Wet palette? Don’t mind if I do!

I am often hovering over the Painting Sage’s shoulders wondering how the colours are so even, and the layers so smooth and watching the magical and weird use of a ‘wet palette’.
I have often wondered if using one of these might help my ability to keep the paint a nice consistency.

So! The other day I head over with coffee to start painting a Warmahordes miniature and Painting Sage has made me a wet palette!

My amazing wet palette in all it’s glory!!

I do have to admit, it has made life SO much easier. I’m not having to water down my paint to the point that it’s non existent to keep it fluid, and really the main reason for using water now is just to keep my brush flexible haha.
Absolutely loving it!!

The colours you see there are the colours I am using to paint up Shadow of Everblight‘s Warcaster Lylyth.
This is not actually an army I’m planning to play, but I love the mini.

Slowly but surely. She now has a cloak and some teeth in her hair – but need to get a better photo of it.

Oh, and I had a stab at trying something freehand. As you know I was given some Warhammer 40K stuff from a friend as a gift, and I’m painting one of them to give back to him – so I asked what he would like on the flag and took a shot.

I need to go over the white again as it’s such a transparent colour (Game Colour Off White) it need a few layers to get it even.
Before anyone mentions this – I did not paint this over the black actually – but I did accidentally cut off his botton teeth when I was painting the back around it, so the teeth have ended up darker/less white coverage.
I’ma fix it later.

Well, that will be all for today!! Can’t wait to finish work and do some more paaaiinttting !!!

Sincerely,
El

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The work of a Painting Sage

So, as many of you are aware – any and all success I have when painting is the result of the guidance of my friend whom I like to call the painting sage (or, Wizard of all things miniature).

Painting Sage isn’t really much of an internet person (like myself) and so never really get’s a chance to show off his work. Thusly, I thought I would take this opportunity to show you one of the pieces painted by the person who’s taking the time to teach me 😀

*DISCLAIMER*: This was not painted by me, it was done by a mysterious painting sage.

Small Update in the land of Painting

So, I’m actually sitting at work. And my plan was to bring all my photos with me on USB and make a post when time allowed – as it turned out, I only copied over like 4 images so now I’m stuck hahaha.

Well, onto the tiny update!

I have continued painting on of the Orc’s that my friend gave me – but appear to be failing with not only the Red, the Pants AND the metal, but I also painted his front arm armour white first so it changed the whole effect I was trying to pull off on the metal. AAAaaaah well.

AAARGH. THERE’S RED ON ME.

I’ve discovered, I wish to never paint anything red again. It is an awful colour to have to work with, and even worse to shade/highlight than most.
Oh, you want to lighten and darken this tone, ey? LET ME GIVE YOU PINK AND MAROON.

Now, this is not a good picture of my Malifaux guy Marcus, I will post a better one when I have my entire set of photos on the PC. But there is he, and his little flame.

I took the photo of the flame separately because in photos of the whole mini the flame seems dark, in photos of just the flame it seems really bright and in person it’s somewhere between the two hahaha.

Well, that’s all I have for today. Oh, other than I bought these little guys from one of the players at work:

He bought a battle box with 2 factions and wasn’t particularly interested in circle.
I then traded out the winter argus with a DIFFERENT co-worker, and now have 3 normal!! Wee, 3 puppies!!

Time to start plotting out their paint schemes!!

~ Sincerely,
El

Gifts, Pizza and Painting

So, well – I am the type of girl that gets heavily into her hobbies. By that I mean, I constantly read about them, want to be actively doing them, spend wild amounts (at least to my bank balance) of money on them AND talk about them.

I have been yammering on a lot to a friend of mine about Malifaux, Puppet Wars, War Machine and everything else miniature related I have been learning.
ANYWAY, long story short, the other day he comes out with this big box and gifts me all of his miniatures stuff. Apparently he was into Warhammer 40K a while back but hasn’t had much to do with it for a while and wanted it to go to a home where the mini’s would be painted and cherished.

Omg omg omg, no idea how excited I was to go through everything and start plotting bases and paint schemes.

