ScaleACT 2018 Photo Gallery

I didn't enter any of my work this year, as these days I'm too busy on the Saturday to make in early enough in the morning to register, and the entire day is usually taken up with life maintenance tasks anyway. This year, I think I didn't even make it last year, I managed to make the Sunday morning on the show and had a good chance to browse the displays without having to deal with crowds of graying old men or young families with overly excitable children.
I went in with the intention of not buying anything, as I have more than enough toys to keep me occupied for several years at least. However, in the end I wandered into the swap and sell for the first time ever and spotted a couple of smaller kits for comparatively cheap, and after my last couple of attempts I realize that I could use some more practice before I start on some of my more expensive kits. So I spent a paltry thirty bucks and walked out with three old 1:72 scale kits, which'll give me a chance to to practice some of my scale model techniques. In future I'd like to have a crack at larger and more detailed kits, but my apartment demands that I be economical with space in order to live comfortably, so there is only so much I can do before I literally run out of space to put things.
That being said, the vendors usually put on a pretty good spread. You can easily pick up a kit of just about any tank or aircraft you desire, though generally I find that the prices aren't much better than my local hobby supply place. The real draw are some of the figure painter suppliers that have a decent selection from most of the major figure painting bust and figure suppliers. I must admit the quantity on display was significantly up from previous years, which is good to see. I also saw many, many more busts and figures on display, significantly moreso than previous years.

Anyway that'll do for now, enjoy the gallery.

The Haul

The Pictures

Shaded Basecoat: Beast Mode

Painting the Chaos Spawn by way of Shaded Basecoat

The shaded basecoat has been a neat little technique for me that has kept on giving, especially for weirder and more organic models such as beasts and monsters. This technique came out very well for my Ycarne model, so I figured it would work well for other chaos creatures. Since I've had a chaos army for some time I realized I lacked a decent array of summonable creatures. While my Bloodletters and Demon Prince have some of the basics covered, I've been missing some spawn, and during last Cancon I had the opportunity to pick up a box in a discount bin at one of the big stalls.
I aimed for a very simple and quick paint job, as while I want the models to look presentable on the table, I'm not keen to win any awards with them, and I've got far more interesting projects in the pipe that I want to get to sooner rather than later. Still, I haven't done many monsters or gribblies before and this sort of thing is good practice for when I get on to other projects in future, especially if I ever get my hands on some unpainted Kingdom Death, either way on with the project.

1. Assembly

The models themselves went together very well, and the level of customization that was available to me was pretty remarkable considering it is a plastic kit, probably not a digital sculpt. I wanted to avoid the parts that make the model look like it has fantasy parts and go hard on the weird tentacles and spikes angle.

If you've done any model kit assembly before there isn't much I can tell you about how to do it. Once the kit was together I did my usual processes of fixing to the base and putting down my usual basing mix of cork chunk rocks and sand.

One quibble that I have with assembling the kit is that you can't rush it, as I found I have to put in a few spikes or tentacles, wait until it the glue was mostly set, then balance the model and set it aside for half an hour to wait for it to dry. Finally, repeat as needed until the model is fully assembled.

2. Undercoat

No need for pictures here, normally I use a combination of black all over and white zenithal to get a gradation of highlighting. Since I'm going to start from bright colours from the get go I'm going with an all over undercoat of Croax White all over for the undercoat. This is essential for ensuring that we can start with bright colours without having to build our way up at we would with a black undercoat.

3. Skin Basecoat

This is always one of the most time consuming stages of the project. The colours I am using are both Vallejo Game Colour using Squid Pink for one and Bonewhite for the other. This was applied by brush for at least five to six layers with significant drying time between each layer. The idea of this stage is to achieve a mostly flat initial base colour for all of the skin on the model, I didn't worry about being messy with the colour as I painted over any over spill in subsequent steps. This is where our white undercoat pays off, building up this colour from white was an order of magnitude easier than starting from a black undercoat.

