Thursday 4 September 2014

Orc Allstars - A blood bowl team

2.0 here... It has been a loooong time.

I had a long vacation, and for the most part, my hobby drive was non-existing.
For the last month or so, I have been working on getting a fully painted space marine army, but more on that another day.

For now I want to talk about something fun! BLOOD BOWL.


This is the beginning of my Orc Allstar team which is going to represent some of the NFL teams, and I can tell you - it is pure fun to paint all these colourful uniforms and logos. The freehand is especially rewarding and it is what's keeping me going.

Each piece takes about an hour to paint, and I would like to share my technique with you all.
Let's look at the dolphins logo.


This logo can seem quite complicated (especially when you think about how small the shoulderpad actually is), but the key to any sucessful freehand is to divide the work into smaller pieces.

On this one for example, I started with the orange sun in the background. It can basically be described as a circle with a bunch of triangles attached to it. A nice trick is to look at almost everything as basic geometrical shapes - that way you won't get stuck trying to outline a something extremely complicated. First we have the circle.
Then we add some triangles.
Here's when it gets a bit trickier. See the dolphin itself is too freeflowing to divide into basic shapes, but looking at a picture of the logo, you can still spot some pretty simple shapes, that would be some good starting points. I chose this one.
I thin my paints down to something like 2:1 water to paint. This is especially important when you start stacking layers upon layers as you don't want the piece to be in 3D. It is also good to thin your paints down because of the fine detail brushes. They will dry up very quickly even with this water-heavy mix.

Next step is to fill in the first shape and add the next like this.
You don't have to be to be all too neat with the paint as long as you use several thin layers. Mistakes can be corrected later on if they stand out.

From here on you can just add on more shapes and colour them up.
Now that all the basics are done, it isn't too hard to add in the detail work. It is a big help to know that you can always tidy up or start over with the background colour. Just remember to keep the paint watered down and it's smooth sailing from here.

This is pretty much done, but I didn't think it popped quite enough, so I finished it off by highlighting the sun with some brighter orange, outlining it, and filling it with white. I think it makes a huge difference.
And that's about it. This isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination, but it is something everyone could do with some practice.

Well that was a long post. Hope you enjoyed it as much as me ;)

/2.0

Saturday 16 August 2014

Still going strong - the cultists are no longer grey plastic.

I've been a very busy little bee this week, and finished off one of the cultist units - Actually, I had to strip them once, since my first colour scheme didn't fit in with the power armour boys, but I'm pretty satisfied with these. Pretty much all washes on a white primer (click the pic for a full scale version):


I took an all nighter last night, and the second unit is almost done, only missing the eyes and some small details, so hopefully some pics of those later this weekend. :)

I'm getting close to actually finishing a project - Hooray!

Next stop; finish the modelling on my Spawn and Champion, and getting some paint on those.

Wednesday 21 May 2014

Andreas 2.0's Legion of Everblight

I finally finished the battlebox for LOE, and I must admit, it was an uphill battle. Don't get me wrong, the miniatures are some of the better ones from Privateer Press, and there aren't that many of them, but the sheer amount of scales on these guys can be very intimidating and overwhelming work - I mean just look at them!

The big guy in particular is just a truckload of linework if you paint him like I do (which in retrospect wasn't the brightest idea). The funny thing about these guys however is that the yellow was a breeze to paint, and it actually came out pretty good with minimum effort. Just look at it! It's so warm and delicious. Needless to say, I am pretty happy with the result.
 
Next up I'm going to paint some Blighted Nyss Striders (pic below). These guys are really ugly with poor sculpts, but their rules are just too good to pass up, so I'll do my best to make them look decent. 

We also have a new edition of 40k incoming, which means I will be airing my Space Marines some time soon, and there will of course be lots of pictures for those interested. Until then, thanks for reading.

/Andreas 2.0

Saturday 10 May 2014

While away from home...