Sooo many things!! And most of them still on their sprues!! (Is that how you spell that?)

So, I pulled out this little guy holding a big flag and thought it would be nice to paint him up really nice, and put something on the flag and gift back to the friend that gave me the box. Just to see that I was putting love into their painting and appreciate the gift.

But the skull at the top of the flag had been eaten away/melted by something?
So, here is my first attempt at making an epoxy replacement.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA. That skull looks REDICULOUS. But alas, it was made with love…or…something. Maybe I can fix it with paint?

Well, this is his progress so far…

I also had a few in the box that my friend had painted himself.
The flags on this are just so nice, and you can see effort was put into this mini, so I don’t have it in me to strip him. My plan is to just clean up a few paint chips, and add him to my shelf.

*Disclaimer: Not painted by me.

In the box I found a few choice items I was really excited about…

Do you see? DO YOU SEE? PONIES.

There were a couple of horse and rider sets already painted in the box so I decided to fix and strip them first. As they were mostly a single thick coat of black it took forever scrubbing, and it ended up actually leaving tiny little ‘bubble’ type holes all through out the horses saddle.
So I green stuffed the saddle and top of tail and sanded it back, after having soaked and scrubbed with Simple Green.

Now, my first pony is up to the stage of priming and painting.

PONY. SO EXCITED TO PAINT THIS PONY. EHEHEHEHE.

Well, I can smell my pizza has now finished cooking – so I shall see you all soon. Post more miniatures everyone 😀 !

Love always,
Ellison

Photos, Photos la la la

Anyone remember that song? Onions, onions lalala, Onions, oniona da da da – doo doop do do doop doo do.

Yeeaaaaaa….anyway.

Ok, so as I said in my last post, tried to get some nicer photos of my (almost) finished Malifaux crew so far.
I say ‘almost’ because le tiger still needs some grass, and everyone’s getting some tufts.

Firstly, Miranda…

As a side note, Wyrd have changed her design to now wear an executioner type mask and have cheerleader pigtails. I feel this Miranda would not be impressed with pigtails…

And then my Tiny-Dragon!!

I’m so happy with how his mouth turned out, despite using the wrong colours for it.

And little le Tiger.

Still not really happy with the heads, they don’t stand out enough. But I honestly have no idea how to fix them.

Finalllllllyyyy, a progress shot of Marcus.

Why everyone else get to be semi-pretty, but when it comes to me – I have to look like this, eh?

His clothes are now getting a coat!! Woowoo. The colours of his clothes are thankfully taking the attention away from his skin. *ehem*

Oh, as a side note, was wandering around the Wyrd forums (as I do) when I saw this on my profile.

(For non-Wyrd fans, that name is the creator of the company/games).

Dunno why this made me happy, I guess it was more ‘oooooh, what did I say that made him look at my profile??’ *beam beam beam*.
Buuuut, knowing my luck, it was a miss click when he was trying to select ‘Mark this user as a derp’ or something, haha.

~ Love from, Ellison

Minis in the Sun

This is just a little post, for like the first time in forever we actually have sun light, so I thought I’d try to get a few shots of my Malifaux crew thus far!!

Will be posting more later! Haha, I have too much fun photographing these.

WarMachine smells like the colour Blue

So, after my exciting foray into playing warmachine, I decided to try to fix up my Taryn de la Rovisi mercenary’s cloak.

I have no ability to shade or highlight cloaks it appears, but whenever I looked at her, I just thought – UGH, that blue looks AWFUL.

So, here at my attempts at upgrading her to something a little more dimensional.

LEFT: New work on cloak ; RIGHT: Original paint job

LEFT: New work on cloak ; RIGHT: Original paint job

So, these are the photos I originally took (on the right actually) and posted in my blog, with their updated versions.

Since these images were taken, I’ve done a little more work on her as I’ve found that I can’t seem to get the ‘gradient’ correct. And it always ends up looking like too harsh of a highlight.

I attempted to get rid of this hard highlight by going back over some area’s with the original blue – but uuuuugh I don’t know what I’m doing hahaha.