4. First Wash Passes

This pass involves putting down many layers of washes. Each wash uses Vallejo Game Colour as a base colour. In the case of the Squid Pink model the colour is Warlord Purple, for the Bonewhite model the colour is Leather Brown. To create my wash I use Vallejo glaze medium and water to create a very thin wash.
To start with I applied an overall wash and let it dry. Next I applied successive layers of washes, each time starting at a spot further down the model until I had achieved a colour transition from something close to the original base colour at the top to a colour that is mostly the shade colour at the bottom.

5. Second Wash Passes

Next up I wanted to emphasize a few spots on the model with a darker colour. In the case of the Squid Pink model I used Hexed Lichen and Charred Brown for the Bonewhite model. I performed similar steps to the previous stage on the tentacles, gradually getting a colour transition on my chosen spots.

6. Basecoat, Wash & Highlight Claws

This stage was very simple, just a simple basecoat. For the pink model I used Khaki and Shadow Grey for the Bonewhite one. Once this basecoat is dry I applied successive layers wash to start darkening down the base colour. Once I liked the look of the claws I then glazed back up using a very thin glaze with a generous amount of glaze medium to ensure a very thin colour. Once a decent gradient was achieved, I did a few small highlights with with the original base colour as a high highlight. In the case of the brown spawn I highlighted the fur up another layer to give it a slightly different texture from the claws and bone.

7. Eyes

The eyes were relatively simple, I started with Sun Yellow until I had a decent layer to work with. Then I painted a small red pupil that I built up a gradient starting at a medium red and working my way up to orange in the middle. Once I finished up the base shape I gave it a glaze with Bloodletter, let it dry, then re-established the yellow and the red. I also painted some bloodshot eyes lines for the larger eye.

8. Gloss Varnish

The very final stage was a layer of gloss varnish on the eyes and for the creature with the mouth I painted the maw and lips with gloss to give the impression of spittle.

9. Paint & Dress The Base

Final stage is to paint up the base, I used my usual technique which I've documented that many times over the years that I don't feel the need to repeat it. Again, I also dressed the base with the usual array of grasses and tufts.

We're Done!

The final form result turned it pretty well for a tabletop standard, and the shaded basecoat approach is fairly easy to do and doesn't require a lot of fine brushwork in the initial stages. The kit itself was refreshingly simple compared the the usual over adornment of detail that is par for the course for most contemporary Games Workshop models. In retrospect I would've like to try more aggressive colour transitions such as a different belly colour or a speckled pattern, I had some ideas using a toothbrush flicking technique, which I'll probably try on a future monster model. Anyway, I hope that helps, see you on the next guide.

Economic Anxiety

Creative work is valued at exactly what people will pay for it, that is, little to nothing. This is painfully obvious when you hang around on the vast online communities centered around creativity. People have devoted their lives to creation, to mastery of an art, that quite frankly I could never achieve, and yet, every second post is a link of a Ko-Fi page, or a Paypal account begging for just enough money to make rent this month, it is heart breaking.

From my own perspective, it took me years to reach the mid-to-high tabletop standard when it comes to miniature painting. That includes investment in materials, brushes, paints, lighting rigs, airbrushes, mediums, and a whole plethora of tooling and material that I can't even remember at the moment. Going through it all may be a good idea for a future YouTube video, but I digress. That investment almost certainly has run into the many thousands of dollars, not to mention the time and labour of putting paint on plastic. Granted many other creative fields don't necessarily have the same entry cost as minis, but labour is labour all the same. Yet when an artist on the internet produces there is a presumption of no to pitifully low cost to access by the consumer, at least in this historical moment. All the while cost of living creeps up due to the ongoing consolidation of wealth by the returning rentier classes. The starving artist is well and truly back, probably never went away.

