Media - painting - Page 2 | virtualwolf.org

A photo of the three measuring gauges from Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. One is long and thin with stylised skulls and a red pentagon. The other two are two halves of an isosceles trapezoid with a white circle, blue square, and black triangle on three of their edges, and half of a large skull with a knife under it on either side. All three pieces fade from a dark metallic blue to a bright copper colour, on the dark blue side I've added rust pigment so it looks like it's been rusting, and on the copper side I added a verdigris effect.

The same three combat gauges as before, but without the rust and verdigris effects.

The "barricades" from the Into The Dark set. Instead of being actual barricades like in the original Octarius release of Kill Team, they consist of four stacks of large ammo crates, two things that look like a portable generator/engine on wheels, and two sets of what look like propane tanks and big lead battery type things. They're all dark and silvery.

With my week-long cold I unfortunately didn't manage to get much miniature painting done at all, but I DID paint up my second batch of combat gauges to match my Into The Dark terrain, with a dirtied-up rusted side and a clean side. Weirdly, on the dirty side where I did the rust pigment I actually went a bit too heavy-handed with the matte varnish and it actually dried white in places (or maybe it reacted with the pigment or something? All I know is that I didn't have this same problem when doing my actual ITD terrain) but it's totally worked fine anyway and just added some extra wear! I also made the ITD "barricades" look at least somewhat better with the application of some airbrushed silver, a dunk in The Army Painter's "Dark Tone", and some drybrushing.

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Posted on 3 March 2024, 19:17

A photo of a bunch of steampunk-looking terrain on a game board, it's all walls and put together to look like the interior of a gothic-slash-steampunk starship. The terrain is all rusty-looking like it's been properly abandoned for centuries. Closest to the camera are the warriors of the Astra Militarium, ten heavily-armoured women in white-coloured armour wielding various guns. On the far side are six Plague Marines, huge superhuman warriors in green armour that have all sorts of gross mutations.

A close-up of two of the Astra Militarum who are about to go barrelling through an open hatchway. Above the hatchway are black and yellow hazard stripes, and the walls are all details with pipes and skulls and cabling. Next to the hatchway is a little button pad with a round screen that I've painted green and it looks like it's lit up.

A closeup of one of the sections of wall that has a series of ten smaller screens on the left half of the wall. They look like they're probably CRTs (or whatever the Warhammer 40,000 equivalent is) because they're curved and are green and glowing like what one of the old Apple IIe displays from the 80s looked like. On the right half of the wall is what looks like a round radar display along with two much larger screens, also green and glowing. Similar to the rest of the walls, there's also a bunch of cables and wires and pipes and skulls and it all looks appropriately grimdark.

A closeup shot of the leader of the Astra Militarum who is wearing an officer's army cap and has her cloak billowing out behind her. She's pointing a glowing plasma pistol directly at a Plague Marine who has a giant mouth in the chest/abdomen section of his armour and is wielding two plague knives (which basically look like mutated short swords). They're both standing at either end of a room that has two open doors where they've come in, and all the walls are the standard grimdark steampunk/gothic look with cables and pipes and skulls and rust.

My Kill Team terrain is DONE! Absolutely fucking stoked at how good it looks, I even painted the screens up to look like, well, screens! Other than the screens, all I did to the rest of it was a drybrush of Ironbreaker plus the rust pigment. I wasn't looking forward to having to individually apply pigment fixer to everything but fortunately using a solid thick coat of matte varnish via the airbrush has done the trick just as well, and with far less effort. The hazard stripes above the doors look so good too, and I made sure I dabbed them with rust pigment so they looked properly worn like the rest of it.

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Posted on 18 February 2024, 16:06

A photo of two of the sections of the wall terrain from Into The Dark. It looks very steampunk with lots of pipes and skulls and both are painted the lower colour being a dark metallic blue and further up the wall it fades into a lighter copper colour. The section on the left looks almost unfinished compared to the one on the right, that looks a lot more "lived in".

