New Projects and Announcements

Lee here with another update from the Beautiful Warfare team...

So today's post is going to be a three part blog consisting of a couple of announcements, a sneak peak at my next project as a bit of a tip for Zenith priming and a look at my latest completed project, mostly as a distraction from beginning to paint as I`m not 100% sure as to what I want to do on this next mini...

So first and foremost; the website is LIVE! yes, we now have our site up as a gallery, list of services and partnerships and a request form. The site is still in Beta stage, with a glitch or two, but for now it serves it`s purpose and looks pretty damn cool - thanks Liam! Check it out www.beautifulwarfare.ca

The second announcement is that we now have a deal with OneStopShopCardsAndGames for great rates on the Warmachine & Hordes, and potentially Malifaux. We are able to offer the lowest price on those lines of figures for anyone wanting any services, from pro-assembly through paints. The partnership is non-exclusive, and I would love to have a partnership with any other store able to offer me a token discount on any other lines of product - We are not store biased, and shop for product and play at various stores depending on product, availability and local community.

Speaking of community, One-Stop is hosting a Privateer Cup, a free weekend long tournament with tonnes of prizes! Check out the event details here. Saturday is round-robin, with one elimination from each group. Sunday is single elimination, so a potential 8 games, and a chance of prizes no matter where you are in the standings with door prizes and raffles.

Ok, ok, back to miniatures, as I said I would post a sneak peak of my next project. Excellent timing too, as the figure is featured on the CMON homepage today. As promised I`ll post a bit of a tutorial, more like a tip, on zenith priming. But first here`s a pic of the model...

Anima Tactics - Legacy of Solomon

I`m not 100% sure of the scheme I want to use yet, I do know I don`t want to use NMM, though I do want to use some similar techniques, I was thinking something along these lines, but more towards the purple tone used in the image above, or a darker blue - I know he wants it to look dark if possible. There`s also going to be some rather advanced water effects on the model, which i`m not entirely looking forward to doing, but will certainly look awesome(it takes a long time and means a lot of down time).

I`m not sure I want to do the cracked effect, it`s more the tones and feel of the shading to look at.

So looking at the schemes and techniques I've primed the model black, and given it a wide Zenith. So why use this technique? most of you probably use this technique or have tried it and understand it. Some of you probably found it not worth the extra effort, when you can probably get a base-coat down for one of the colours in roughly the same amount of time. Well I think that in a lot of cases, people have the technique in practice without really using it well. So I've given another figure a typical bad zenith...

Yeah ok it's not a great shot, all of todays pic from my table are from my phone, care of my DSLR being out of battery from the photo shoot. But if you enlarge that image it'll be pretty clear that the prime is a bit spotty, has not touched a lot of areas where the technique would help to give a bit more pop on the underside areas, and is probably a bit too heavy on the top surfaces. These are all because of one simple thing I did MAJORLY wrong. For this one, I simply held the model at an angle and gave a couple of very light dusts of white from directly above.

So why's this bad? Well you should by now know that when you're priming you don't want to hold the can still and spray at the model. To get a really nice thin, smooth prime you want to hold the can at a bit of an angle and sweep across the figure in very light coats. That's why i got the spotty effect! This of course ruins a  lot of the purpose of the technique. This also has the effect of pooling the primer too heavily in one area and risking some finer detail.

Another thing about this execution was that when you look at the way that light acts on an object and what we`re trying to do, it just isn`t accurate, and it doesn`t help on a lot of the surfaces it`d be really useful for. when you paint zenith, you`ve got to lie a little and drop that highlighting outwards from the zenith just a touch, otherwise the gradient doesn`t look right and the lighting seems a bit stark and unnatural. Think of it this way, it`s a sunny day outside, if you look at the sky, you can see that light from the sun is being refracted in the atmosphere and all other points in the sky are sending light towards you, concentrating towards the suns position.

So here`s how to do it. prime the mini black - WELL, remember the upper surfaces are going to get a few extra hits of prime so keep it light. Hold the model at an angle of about 70 degrees and sweep very quickly one way and then the other with the white, to give a very light dusting. Rotate the model about 45 degrees and repeat. Keep going, making sure the dustings are very light, the true zenith will eventually build to be the most brightly lit. Here`s an example...

