Lethe's WIP Lair (Elves, Chaos and terrain oh my!)

[Lethe]

I've painted on and off for a couple of years now, probably totalling about 10 months to a years worth of painting altogether. Even though I really enjoy painting I tend to reach a point where things look messy and I get a bit lost, and end up hiding whatever I'm working on and starting something new or taking an extending break altogether. I hope that making a thread with some consistent input might help me push through even when I'm not happy about where things are. Here's the last thing I painted;

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It was both a gorgeous model to play about with and really fun to paint but still took me ages and went through a month break gathering dust before I picked it up and finished it again. I wrote a bit more about painting it here http://lethemonster.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-pheonix-rises-and-then-rests-gently.html

I am partway through painting a couple of GW elves from one of the plastic box sets - the one with the dude on the horse and the guy standing next to him, not the sorcerer and the dude standing next to him! I will get pictures up of current progress tomorrow. I am posting this little short now because I keep wussing out of putting up a thread to try and improve in. :disapointed:

 

[shponglefan]

*thud*

Sorry, that sound you just heard was my jaw hitting the floor.

And this is after only 10-12 months of collective painting experience?

*thud*

Oops, there it goes again.

Seriously though, really great stuff. I'm starting to look through your blog too, it's inspiring! :waving:

 

[Lethe]

Here's the only thing I havent stripped out of the high elves kit;

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The front was done using an airbrush, and the back I painted with a brush over a basecoat of the deepest blue. On the big canvas I think I'm getting the hang of painting, but I proved to myself today that I have big ole ham hands when it comes to painting something small.

I tried painting the chaos terminator lord model thingy. My friend likes the Thousand Sons so I was trying to paint it in that scheme for him. I started with a basecoat of mordian blue but when I tried to apply the mid tone of magic blue (VGC) it really didn't mesh. I gave it a full coat of magic blue instead, and gave shading it by hand a go. I already want to strip the model off or possibly tread on it.

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I don't know if you can see any of the paint on it so far in that photo. I'm not good at taking shots on the go.

Oh well, I'll see if I can bring myself to try fixing it and continuing tomorrow.

 

[Zab]

Holy crap! Feel free to take your time is that is what you are starting your thread with!!! Looking forward to more :shock:

 

[Lethe]

Well I have done some more painting this week but it's actually ended up killing my drive, and ended up with the terminator in some dettol.

I DID, however, discover what was going wrong. I have been using W&N retarder gel and for some reason it has been reacting very badly with all my paints and giving me little gritty speckles in whatever I add it to, and ruining the consistency of everything. I reapplied some paint to the elves with plain water and it felt much nicer; like painting with watercolours again rather than... gritty paint?

While I try and paint the elves/terminator all fancy I have the garden of morr set on the go that I'm trying to paint in a more cartoon style - I have lots of screenshots of Torchlight 2 on my desk as a reference. I love that art style, but I'd also love to be paint as well as other users like Sproket.

Here's a test piece I did for the garden of more;

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Currently working on applying that kindof basecoat and sketched highlights to all the pavement pieces on the rest of the set. Yay!

 

[Lethe]

Well I figured I'd resurrect this instead of starting a whole new thread. I've been working on Kaladrax from the Bones kickstarter. Nearly there. Been both great fun and a nightmare in equal parts. I've never touched the Bones material until now, and it was a steep learning curve.

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There is something very fun about painting tiny bone legs.

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I am slowly brushes away the mask like look of the eyes so that'll be smaller and less 'Zoro-Kaladrax' when I'm done with it.

 

[Lethe]

Finished! Here's the first couple of photos I took.

 

[Lethe]

Here's a few more pics of the finished work:

I have a bunch more here: http://lethemonster.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/kaladrax-finished.html

Now I've moved onto a frostheart pheonix that I am painting up in purple hues for my mother's present for mother's day. I need a few days break from painting before I really crack on with it. It's base coated but the idea of picking up a brush just yet is unpleasant.

 

[Lethe]

I received some good feedback on Kaladrax: I need to add more depth to the colours. As it stands it still looks a bit plastic. So more contrast using deeper shading and brighter highlighting. And my photos look like they have flattened out a lot of the colours and detail. I have to say I was struggling to make everything show up in the photos I was taking. I think I may have had the ISO on too high, and it's ended up looking a bit to washed out and bright.

I do spend time looking at my pictures and thinking 'where have all the colours gone?'. Unfortunately Kaladrax is already sent to his owner to be beaten up in D&D games, so unless I can fix the photos up I already have I won't be able to produce better ones of Kaladrax. I will play about with my camera settings and photoshop with some other finished models I have lying around though, and try and get my images closer to reality.

 

[marjedi]

I would love to hear more about how the material was to work with at this size. I only painted a few man sized models from the bones line.

 

[Lethe]

I would love to hear more about how the material was to work with at this size. I only painted a few man sized models from the bones line.

I'm doing an effortpost on bones and kaladrax in particular for my blog, I'll repost it here too. He actually has two types of material on him - one is the standard bones all the smaller models are made of, and one is a very flexible, bendy soft material. It was odd and I couldn't quite work out why they did it. I have read that the softed material (which the tail end piece and head were all made of) were used so the pieces could be flexed out of the molds, meaning no mold lines on the more detailed pieces. But there were plenty of mold lines across all the squidgy pieces that I dealt with, so who knows.

In general though it wasn't different from dealing with a smaller model made of the same stuff. It just feels like the mold lines will never end...


For now I have spent the day working on my purple pheonix model. Laying down the base layers with an airbrush before I go back in with some tiny brushes and glaze the shadows in.

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The feathers on the bottom layer to the inside of the turqoise section are going to be airbrushed into a deep, dark blue.