline to keep it from sticking.

I did the Chaos warriors first.mostly just the torso joins and hiding the gaps in the axe handle repair. I also used it to fill in gaps in the bases as i always have excess putty left when I do these things.

Next I got to work on the joins on the Cthulhu. I probably should have started with him. As I got to the wings and arms the lack of stickiness of the putty began to be a problem. I think I had been working for about an hour and a half and it was curing too much. I think part of the problem was that I had used a roller to squash my putty ball into a very thin pancake. This greatly increased the surface area and I think effectively reduced the work time. So only flatten what you absolutely need to.

Hmm, I'm not exactly sure what I was trying to show you here. This is where I gave up and threw out the remaining bit of putty as it had become very plastic.

After a discussion with some facebook friends I started using some Tamiya putty with a couple of "hitech" tools. They both had their uses but I was finding them inadequate in some situations.

I then remembered that i had a whole set of cheap sculpting tools that I never use. Apart from two or three favorites that is.

I ended up using these two plus my old palette knife. I find Tamiya pretty hard to work with, but you can sand it. I have some Squadron putty lying around somewhere. I'll give that a try some other time.

In hindsight I would say it would be better to glue on and putty each part individually working up from tail to head. I think it would have been a little easier to do.

Thanks for sitting through my ugly cell phone pictures. I didn't want to spend a lot of time on Photography for this.

Working with Color - Painting Notebook

Hi All,

As usual I'm kind of spinning around trying to keep several things at once going, and not really making progress on any of them. :(

That being said, one of the things that came to mind after the Abdul Goldberg challenge was a lack of taking notes, pictures etc about the process of putting out a finished figure. So I'm going to try, again, to use the blog as an online repository for my notebook. Since I can't seem to keep a regular physical one.

One thing I've been thinking about again since reading Blue's excellent blog is the idea of picking color schemes. I don't pretend to understand color theory, but there are a whole host of websites that will help you. Since I have taken the plunge with Adobe I found this one color.adobe.com, what's cool about it is that you can upload a source image and derive a color palette from it.

Here's a youtube video detailing how:


If you don't do Photoshop you can skip that part.

I decided to use this tool to figure out a palette for my Giant Cthulhu (who is still unassembled).

I moved the point that is displaying on the right of the color bar off of black to one of the dark blotches on the octopus body. Interestingly not too far off from the colors I used on the Eldritch Demon.

Anyway, I hope you find this resource useful. Happy painting!

Paint Table Saturday - 135 Orcs, Cthulhu and Chaos

Hi All,

Busy with the last regular meet of track season, but I did get some figures washed and a little bit done on the orcs.

A little bit of work on these but still way too late. I need to push harder on these because I've signed on for a couple more competitions (maybe too strong a word) on Facebook.

For the Bazaar of Crooked Wonders group's "Big Things" comp. I'm doing a Reaper Cthulhu. He's a big bastard.

Foe Herohammer International I'm doing a Tzeentch themed Chaos Army. Here's a unit of 4 Chaos Warriors plus Champion. I finally got the majority of the paint off the Marauder figure on the right using Krud Kutter Graffiti remover. It was fairly cheap at home depot ~$7 and took off the paint in 5 - 10 minutes. I can't decide if I'm going to change out the shield or flatten his shield boss. My original intent was to try to recreate the original scheme my brother tried but couldn't execute.

Anyway, I need to have all this completed this month. Hmm.

Lastly, I processed these in Adobe Lightroom and added a graphic watermark. Just trying some things out. Any thoughts?

Last week's Challenge output

After all that whining my Goblins did make it up on the Challenge. Maybe my son is right about whining getting results. ;)

First off, here are the goblins:

You can read some particulars here.

What I'll add is that I gave them a heavy black wash, which really helped me identify detail and seemed to greatly lessen the problem of little bits of white showing at color transition areas.

I'm only realizing in the last few days that their skin color may be too close to how I'm doing my orcs. I had meant for them to lighter in complexion. At least lighter than the orcs.

For the Victorian theme one could say I stretched things a tad.

Great Uncle Thulu comes to us from Westwind Productions Empire of the Dead range.