So the last piece in the puzzle is scale. The larger the object you`re painting, the more you want to drop that angle down to being a side-on, to at most about 45 degrees. about 80-85 degrees is good for something ``man-sized`` and about 50-60 for something like a tank, 45 for a very large building(just enough for a shadow under window sills). I hope you all find this verbose little tip quite helpful, if not you can always send me a request to paint it for you.

Right, as promised here`s some more eye candy....

The model had every connection pinned to ensure the pose would not be damaged.

Latest completed project was done as a commission, the scheme was set to reflect the codex `flyer` image, where the model fades from light to dark. So having said that I didn`t want to fade it too heavily, and on the lower extreme`s a I used colour-matching rob contrast rather than actually fade the model int black. It`s a feature piece in the army, a caster always is, so I wanted it bright, having said that I didn`t want the basework to steal too much attention from the actual figure, so I painted that quite dark, with very few contrasting hues within the base - contr4asts were the base coat(blue) and the washes(sepia and dark brown). I also painted the small tree you can see on the lower left side of the base very drab tones so as not to pop too much against the base and mini. I think the most imortant step I did was to go back over the whole model and put an extreme shadow of purple into all the deepest creases and edges between the gold trim and red armour. It helped to make the shadows appear very dark without over darkening the figure and got a lof clean edges in between the fine detail.

Khador Commission and then some....

Hi it's Lee again with the latest update from my painting table...

This weekend I completed and handed off the Khador commission I've been working on. If you know me on Facebook, or are part of the Warmachine Hordes Vancouver group then you might have seen a WIP shot a week or so back. I have some pics of the mini's at near completion, one or two at completion and a group shot that is now the header of the blog. I'm really sorry I couldn't get the timing better to actually get shots of all the models once completed. The weekend was insane, with finishing the commission, going to meet the client, doing the photo shoot for our website gallery and the Drake release party(amongst other things) there just wasn't the option.

I now have the photo booth set up and the settings can be ported on the camera, so that won't be an issue for future projects. Today I won't really be going off track too much, but tomorrow I'll do a fluff post (not that kind of fluff) with some upcoming events, new commissions, etc.

Project Brief...
To pin and restructure the arms of 5 Berserker models and Kherchev The Terrible, preventing them from drooping and to lengthen the arms slightly. To pose Kherchev in a highly animated pose to show his manoeuvrability as a caster by posing him leaping off a wrecked jack. To paint the models in a snow-cammo scheme that allowed for a great amount of contrast without being inconceivable as a real warfare scheme.

The scheme...
The scheme set with the client was for an off-white blue/green/purple/what-have-you snow-cammo, with little to no battle damage and weathering. The idea being that white is too bland and leaves littel to no pop, and that the original Khador scheme makes absolutely no sense for an army running around in the snowy mountain wastes (unless maybe your caster is following Winston Churchill's lead with daylight bombing runs). Everything else was pretty much left to my idea as to make the scheme work. The client has a lot more work for me so I wanted to try to avoid using mixed colours, being that replacing paints could cause issues maintaining the scheme later on.

Shot of a completed model.

So I went with the blue for the off-white, I like the tones and leaves for lots of options for contrast through the model. I also chose to run the bulk of the metal tones on the silver side of things, rather than going with too much brass, bronze and gold which I felt would have been too "noticeable in the snow". Still wanting to have a fairly high degree of contrast, the complimenting tones are mostly subtly placed.

The project started with re-structuring the upper-arm sections of all the figures. The client wanted them replaced as the arms tended to droop and bend away from their original posing and was tired of that(it also causes metal fatigue and would lead to them breaking eventually anyway). Looking at the size of the parts, it was apparent that pinning would be an issue if I wanted to keep the detail of the original parts, so I removed the upper arm sections almost entirely, only keeping the wider parts of the pistons. at this point the detail that needed to be drilled into was going to be very thin, and wouldn't very strong as a standard pin. There was also the issue of loosing some of the detail if I used a pin too wide. So I did a compound pin on the arm sections, using a very thin durable inner pin to connect the parts and an outer pin in-between them, adding more glue surface area and a higher degree of durability.

Here's a shot of one of the pinned arms....

The added advantage of the compound pinning was that I could make all the arm pistons the same length and ensure I didn't end up with some models having longer arms than others.

