[WIP] Kastelan Robot - Almost done

I'm soooo close to being done with the first robot here. The pictures can speak for themselves on this one ;)

[WIP] Kastelan Robots - continued

Today I have been working on the second robot. As mentioned earlier, I really wanted it to look like he is running, so I have been cutting and gluing most of the day to make that happen. This is the result.

It isn't perfect, but at least it's alot more dynamic than than Games Workshop inteded (which is good).

Besides this guy, I have started painting the other robot. I was pitched the idea of doing a digital reticle instead of making a completely black screen. Here's the result so far.

I personally think it is a cool effect that outshines the original model by far. The method of painting this however, is not easy by any stretch of the imagination. It requires blending and paper-thin freehand lines that have to be highlighted a few times to give the illusion of a blue glow. I don't think I want to do more than a few of these guys lest I go crazy.

Well thats all for now. I'll hopefully finish this fine piece sometime tomorrow.

Cheers - Andreas 2.0 

You probably thought, we had abandoned the mechanicus project already

Well... We haven't.

Rasmus and I have both just been really busy, but now the wheels are turning once again.

Right now I'm putting the finishing touches on the ironstrider, and Rasmus has actually already finished the dunecrawler! Now we just need to get some pictures of the walkers, and then we can move on to other projects.

For now I have another little thing to share - A friend of mine asked me to do a some freehand writing on his ultramarine dreadnought, and seeing as I love me some freehand, I of course said yes.

This is what I came up with. It took about 1-1,5 hours, which was a nice balance between quality and speed. I could probably have done a few things different, but I didn't want to put to much time into something that wasn't mechanicus ;)

I'll update later with some pictures of a mechanicus crawler or two.

Time for a change

As a hard-pressed student who spends most of his offtime sleeping or watching series, it can be rather inconvenient to keep a blog up to date. Especially when the other two guys are doing good-quality pictures with fancy effects and a logo, which puts some pressure on me.

Well it is time for a change. I am not going to be concerned with that any longer. If I have the time to take and make a good picture, I will. Otherwise I will still try to post a picture of my work every time there is some progress to show.

Which brings us to this -

I really wanted to add some guardsmen as allies to my space marines (I haven't posted any pics of them yet, but I'll get to that at some point), so I painted these guys. It took alot of time, and after I was done it didn't really seem like a good idea to paint another 50 and some vehicles.

Especially when this guy alone took somewhere close to 2,5 hours to paint -

Even though the guard project was doomed from the beginning, I still got the time to make this fine chicken-thing.

I really like the look of this walker, and it pains me to know, that it will never have friends.

After the dead guard project, I decided to get the new fantasy flight game - Imperial Assault, and paint the miniatures included. The sculpts aren't quite as pretty as one could have hoped, but I still think that they do alot to immerse you in the game. Here is my take on storm troopers and some star wars heroes-

And of course some OSL from the lightsaber -

I am not done with this project yet, and I will post some more pictures when there is progress to show.

The next project I started was actually born from my love of painting banners. I really wanted to freehand something cool and simple, so I bought 10 bloodletters just to get this guy -

The paintjob here is very subtle but it was a great deal of fun to try and get some depth into the khorne symbol, which I think went pretty well.

Finally GR and I decided that we want to do a project together. We have tried this once before and failed miserably, but finally there is a project worth giving it another go. I am sorry for the quality, but take this as a teaser for what is to come!

Lo and behold -

Skitarii Rangers. And a great deal more to come in the next few months.

/Andreas 2.0

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