You know, Ellie…you spend all this time on my cloak and don’t seem to care about my face or hair!? I feel my face is more important!!

So, my plan is, take her to my Painting Wizard – plead for assistance.
There is so much on her I need to correct……*sadness*

Can someone just take their painting skill, gift it to me on steam or something, and I can download it into my brain?? Much appreciated.

Sincerely,
El

Kickstart your Baseing!

Was just thinking about kickstarter.com , and decided to patrol to see if there were any new projects I was interested in, and stumbled upon this:

(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1843680961/base-stampers-textured-base-stamps-for-miniature-w?ref=search)

So the concept is that you can just putty (green stuff/epoxy) up your base, and use this simple stamp to ingrain a texture and shape for your base to then be painted.

Now, I personally find this is a really exciting concept, because even though the set of stamps will continue to create the same little base – you’re avoiding using your own spare skulls/pipes/swords etc to give the base a little more something, AND once you’ve stamped it, nothing to say you can’t have a go at a little artistic license and grove your own additions into it.

Quite interested to keep tabs on this one, and see if I can work up the funds to get me a couple of sets of these bad boys.

War Machine with my good friend Wang

My painting sage is a War Machine player and on a number of occasions has been busy working away on a warjack or two while I’m set up painting my Malifaux crew.
But the game honestly intrigued me, so I asked if they would teach me how to play.

Now, to be entirely honest – this is the first proper table top war game I have ever invested time into learning the correct rules for, so was very eager to head over and learn the ins and outs of robot men battling it out.

You want me to what? OH YEA RIGHT, PIECE OF CAKE!

So, what we have done is actually ‘made up’ a game play style. The story premise is that there is a piece of equipment Coleman Stryker (I call him Wang…I am unsure as to why I named him that) wants, and to win, one of the Cygnar team need to reach the part and role a 6 (with 2 dice), while my opponent surrounds me.

The reason this suits me a bit more is because I have a premise to theorize on, a story I can formulate in my head and my friend can build un-even pointed armies purely for the experience of showing me what all the different types of figures can do.

Actually LOVING doing this. Because when I’m playing, I can see it like a movie in my head, hear Wang making ‘Go get em!’ supportive yells as he skirts off around the edge with his IronClad.
I’ve so far being using Lancer and Charger to attempt to kite the enemy, but this is sometimes more effective than other times – depending on the abilities of my opponents.

Last piece of news, my friend offered to sell me the Cygnar guys (at a greatly discounted cost) as I was enjoying playing with them so much, they thought I might like to have them for my own.
Yipppeeee! Now I have ordered myself a Hayley to add to my little blue team.

Arrow to indicate most integral tool to any good gaming session. A medium cappuccino.

I want to have a go at building some terrain pieces like this as not only do they look like good fun, but so I can have my own to sometimes bring to games and help make the table look nice and pretty.

Well, that’s all my friends!

Love – Ellie

Dark skin is too hard to paint

While I have been painting my Malifaux crew, I’ve been painting them to match how they look in the images on the cards or art.
Now, Marcus (head of the crew) is quite dark skinned – which I have never attempted before but figured, oh you know if lighter toned skin wasn’t too bad this should be similar.

It was actually awful. I’m currently in two minds between stripping him and making him lighter skinned or leaving him as he is and not being entirely happy with him.

What do you mean I’m ugly? I have lovely white eyebrows.

I don’t know, maybe when his clothes are done I can touch it up/fix it some how. Uuuugh, this miniatures painting business is so stressful – WHO KNEW.

Oh! Good news however, I got these little cuties in the mail today!

They are so little you have no idea. Like, less than a CM for the Tiny Kittens and Jackalope is barely over a CM big. I’m worried I’m going to damage his little antlers trying to put them on! (Both of these, also by Wyrd for the Arcanists of Malifaux)

Aaaannnd, my very generous Painting Sage gave me 2 boxes of paints. Most of them are half used, but plenty enough for a newbie like me to keep me busy for a while to come.
So excited to have more than a few colours to try to practice painting at home!

Yayayayayay.

Well my lovelies,
time for sleep.

Sincerely,
El