So Kherchev was an interesting model to assemble, I must admit the khador stuff is wonderful for posing in general, as a menoth / cryx player I'm used to very little in the way of posing options. being that the figure needed to have a very animated pose and be leaping off an object a bit of restructuring was needed in other areas, so I snapped the glue on the torso joint, right shoulder and right hip joint. The torso was simply posed turned a touch more to the right and the should reposed accordingly to have the model posed with it's axe brought back for a swing. The right hip joint was pinned, glued and then encased in putty to add structure to the joint that would hold the entire model's weight. I think the pose came out really nicely...

Kherchev's final pose.

The primary contrasting hues were placed in the metals and the basework. I painted the base a very red brown, highlighting up to rather drab tone, I felt that highlighting too much, though effective for contrast on the basework would otherwise rob out the overall appearance and bring too much focus away from the figure. I also didn't want to cover up the red tones too much. To add to the effect I went a little overboard on the rust effect on the scrap parts on the base, each base has some element of metal, be it a cog, gear, weapon or rail track that could be rusted, and took that all the way up to a bright orange more-so than I would on anoth rust element. Being that I planned to cover the bases in a fairly large volume of snow I wanted as much colour in the basework underlay as possible.

Kherchev's Base as an example of tones used on the dirt of the bases.

The metals of the model were more subtly done, being that there was the mandate of having little-to no battle damage and weathering, I wanted that crisp appearance, so kept the contrasting hues of those areas rather subtle, starting with a 50/50 mix of boltgun and black, then washing with an undiluted agryx shade and then a wash of 50% - 75% diluted sepia. After the washes dried I brought the mid-tone up to boltgun's new compliment and then went right in to mithril highlights. The copper smokestacks did allow for a lot of red, so I went with a base of warplock, going up through screaming bell into dwarf copper and then a copper/ mithril mix. The smokestacks were later glazed very roughly with a mix of black and a dark brown to give a sooty effect. The gold area were based with warplock, shaded with molten bronze and then highlighted with a 30/30/20/20 mix of rhulic gold, mithril, pealescent silver ink and pealescent gold ink.

You can see good examples of all the various metals in this shot, and how the warm tones are prevalent throughout the metal sections to aid in contrast.

The armour itself was done quite easily, starting with a base of russ grey I shaded the armour into it's mid-tone and highlight with spacewolf grey(P3's frostbite will replace this later on). The extreme highlights were then gone over with white scar to give the mini pop and annunciate the edges. I really didn't want to shade all the way up to white on this as part of the gradient because I wanted those edges nice and sharp. The accents were done with a base of stegadon blue(because it has a nice little hit of green to balance things out) then shaded with troolblood base, edged with spacewolf and then hit at the extreme points and zenith edges with white scar for a little extra edge and to define those edges from the main armour sections.

This model actually ended up with another 2 layers of snow after this picture was taken, because I thought the pose was apt for him to be trudging through ankle-deep powder.

The snow basing was done in muliple layers to build up  a bit of a puffy appearance, and to fill in sections where I wanted the snow to be deeper between crevices and so on. To give the models each a sense of individuality the snow was done in varying depths on each base.

All in all I'm quite happy with the scheme, there are a few changes I'd like to make on future models, but that will come when I get the next job for the army... you\ll see. and because we're talking about mini's here's some more photos.

 

Here are a couple shots of Kherchev almost completed, he got a few extra highlights and some shading here and there that you probably wouldn't notice. 

...and one more group shot....

Ok thats it for me today, I've got huge amounts of work to do, including 2 more unique projects and a website to write for... oh, no, I'm not going into it - I'll blog it tomorrow.

1 Day Pro-paint, Pre-production Yeeve 3D print

Hello hello,

It`s Lee here with another update on my activity. Today`s post covers an 'emergency' 1-day Pro-paint of a pre-production mini for action games miniatures. The game they produce, Drake, is currently shattering it's Kickstarter goals and will be launching soon. As part of their campaign they were putting together a rules video, to demonstrate gameplay.

You can view the video here: Drake Rules Video

Ben gave me a call on Sunday saying the mini's would arrive by courier Tuesday and the video was shoot was set to start on Wednesday 10 am. I didn't realize it at the time, butt I would actually be painting a pre-production 3D print of the model. They have a lot of their lineup currently already in pre-production metal casts, but this mini is not one of them; but I digress... I was to paint the Yeev of the Rish force.

So the project was something really exciting for me as there were 3 models going in for the painting to 3 different artist, one by Nick from Else-Where games, who I will be mentioning at a later date. The other model was headed off to Chad Lascelles, who's work you will see all over the Infinity line. I was very excited to see how my work would stack up to a well-known international painter's, seriously his work is awesome.