Also after our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542), I decided I wanted to add a bit of extra pizzazz to my Into The Dark terrain because it looked a bit dull next to my friend's set that he put a fair bit more effort into. One of the things he did that I particularly liked was adding hazard stripes to all the walls above where the doors are, because it's VERY easy to miss the fact that there's a door there and suddenly your opponent opens one right next to one of your operatives and you're like "...oh, shit." Very happy with my hand-painting efforts for the hazard stripes here, I also did some drybrushing with silver (I had done zero drybrushing at all until this point) and used the MIG brand rust pigment to add some extra grime and wear, and it looks mint. Left is before, right is after. Now I just have approximately twelve million more pieces of this terrain to do. 😅

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Posted on 12 February 2024, 21:51

A photo of a Plague Marine from Warhammer 40,000. He's in huge khaki green standard-issue huge Space Marine armour with bronze-coloured edging in places, but because he's one of Nurgle's chosen he's all corrupted and mutated: there's a GIANT mouth with huge teeth right across the entirety of the chest and abdomen of his armour with a metal pipe coming from his shoulder and going into the side of the mouth, and the two very large knives (honestly, they're more like short swords) he's wielding have skin-coloured spines growing out of them in places.

A photo of three Plague Marines in a line. They're all in the same general khaki green armour, but the one on the left is fairly dull-looking without too much highlighting since it was my old regular-paints painting technique where the highlighting was done with drybrushing. The one in the middle has come out a brighter green because the underlying primed colour is brighter and also it's the newer "Militarum Green" Contrast paint so the primed colour has a lot more effect on the finished product. And finally we have the one in the previous photo with the two knives that has much more emphasised shadows and much punchier highlights thanks to the zenithal highlight and manual highlighting.

After our last game of Kill Team (https://virtualwolf.org/media/posts/2542) I figured I should probably paint up my Plague Marine who has the double plague knives because he's a beast in close combat and against Genestealers my ranged Marines weren't super-useful. I re-primed him using a zenithal highlight and got him fully painted this weekend, and am very happy with how he came out! There's zero drybrushing except on the sand on the base, it's entirely Contrast paints and manual highlighting. I also realised that I've been painting Plague Marines long enough that I have essentially the three stages of evolution of my painting technique. On the left in the second photo is one of my first Plague Marines from nearly six years ago now, using regular paints which looks fine but takes so long. In the middle is my second batch from eighteen months ago where I was using Contrast paints to greatly speed things up, but still had a plain white undercoat and the highlighting was still done by way of drybrushing. And on the right is this latest guy, with the full zenithal undercoat and manual highlighting!

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Posted on 11 February 2024, 21:49

A selfie of me, a white man with a short red beard and receeding hairline, wearing head-mounted set of magnifying eyeglasses. The headset itself is white and the lenses are a single piece of almost sunglasses-shaped hard plastic that attaches to the front of the headset and can be moved forwards or backwards. My eyes look freakishly large because I'm looking directly through the lenses at the camera.

My eyesight is definitely still very good, but I _do_ need extra magnification when I'm painting eyeballs on my miniatures because they're so damn tiny (the best technique is to paint the whole eyeball black, then put a white dot at the very left and right so you just have the black in the middle looking like the pupil). I've had a magnifying glass on a arm attached to the side of my painting table for a few years and it helps but even with that I've been finding it tricky, it doesn't quite magnify enough without ending up with the end of the paintbrush awkwardly close to the magnifying glass. A friend has a set of those headset magnifying thingies, so I looked at a bunch and bought a set for myself, from https://visionaidmagnifier.com. It's got a couple of LEDs in it and there was the choice of a USB-rechargeable one or a 3x AAA battery one, so I went with the latter since I'm very unlikely to need any additional lighting given how brightly lit my painting table is. The handiest bit is that it comes with five different magnification strengths and you can easily swap them out, change the angle, and move them closer or further away from your eyes.

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Posted on 11 February 2024, 14:57

A photo of two fully-painted Space Marine miniatures with bare heads standing next to each other. The left is holding her boltgun in front of like she's standing on guard, and the base is a sort of desert rocky-looking texture/colour. The one on the right is a much deeper richer red, far closer to the colour of blood, and she has a pistol held in one hand and is in the middle of throwing a grenade with the other. Her base looks like really thick mud and it's splattered half-way up to the knees so it looks like she's been really tromping around a battlefield.