2.0 here

So right now I'm sitting a few hundred kilometres away from home in the kingdom of Jutland or whatever this dark place is called. I don't have any of my painting supplies or miniatures with me, which means I have to recreate in some other way. Fortunately the local gaming store was open today, and that gave me the chance to look at something different. Although I'm a huge Games Workshop fanboy by any standard, I would still categorize myself as open-minded to alternative games. Johan will be posting alot of hordes/warmachine, and GR is mainly focusing on GW products, so I thought I'd give myself a different focus - behold


Just kidding... Well not completely. I will of course keep painting GW and P3 miniatures, but at some point during my summer vacation I intend to pick up one or two of the new plastic boxes from Wyrd's Malifaux. I have previously owned some of the miniatures and played a single game, but 40k just took up all my time back then. Now that Wyrd has released a second editon of the game and some cool new (plastic) minis, there is no longer any good reason for me not to look into this strange new world of wonders/horrors. There are new improved computersculpts for alot of the old minis, which P3, as a slightly bigger company, could learn alot from. The first box I'm going to pick up and paint will be this badboy.



It might be hard to make out just how cool these guys are, but thankfully the Wyrd web shop has some high quality pictures - http://wyrd-games.net/shop/Crew-Boxes/
Check it out if you are a fan of the heroic-horror-steampunk-fantasy genre, or if you just like great miniatures. 

Thanks for reading

Thursday 8 May 2014

Andreas 2.0 - The story

Where and when does a story truly begin?

I could start from the beginning of my "painting career" about 20 years ago, but the story would be long and honestly not that interesting. The first model I ever painted was a skeleton from the time where you could buy those guys in boxes of 8; it was a horribly painted model and I won't be posting pictures of that thing any time soon. Instead I will begin the story with this guy - a model I painted just 5 years ago.


'What is so special about him?' You might ask. Well that shoulder pad was the first clean 'eavy-metal-esque paint job I had ever done, and it would a few weeks later become the place, where I painted my first freehand. As you can see from the model below, it wasn't a total disaster.


The freehand did however take a long time, and I got bored with it quickly, after which the army project died a quick and undignified death. I did however get my eyes open to the endless posibilities that come from large open surfaces (eg. shoulderpads and banners). I really liked that you could give a model some personality, simply by adding paint that wasn't restricted by the sculpt. This is something I have found to be especially true on cleaner paintjobs. A great example of this is my ultramarines (shown below). The paintjob isn't bad, but it would be very boring to look at if it wasn't for the freehand.




These models are probly the epitome of my painting style, and the techniques used are the ones I'm most comfortable with. They are however not the end of the story, but rather the beginning - a story I will hopefully be telling for a long time. These ultramarines were probably painted a year and a half ago, and alot has happened since. I won't be recapping everything in between, but I will post 2 pictures that perfectly sums up, just how much i have progressed since then.



It might not seem like much, but I can assure you that every detail on this model is an improvement on the ultramarines. The shadows are not just black, and the subtle blends make the the model more vivid and alive.



And then there's the freehand. This is the most fun I have had in a long time. I wouldn't dare do it on a whole army but who knows, some day I might have a stroke and paint a whole battleforce with this kind of freehand.

Anyways - Thanks for reading this far. I won't be posting much for a few weeks, as exams are draining much of my free time, but hopefully I will be able to post a short bit on my current projects.

Cheers - Andreas 2.0

Sunday 4 May 2014

Welcome to the Bitter Old Painters Blog!


This blog came to be during a conversation between Johan and 2.0, being inspired by some of the great blogs out there; Tale of Painters, Massive Voodoo, etc., just to name a few. They wanted in on the action too! Rasmus was invited, a bit of bashing our heads together trying to come up with a name, and the blog became a reality.

Most of us have had or still has blogs on some of the biggest wargamer forums – Dakka, Bolter&Chainsword, Warseer, etc, and these will still be maintained – although the WIP pics of new stuff will primarily be on this blog, while pics of finished works will be found on the forums.

This blog will be primarily focused on the creative aspect of the miniature hobby - all of us game to some degree, but we are mainly attracted to the painting and converting aspect of the hobby.
Rasmus and Andreas mainly dabbles with 40k, and the specialist games connected to the universe, and Johan has recently taken up WarmaHordes again, painting armies with almost fanatical zeal and speed.

You’re very welcome to drop us a note, or better yet, leave a comment or critique in a blog post – we all love getting response on our work, including ways to better it. J