I spared you the extra shots showing the missing right collar. I had to fill a void and re-sculpt the right side of his face, but I didn't notice the collar was also missing until I had started painting him. I couldn't let it be, so I super glued a piece of paper to make a new collar. If you really want to see how it turned out you can read about it here.

In this last shot you can also see the beans as cobblestones I tried to make. Looks like he's standing on weird boulders.

In local wildlife news, my neighbor's dog was attacked by a coyote this morning just before the Sun rose. It jumped the wall into his back yard. We still have a fair amount of open desert around here, even though it's pretty suburban.

Ia! Ia! The cold challenge round Fhtagn!

You need to go over to the Analogue HobbiesVth Painting challenge bonus round and vote for your favorite entries (mine) immediately. In all seriousness you don't have to vote for mine if it doesn't tickle your fancy, but there s some really cool work being done and I think there may be prizes for fan favorites at the end (in March).

So show some love to the painters out there. Everyone is trying really hard and showing some good stuff.

Here are the pictures I sent to Curt.

I reasoned it was "cold" at the bottom of the sea.

Here are some glamour shots I didn't include in my submission.

I really had fun with this one. Thanks for looking.

Shaking off the digital rust

Hi All,

Long time no post. The run up to Halloween and the culmination of Zom(b)orctober had me a little out of sorts. Just one of my moods I guess, but I was just struggling with trying to keep up so I took a step back. So what I have for you are a few random things that have come across my plate and, hopefully, some direction for upcoming posts.

I've been acquiring bits and bobs and hope to have some good stuff to share with you soon on terrain making and what not. Hopefully some figures and bases will be here soon as well.

I've been trying to get another Cthulhu game together but schedules are not lining up right now. One of the players is not jazzed about the Basic Role Play (BRP) Sytem that Call of Cthulhu uses, so we are going to try FATE. I ended up buying a PDF of Present Day Cthulhu Powered by FATE, by Starbright Illustrations, from DrivethruRPG. I mainly wanted to see how the FATE principles might be applied directly to a Mythos game. Perhaps I could have figured it out myself, but they have some good background and monster stats that I can use as guidelines. Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and release the 7 or so hours of audio, and slightly less video, of our sessions from the first adventure. I like the Call of Cthulhu setting but am not so married to BRP that I'm unwilling to try a different system. I do feel that perhaps part of the clunkiness of BRP is more due to my lack of experience GMing it and having not played or GMed in decades.

We did play the first half of the intro Goblinquest scenario, I hope to finish it tonight. We got a little bogged down in dice rolling, I'll give you the report thoughts in a separate post. I think it may be mainly my son's short attention span.

I also rolled up two Warhammer Orc Warbands using Erny's awesome rules, Warlord. I think these could easily be extended to all the races of Warhammer. I hope to use these warbands as a jumping off point for the Tale of Painters thing, which I need to check in on.

6 Zombies and 5 orcs is all I got done last month, so lets hope I can get rolling on painting. I am planning to start prepping in earnest as Curt's challenge tends to get announced in mid November. Last year I was woefully unprepared.

Lastly I will get back to giving opinions etc about photographing miniatures. Hopefully you can get better performance out of your setup, the juries still out as to whether or not I really have improved my photography with what I've learned. And look for the 2nd issue of Wargame Bloggers Quarterly WBQ to be released into the wild soon. If you were a member of the G+ group, you'd already have it.

Here are some random pictures of stuff you may, or may not, find interesting.

A few pickup trucks for Hugh. Closest is a Chevy Silverado, my Toyota Tacoma and I think a Ram 2500

 Hugh was asking about Pickup trucks awhile back, here are two I parked in between. The top of my cab is about 6 ft off the ground, I have the jacked up TRD suspension. The two on either side are full size pickups, mine's a 3/4 ton, and you can see they are considerably larger.

A silly book I saw on the shelf at Barnes & Noble

Oh yeah, welcome to Roy Williamson of RW's hobby blog. I could have sworn we were already following eachother. It looks like he may have lost his blog and had to restart it. Anyway welcome aboard and go check him out and follow him. You may have been before.