I don't need to do this hobby to live, a fact of reality for which I am truly grateful. However, for others, is there a way out of this situation for creative people forced to live in this reality? Probably not in the short term, because the only way to live on a low wage seems to be working long hours on multiple jobs. In the long term, who knows what the world is going to look like, though given current trends things aren't probably going to improve. Art and creativity will more and more be available to those that don't depend on their labour to survive, the sons and daughters of the wealthy that have the time and resources to engage in long term creative labour, to take the unpaid internships that allow them the build the networks required to get their art, whatever it may be, noticed. All the while everyone else gets forgotten, drowned out in a sea of content hobbyist, their passions crushed by the monotony of day to day living and surviving. Assuming the boiling seas don't rise up to claim us all, rich and poor alike, first.

Take a guess as to what my mood has been like lately.

What I have Painted

To start with, and with ScaleACT 2018 looming ahead I've dusted off a collection of old scale model kits and will build them to see if I can hit the necessary level of quality for entry into the show. To start with I pulled out the crappiest kit of the set, an old Hawker Tempest by Revell that I'm sure is based on tooling that may well be older than I am.

First off, the build didn't some out nicely, and my stubby hands made a mess of the hull by covering it with finger print impressions due to mishandling and glue over spills. The painting was a pain in and required way too many layers, finally I started on the enamel wash and forgot to put the transfers on first, thus causing me to abandon the kit as I felt saving it would be too much effort.

Next up were a few Colonial Vipers that I purchased some years ago, yet never go around to finishing as 40k and wargaming was taking up all of my time. First up, I messed up the build right off the bat by mixing up parts, not noticing it until the glue had set and finally also forgot to do the transfers before the enamel wash. Unlike the Tempest I felt the airbrush work was good enough to attempt to save the kit. So I cleaned up most of the wash, applied the transfers, then re-applied the wash. The end result was perfectly good and I feel up to standard for ScaleACT, so that'll be one entry.

I've just finished up a new batch of post apocalypse cars for Gaslands, the great little game that keeps on giving. They turned out pretty well, despite some initial misgivings with attempting to freehand designs, camouflage and even tasteless car art. This batch should provide me with more than enough hulls for the upcoming Gaslands bash at next year's Cancon, and odds are I'll have finished another couple of batches before it finally arrives.

The Clockwork Highway-woman, from Twisted Miniatures turned out fairly well. I'm not quite sure if it is a competition level piece yet, but we'll find out once I enter it in the Crystal Dragon at Cancon I suppose. I'm particularly happy with the way the tan greatcoat and the base turned out.

Yvraine and Ycarne, the last two models of the second triumvirate are done and in retrospect they turned out very well for a high tabletop level. Yvraine was painted separate from her base using more traditional techniques, apart from the black leather, which is a base blue, shaded down to near black with spot highlights applied for show. The sword is another favorite of mine, an off-white with verdigris glazed into the hilt and the entire thing highlighted with stark white for effect, her kitty also turned out pretty well. Ycarne on the other hand was an utter pain to paint, relying heavily on dry brushing and washes to get colour transitions happening. This was definitely one of those models that looked like garbage right up to the point it was finished, at that point it came into its own. Unfortunately the sculpt of this model meant that painting it as sub assemblies wasn't really an option, hopefully I won't paint any more models like this for some time.

What I am Painting

I've made a start on a good Tamiya Universal Carrier. Assembly is done, as is priming, now all that remains is the first airbrushing pass, which will probably not happen until the weekend at latest, possibly later as the coming Sunday is my usual gaming session and Saturdays are filled with chores and work.

I picked these two up on a whim because I do enjoy painting non-combat miniatures as well. They are from the WizKids lined of pre-primed D&D miniatures, they are made out of the same material as the Reaper Bones miniatures and as such they have some pretty nasty mold lines that don't clean up well. So these two ladies will end up as some painting practice, then I'll move on with my hobby.

What is Upcoming

I see red in my future, specifically hordes of brave heroes of the Soviet Union standing ready to smash capitalism and imperialism in the name of the international proletariat. In short, I'm planning an expansion for my Team Yankee Soviets, unfortunately my order has been held up due to lack of stock, so I can't fully finish this project in time for Cancon. In other news I'm planning to take these comrades for a spin in the two day Team Yankee tourney, hence the need to expand them.