Earlier this week I painted one of my converted Space Marines as a test to make sure the colour scheme worked, and man am I glad I did only one as test because I hate it. 😫 Despite deciding to paint them in Blood Angels colours and using the Contrast paint called "Blood Angels Red", there's FAR too much orange in that colour, I don't like how the backpack came out with it being black, and I don't like the base either (I DID do an absolutely bang-up job her face though, particularly the eye). I did a second one and finished it tonight (the one on the right) using my trusty old Flesh Tearers Red, painting the backpack the same colour, and using the muddy terrain texture, and it looks SO much better. Definitely going to use that for the rest of them.

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Posted on 10 February 2024, 21:51

A photo of five Assault Intercessor Space Marines. They're all wearing standard massive Space Marine armour with big shoulder pads, and they all look like they're mid-stride. They've got pistols and chainswords, and the one on the left has a grenade in her hand and looks like she's about to lob it. None of them have helmets and they've all got either mohawks or very short cropped hair and various cybernetic implants.

A photo of five regular Intercessor Space Marines wearing much the same armour as the Assault Intercessors. These ones are armed with very large two-handed bolt rifles, two are pointing the rifles and yelling like they're in the middle of laying down a hail of fire, the sergeant is holding hers upright just by the grip and is pointing with her other hand, the fourth is standing there like she's keeping watch, and the final one has a pair of grenades in one hand and looks like she's just about to throw them. They're also all bare-headed with cybernetic implants.

Yesssss, got my converted all-women Intercession squad assembled and undercoated! Extremely stoked at how well these have come out, in particular the one from each squad with the grenades since none of the sculpts actually have them holding grenades (one of the operatives for the Assault Intercessors is specifically a grenadier and I wanted to make it obvious which one that was, and if I don't take her I'd be taking the regular Intercessor with grenade as an added equipment). I even went to the level of detail of chopping off the grip from one of the spare holsters and fitting it properly onto the empty pistol holster that the grenade-lady from the Assault Intercessors has, since she's holding a grenade instead of a pistol. I also chopped off all the helmets and attached them to the belts of every single one of them, to show that they still HAVE their helmets, they're just too cool to wear them. 😛 I'm going to paint them in Blood Angels colours, mostly because the red and black scheme is quite striking and I've never painted Blood Angels before.

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Posted on 31 January 2024, 20:16

A photo of seven hunched-over rotting zombies. They've got the standard-issue zombie decaying clothes, but all three have part of the lids of the coffins they were in on their backs, which are attached to them by way of stakes driven through the top of the lid and through their chests. They also have tree roots growing through their bodies. The bases are all done up to look like fresh wet mud, which is splattered part-way up their legs so it looks like they've been slogging through it.

A photo of three bases of bat swarms mid-flight, all flying around ruined stone columns. The middle one has clearly visible fangs and is FAR larger than the others.

I'm definitely closing in on the end of my Warhammer Quest project, I've finished the rest of the deadwalkers and the bats! Only thirteen miniatures left to go out of the sixty-odd in the box. Really happy with this second batch of deadwalkers, I didn't do any drybrushing at all except for the robes and instead just highlighted everything manually. It comes out a lot more strikingly.

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Posted on 24 January 2024, 19:49

A photo of two miniatures side-by-side. One is a standard human-sized skeleton warrior, the other is an ogre who is head and shoulders taller than the skeleton. The ogre is wearing chainmail and a big helmet that leaves his face exposed, and has a big mace held out in one hand behind him like he's either about to hit something or has just finished doing a big backhand swing with it. In his other hand is clenched a big blade that's attached to a leather glove and that arm looks like he's about to stab someone with it.

And the final hero is completed, say hello to Brutogg Corpse-Eater! (As before, skeleton for scale.)

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Posted on 9 January 2024, 20:23

A photo of an aristocratic-looking miniature mid-stride. He's got a magnificent beard and mustache that's curled up at the ends, plus a long top-knot of hair and the rest of his head is bald. He's holding a steampunk-looking pistol upright and has a red jacket edged with white fur billowing out behind him, and his other hand is on the pommel of his sword. His robe thing is lined with armour plates and he's wearing an armoured chestpiece as well.

Glaurio ven Alten III is ready to avenge his family's deaths! One more hero to go (who is actually mostly done but the base texture paint is currently drying) and I'll have the full eight completed, woot.

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Posted on 7 January 2024, 21:06