YoreTime to clear out the picture roll in my phone, which covers late October and early November!
November is kicking off with some good momentum, and I have plenty more Blood Angels in the works for December and beyond.
Out now: The Unlucky IslesLots of ground to cover in this omnibus post!
I’ve been mulling over what painting goal to set for myself after finishing my initial 2,000-point army, and this morning it hit me: a new point total is the perfect goal for me. So that’s my next miniatures goal: paint another 1,000 points of Blood Angels.
Unlike “finish the 2nd Company,” which limits what I can paint (because of the Blood Angels’ force organization), painting another thousand points gives me freedom on that front — but also a manageable, specific goal. At my current pace 1,000 points should take me 3-4 months to complete, and will give me lots of new army options when I can finally play the game.
Squad Barakiel includes a few elements I’ll forget in a month, so as always I’m writing down the colors I used for them. This is GW’s parade ready guide with a couple of minor tweaks.
My main project this week is finishing up Squad Barakiel (the last one I need for my first army!), but because I never let my “minis queue” run dry I’ve also got four other units on the go in various stages:
The Contemptor is perhaps the cheapest date I’ve encountered yet, assembly-wise — he’s simpler than some of the single Marines I’ve put together! The downside is that he has almost zero posability, which is always a bit of a bummer. But I put him together in under an hour, from sprue to fully assembled; for a large unit that’s pretty minimal.
I have a feeling he’ll be one of those figures that shines once he’s painted, when his boring pose comes to life.
I think of this stage as “a clown ate a bunch of crayons and took a shit on these minis,” because they look so bad when I’m done base-coating them. Then the clown cleans up a bit of his shit during touch-ups — and after that, every stage makes the mini look better and better. Needing to believe in that future while I’m base-coating is part of what makes this stage take so long.
I’m driving pretty hard at wrapping up Barakiel before the end of the month. Will it happen? We shall see!
Out now: The Unlucky IslesI love working on miniature bases, creating little landscapes to complement and set off the actual figure, so for my second Dreadnought I picked up some plain 60mm GW bases on Ebay to give me a blank canvas to work with. I gather that a lot of folks don’t love basing, so I figured I’d talk a bit about my process — not because I’m an expert (I’m not!), but because maybe some of that joy will be passed along.
I start by looking at the figure and thinking about their role in the battle on the plains of Armageddon — that’s where all my Blood Angels are fighting, base-wise. Then I dig out my bits box and pick fun stuff that seems like it might work.
I test out my ideas on the base, moving stuff around until I can picture a cool finished product in my mind. Then I literally test out some elements — like making sure this upright grate/hatch thingie won’t get in the way of Turiel’s body. I also think about whether I want to add tufts, and how many, so I can leave room for a couple.
I also make sure to leave some clearance around the figure itself, to give myself room to, you know, actually paint it. I’ve bumped stuff up too close to models on past bases and made things more difficult for myself. Ditto on avoiding the edges, since I like to have room to put texture paint around everything.
My first Dread, Narses, has prominent vertical elements on the front and back sides of his base. I thought it’d be fun to give Turiel a mostly flat front, but couldn’t resist playing with height in the back.
After I’ve got stuff pretty much how I like it, I trim the nubs, get rid of the mold lines, and glue it all down (plastic glue for plastic, superglue for rocks).
After Turiel’s glue cures overnight, it’s on to painting the debris and then surrounding it all with texture paint!
Out now: The Unlucky IslesTonight I wrapped up assembly on Narses, my Librarian Dreadnought.
This is a really cool kit! I can’t wait to paint this guy.
Narses is actually still in seven pieces: torso, arms x2, legs, feet x2, base — I’ve carefully balanced him for a photo, but he’s not glued together yet. I’m going to paint him in pieces and I may leave his arms unglued; I want to see if my miniature storage solution, which hasn’t arrived yet, can accommodate him with his arms attached before I make that call.
I can see a difference between these two, but it’s not the difference I was expecting; I may have fucked up here.
The texture paint is pebbly, which makes sense, so I focused on really saturating it with my wash . . . which, as I type it, doesn’t sound like how I’d usually do a wash: drag across the details, letting it naturally sink into the cracks. So far the net effect here look less like a wash and more like I just used a darker texture paint.
It’s not unpleasant — I like the color — but I don’t know if it will add shadows and depth. It looks like I’ve eliminated the mid-tones.
Next stop is drybrushing the ground in Grey Seer, and then the rocks in a 50/50 blend of Grey Seer and Corax White and the skulls in straight Corax White. We’ll see if the finished product turns out anything like what’s in my head and/or what’s in the White Dwarf Basing Cookbook, but I’m not optimistic.
Out now: The Unlucky Isles