I've also pulled some more random things off my current schedule to commence some of the preparation work. First and simplest are some chaos spawn, mostly as adds for my Chaos Space Marines.

I'm also planning to start on another Crystal Dragon competitive project for the squads category. Specifically, I have a copy of Steelheart's Champions and I have some ideas for painting their armour using VGC Verdigris to give them an ethereal look. I've already tested on a free Stormcast and I like the scheme, however I'll go for true metallics for the weapons rather than NMM.

That is pretty much it for me, still grinding onward, diminishing my pile of plastic a few pieces at a time.

It's Been a Long Road

As I put down my paintbrush, step back from the desk and admire the last figure, I feel a sense of loss. This list, this schedule, has been my life for just under a year. Everything on it is something I've either applied paint to, or have given up on, the failures marked off in angry red rather than somber black.

Fortunately this time around the failures were minimal, and not entirely my fault. A kit that had parts missing to the point of uselessness and some badly miscast metal infantry that I didn't have to willpower to try and save, so off to the discard pile with them.

Plenty of additional extras, unrecorded and unplanned also made their way onto this list, most notably my first Necromunda gang, an Escher outfit that I have named ''The Nightshade Crew" they have served me well so far in the local campaign and my enthusiasm for getting them on the table was the cause for them to jump the queue. The other major unplanned project were my first batch of Gaslands cars, after I was very taken with this new and quirky little system, as well as the novel source of table top miniatures. Other than that a few random minis got in the rotation, but mostly as a palette cleanser between projects.

The Final Tallies

28mm Infantry Figures - 237 (give or take due to poor record keeping on my part)
Monsters, Robots and Large Characters - 7
Vehicles and Bikes - 13
Gaslands Cars & 15mm vehicles - 10
Terrain and Objectives - 7

Where To From Here

It was always my intention to have four main 40k armies. Now that I have them I can see my 40k throughput slowing down to Kill Team sized projects and occasional small expansions or single models for display pieces. I've also got the Kill Team Terrain to paint up, which will be a fairly expansive project, but that is what the airbrush is for. The army sized projects in my new schedule will be a triumphant return to Flames of War for me, as I seek to paint new Commonwealth armies to a much higher standard than I could years ago when getting into it, and with the good plastic kits no less. This will also be a time for me to dive deep into my lead pile and start on things that have been languishing down there for a while. I've got a whole load of display miniatures as well as a few pieces of ephemera that I want to get painted. I'm also going to paint up some D&D monsters and heroes, mostly because I'm planning to get into a Song of Blades and Heroes. The biggest projects however are Gaslands, as I've got a lot of toys that need rebuilding and painting, as well as my remaining Necromunda gangs, Orlock, Van Saar and Goliath respectively. For weirder projects I'm planning to build a 6mm Team Yankee army, which I'm still acquiring minis for, and repainting my old Battlefleet Gothic. However, to start with, and since ScaleACT is happening very soon I'm going to make a start with some old scale model kits that I'll enter if I feel they are good enough.

Ever Onward

This new list looms ahead, hour after hour of entirely self inflicted labour for no real purpose other than the fleeting satisfaction of a job well done as items get checked off. Fortunately the particulars are far less demanding this time around, fewer armies and those that are exist are easier to speed paint due to my recent experimentation with techniques for batching 15mm models quickly. The big departure from my last sequence is that there are more projects that require quality rather than a mere tabletop standard. The downside to army painting is that I've failed to adequately grow my skill as a painter, so now is the time to regroup and give it another shot. The Crystal Dragon looms ahead in 2019 and while I already have one project ready for it, I fear it is not yet up to standard. Instead I'll see what I can do to lift my painting to the next level. On the subject of conventions, Cancon, the event that hosts the Crystal Dragon, appears to have several tournaments that I'm interested in, most notably, a two day Team Yankee affair and a one day Gaslands bash, so the miniatures I requires for these events will be bumped up the priority stack. Anyway, hopefully I'll post another one of these in late 2019, with an every shrinking pile of unpainted plastic, see you then.