So here's a shot of what I received at 1pm after a discussion about scheme:

I know it's really hard to see much detail from the shots above, but most of the mini is covered in a very strange texture that just wouldn't fille or sand off, and of course I had to be gentle with the prototype, as there wouldn't be time to get another one shipped from Texas in time for the next days video shoot.

The above picture shows the primed and based mini. I primed the model black and then hit it with white to help a little with some zenithful lighting. The mini had to have a lot of contrast for use in video as the shots wouldn`t be closeups. After the prime, I took the airbrush to it with a custom dark blue, I can`t remember what I used for the airbrush basecoat. The scheme needed a dark blue back and a grey belly with some flesh tone worked in, so I used the flesh on the wings, and based the wings on both sides with the same colour. Now I mentioned the texture of the printbefore at this point the texture started impacting upon my stress level as it would just suck paint up and leave exposed areas with a stippling, stripey effect, so layer after layer, after layers, after layer were applied in rapid succession to get coverage in clog up a bit of the texture to even the surface out somewhat(i know, but you totally can`t tell on the final result).

to make the wings shading I used different washes in series over the creases in the folds of the wings, Sepia on top and ogryn flesh, sepia & agryx shade on the underside, tapering towards the exposed sections. The base was primed with a very watered down Cardon granite, which is wonderful as it fills in between the gaps, gives full coverage, but doesn`t clog up detail. The horns and teeth were done with my darkest brown, with a transition to desert yellow, then hit with a heavy dose of agryx shade, tapering away from the base of the horn or tooth. The belly was painted a dark grey.

The mid-tone and highlight stages were a nightmare, moving between techniques to get around the texture issue, from a standard transparent layering technique to a brutalised version of wet-blending and then combining to ensure nice clean transitions and clean edges. at this stage I started transitioning the grey belly into the blue hide and shading the inside of the legs, feet, throat, etc. 

The highlights on the hide were brought all the way up through blues and into white, then hit over with a very watered down blue to ensure that the blue tone wasn't lost. The horns and teeth got a hit of menoth base, then brought up to full white with white scar. the grey was highlighted up using a standard layering technique with exceptionally watered down paint to ensure that little errors wouldn't show.... at this point I'd vowed never to paint a 3D print without having at least a day to fix the texture before painting... the tail was hit with an additional stage of white and then a cover of blue to make sure it stood out, as the video was going to be mostly top-down shots.

The wings were brought up through flesh tones from the GW line, then washed again, then given another watered-down hit of a very bright flesh tone in multiple layers transitioning into the extreme highlights. I think i used a watered down ulthan grey as the highlight on the belly, just picking out the edges and a giving a freehand bit of transition through the shoulder to give the impression of musculature.

The base was finished off using various mid-tone browns as dry-brushes and overpaints with a light hit of a watered down sepia wash to add a touch of red contrast to the base. The rock base was a quick effect i use on rocks all the time, using heavy Agryx shade and sepia washes in opposite directions over a grey basecoat, then dryrushed very very lightly with the grey and then highlighted lightly with a watered down white. I spent a bit of extra time adding the static grass and flock to make sure the base didn't look like a hack job.

And here's a terrible shot of the final model.

The next day I went down to the set, to help and meet the rest of the team. Unfortunately I didn't get to meet Chad, but I did get to put his work side by side with mine, here's another aweful shot from my phone:

I was very happy with myself for producing something, that was not only very comparable quality(obviously his is a little better, but they are very, very close), but that matched his scheme so closely with absolutely no direct communication, which I think definitely paid off for the video, here's a better shot of the whole army.

So I have been on here too long talking about the Yeev for too long and have to get back to my Khador commission, but I'll find some time to post about that this week before I hand the models over to the client. I have one finalised and I'm down to the details on each of the other minis and will be painting a mini a day at this point (yee-pa!) So stay tuned for that and some more from Gord. We have our next projects and will be posting in updates on those as well.

Comments always welcome, if you like our work, please share the blog, and tell your friends we are accepting new projects!

