Since my last post I've completed a fairly eclectic mix of small projects, and very few large scale armies. This variety has helped keep things fresh, though it means that now I'm up to painting armies I've got a long slog ahead before I can mix up what I've been painting. So, starting some time late last year, here is what I've worked on since.
Tau Fire Warriors
I'm pleased with the way these guys turned out and they were a decent hit on Tumblr. The cool white armour was inspired by the Combine Elites from Half Life 2. Overall I'm extremely happy with the result, the one downside is that I started with a black undercoat, which made working the way up final blue-white an extremely arduous process. The fatigues themselves started at grey, and were shaded down to black in order to get the graduated highlight. This itself was a huge investment in time. Add to that the pin washing of the armour and all of the other details and the project results came in. Overall I think I could paint an army like this, though I'd adopt a few changes to the method to speed it up. Unfortunately I doubt I'll revist the Tau at any time soon.
Vindicare Assassin
I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. I mostly stuck with the box art and achieve the differentiation between the black green of the rifle's furniture and the blue black of the body suit. The result was achieved by mixing in various blues on the body suit, working up to stark blue for the highlights. The rifle however was black on a simple green highlight. Otherwise all of the other components were painted fairly traditionally. Another thing I did was avoid washing to get shading and manually applied to much of the leather and other components. I was going to try non metal metallics for some components, but I still didn't feel like I could pull it off. At some point I have to sit down and intentionally practice NMM until I can execute it correctly before I try it on a model.
Dark Angels
The last of the Dark Angels are now done, which completely closes off this project. Personally I'm glad to see to back of them, I've got more than enough troops to roll out some regular marines, and since they are being soft squatted anyway I'm happy to call the project done. I did also finish off a bunch of scouts for the table top, and for Shadow War. However, now that Necromunda is back the entire thing is a bit of a moot point right now. On the plus side I think I've finally figured out how to weather a tank properly now.
Chaos Demons
In order to refresh my current chaos army a bit I added a few things I bought at last year's Cancon to the roster. Overall they were intended as a bit of a rush job and it shows a little bit. That being said I'm somewhat happy with the blending that I worked in on the swords, the Demon Princes fingers, and the horns. A decent tabletop standard, but nothing revolutionary. At some point, if they re-release Khorne berserkers at the new Primaris scale I will add them to the army and retire the old scale marines, but until then I doubt the chaos will get any more attention.
Flames of War 15mm Assorted Armour
The intention of this project was to test out some new techniques for painting realistic armour. The standard method is base coat, overall dry brush highlight, gloss varnish, then enamel shading and cleanup. Once that is done a gloss to protect the work, a matt varnish to kill the gloss. The final stage a light dusty dry brush, then details. Overall I'm super chuffed with the results, so much so that I'm not quite motivated to refresh some of my older Flames of War armies with the new plastic kits. One thing that has turned me off a lot of Flames of War in the past was having to work with their resin and metal kits. The new moves to plastic has seen a general increase in quality, and I vastly prefer plastic at this scale.
Battlefield Objectives
These were a bit of a rush job, I did try to do some weathering and chipping but it didn't turn out as well as I'd like. Sadly this is a particular technique I have yet to master. Right now I'm looking for another opportunity to give this technique another shot.
Triumvirate Boxes
While the initial attempt I did try and lift my game when painting these fellows, but I quickly fell back to my middling tabletop level quality and some instances of experimentation with new techniques. In spite of this I'm quite happy with all of the results in general, especially the glow in Cyphers eyes and Greyfax's power armour. I will say that while the Cawl model looks good, that thing is an utter bastard to paint. Sub-assemblies are a must, and I wound up snapping more than a few of the small cabled bits off in the process of painting and assembling. Current Gulliman is going to get painted along with the rest of the Primaris Ultramarines. And the Yvranine (probably misspelled that) box will get painted up with my Dark Eldar army.
Sigmarite Priest
I started this guy with the goal of making a Crystal Dragon competition piece, but I ended up hating the model. I wound up getting a mediocre result, which might be good for a local comp, but not up to scratch for a more prestigious one. I attempted to do a molten glowing effect on the hammer, but the resulted ended up being fairly mediocre. I'm probably going to enter this into my local GW's painting comp, maybe ScaleACT later in the year.
Necromunda
I'm super chuffed with the new Necromunda miniatures and game rules. It has historically been my favorite Games Workshop game and far superior to 40k. The new miniatures are pretty wild in terms of their sculpting, versatility and creativity. I did try to lift my game with these ladies, but they were a pretty hard slog to get finished and the varied colours on the hair and animal print cloth ended up being a massive time sink. In spite of this I think the results were fairly decent, unfortunately due to my car dying I have yet to make it to any of the games that have been starting up. I'm looking forward to picking up the Orlocks boxed set and trying for a more unified set of colours.
That is pretty much it right now. I'm hoping to get back in the a mood to get some serious progress on my backlog done, but given how low energy I've been right now I'm not sure I'll be keep the throughput going that I used to, especially since I have not played much in terms of games lately, nor am I trying to make it into painting comps. I may be losing interest overall, if this is the case throttling my hobby down a bit might be for the best, as avoiding burnout should be the goal.
One thing I am going to do is try to write more painting articles when I have a decent enough project. I probably won't do much more streaming due to me being somewhat boring on camera and the batch projects right now aren't particularly great fodder for online content. Maybe some Youtube stuff if I can be bothered to do the work.