Orks Update: Trumpeter Salute 40k Tournament

Hey guys Gord here again with an update of my favorite boyz. The Orks.
This last weekend I took them to a local tournament. The Trumpeter Salute 40k tournament. It was good times with lots of good people. The event was TOed by Lee Baxter. Thanks Lee for putting on a fun event.
Not super competitive. But that didn't stop me from losing two of my three games. :P Anyways I didn't come home empty handed as I won one of the raffle prizes. One of the GW 40k Trench Lines Terrain boxes.
I also won the best painted trophy. Yay me!

So I was up until 1:00ish the night before trying to get my objectives and Defense Line finished up. Here's a couple shots of my army.

As you can see in the front I used the Citadel Urban Barricades and Walls as a defense line. If you chop two of them in half then it all comes out to the same size as the Aegis Defense Line. Four long pieces and four short pieces.

Here's a close up on the defense line and you can sort of see the Objective markers in the back. I used the little markers you get in the Munitorum dice set only I chopped the Servo Skulls of the top and built some totems from plasticard and random Orky bits I had laying around.

So now I'm adding to the army and changing some things around that I find didn't work so well in preparation for a larger tournament in a couple months. I've also got a possible commission coming up so I'll post up progress shots and finished shots of those. Until then.

Exciting times; new Commissions

Hi, it's Lee here with another update from my side of things...

I did promise to upload some shots of the final Kara Sloan project and my Protectorate of Menoth list, but I have to delay that for a while.Firstly, I can't find my cable for my camera(my fiance's shoes cover most of our house and thankfully haven't invaded my studio yet), and I've had to sideline the Menoth for now as I've had some new work come in. Positives on that point, I have finally obtained and stripped all the last few models needed for this list and am hoping to get in a game to test out the list later this week - will report.

What I've been doing:
So first off I've got another commission I'm doing for a Khador player, cool little battle group of Kherchev the terrible and 5 Berserkers, all done out in an off-whit blue winter scheme. The project started off with some customisation and this little bit of work turned into a monster project as for some reason my drill bits kept snapping. Now that's only ever happened to me once so to have this happen to me 6 times is a big wake-up call on which products to buy and from where.

Here's the story on the customization:
So for everyone thats not aware of the berserker model, you can find it here:
http://privateerpress.com/warmachine/gallery/khador/warjacks/berserker

if you look at the arms, the "biceps" are basically a few thin pieces of material connecting some rather large weapon arms and the clients were constantly bending during play, so he wanted me to come up with something to make sure that the pose was more stable and droop effect came to a halt. now the biceps are essentially 2 pistons and a strut. I've reduced that for effect, to simply being 2 pistons, which i felt gave a greater look of this being something animated.

The next customization was to repose Kherchev to be leaping off a cast wreck marker, so I rotated the whole lower body, re-pinned the hip joint and raised the leading leg.

Just a note, I have also since changed the pose so he doesn't lean so far forward, it's actually a really nice pose you can see in the group shot below. So I've also given myself a massive headache by not wanting to wait to buy white primer, and simply priming black to help the metal shading, bad move, it made the basecoats turn into a 5-coat affair. but I now have the basecoats and shaded mid-tones down on most of the models. leaving a lot of the detail areas unpainted for now, those will be quick fill-ins once the armour is complete.

I still also have to put all the snow down on the bases, but I figured this would be a good chance to show off the colours of the base. Since the final result of the armour is going to be a very subtly blue white, I've made the bases a very subtly red shade of brown dirt.

SO, what else is going on?

Well I've been speaking with a local manufacturer and we're looking me spearheading coordination of the product from renders to casts, which is awesome! I get to bring the mini's to life, what a cool gig! Also they have some new models coming in from the casts tomorrow and have a promo video to shoot the very next day so I will be putting the Khador aside for a 1 day pro-speed-paint. Thats a real push for me, but I think I can handle it as the model isn't oo complex and will be exceptionally cast if it's anything as well cast as the last model I painted for him.

So I have a million and one things to do tonight, including a work-order with the the chief over there and finish off this mid-tone tonight, tomorrow is going to be insane, so I'll leave you all for now, and promise to upload some shots of that work when I'm allowed.

Please comment if you found Gord's rust tutorial helpful, I'm thinking of putting up a complimentary tutorial, being that I do rust the exact opposite way Gord does it anyone interested in seeing a different side of rust and being able to have a bit more of a transition into unspoiled metal?

Or how about you tell me what you want a tutorial of and I'll put one together, I have a couple cool tricks coming, up I'm just waiting for the chemistry to happen.

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