Let’s begin this story with the fact that I participated in Paintball this weekend.
Now, as much as I can hear you doing a fist pump and a ‘Hells yeaaa’ this was more of a revolutionary awakening for myself to absolutely know – I will not survive the Zombie apocalypse.
Honestly speaking when the virus ridden cannibals start roaming the streets – I’ll already be one of them, don’t worry about coming to save me.
Now for a small update on painting!!
So I’ve been experimenting with paper to see if there’s anything comparable to the P3 parchment paper to use to put my paints on. Here’s how I went:
- Standard Paper = No. It dissolves easily.
- Baking Paper = No. The wax being placed either up OR down creates a water repellent barrier that doesn’t allow the paint to remain wet.
- Tracing Paper = Maybe. I’ve had a limited amount of success with tracing paper keeping paint wet for about 24 hours. But not much longer.
- Tradesman Paper = Maybe. This is actually paper made of a type of stone. It’s oil and water proof, but this actually made it PAINT proof, meaning that if the paint was thick enough, it just sat around on the top with the water keeping liquid for about 48 hours. Not bad but not great.
TRADEY PAPER. FOR THE TOUGH MAN… Or for the 5 foot nothing woman trying to paint tiny people.
The tracing paper on the left, and the Tradesman paper on the right after 24 hours.
So, using my ‘temporary’ wet palette, I got to trying to fix horsey.
I did this by adding an orange/brown type colour to the original brown and re-going over the highlights and then toning them back again with flesh wash. I think it’s a bit of an improvement but not great.
You still haven’t fixed my saddle woman. I mean seriously, who rides a saddle without stirrups?
I also used black wash to give him a slightly darker tone on his hocks. I was going to do him full bay colour and black them out, but I figured – he’s obviously no REAL breed of horse anyways, so we shall cheat! MWAHAHAHA.
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In PC gaming news, I have gotten addicted to the Mighty Quest for Epic Loots.
So the point of this game is to build a castle, and other people can attack it. If they beat you castle they get a % of your loots (gold and gems) – if you attack them back you get a % of theirs.
How anyone travels from castle to castle is currently a mystery. Pegasus ponies maybe??
My castle in all it’s glory. AAAAANNND can be beaten in about a half a minute. Sorry gems, it was nice while it lasted.
The idea is that people get more and more creative with how they set up traps and monsters and try to catch you out. So far mines a pretty straight forward Walk in > Beat obvious frog guys > Take my shit.
There’s just a heart warming feeling knowing the loots you scored were actually another players. MWAHAHA.
Other than this – I also got Anna some time back if anyone remembers? But I hadn’t actually played it.
Regret.
So much regret.
Welcome to Anna. Where the best part of the game is the font the title shows in.
So it’s a horror puzzle game. Where the puzzles are actually ridiculous. After 10 minutes of kicking around in this pretty outdoors area I had to google what I was supposed to be doing.
Would you believe I was meant to go find a branch, use to to move rocks in the river, fill up my canteen and catch a glass shard – and then just HAPPEN to work out that I need to set this glass shard on fire using a pinecone while sitting in the groove of a stone eye.
Like…what the actual fuck?
We’re trying to look dark and ominous. Instead we’re just giving you a headache with the overdone music and shitty lighting.
You fumble around in the water mill for a while finding random objects, like this prize winning message on a handkerchief.
I’m pretty sure I follow the 14 year old girl that wrote this on Tumblr.
I ended up giving up the game after I illuminated some magical bridge over a puddle and got to enjoy the ‘horrific’ image of a stick figure hugging kids in the water.
The scariest part of this entire ordeal was the art work for the kids. Really? REALLY? We allowed someone to publish that nightmare?
Neeeeedless to say, I won’t be finishing this game. I have plenty of better ways to spend an hour. Like you know, sniffing paint.
Well, that’s all for this evening folks.
I have a tendency to waffle – my apologies.
Night all!!
Cappuccino Gaming 
I haven’t had much luck trying to replace the P3 paper, so I keep buying it. Let me know if you find a cheaper solution!
Looking forward to reading deeper into your blog.
Thankyou very much! And I will 😀
Horsie looks great, much better now! 🙂
Thankyou! He’s still a bit more funny lookin in person. But slight improvement! Hahaha.
I find painting horses hard. The only advice that I could give – bearing in mind that I have painted very few horses over the years, Im a sci-fi flavour of nerd – is that like Space Marine armour, horses are often easier to shade by painting the recesses darker than to highlight it by adding brighter colour to the high points on large rounded areas. Judging by horse photos MKII, you have worked that out for yourself 🙂
I tried to make a wet palette last year, but it didnt work immediately so I gave up. Therefore I am watching your progress with interest.
As for angsty 14 year old girls, Ive got nothing.
Haha, yea I’m starting to realise there must be hidden secrets behind the wisdom of painting horses. Especially the people on CMON that posted up this exact mini and it looks like it dropped out of a life like sculpture fair.
Have you tried palette paper? It’s what I’ve been using recently and it does a good job of holding paints and washes without absorbing much of the paint or water.
Oh yes! I forgot to add that to the list!
I did get a ‘palette notepad’ but the paper was similar to baking paper in that it was water repellant.
But, that being said it was really cheap brand,so that might be where I went wrong!!
So when you tried baking paper, you got wax paper instead of parchment paper? Because baking paper comes in both wax and parchment varieties (totally different stuff, but both are baking paper; kind of like how a corvette and a dump truck are both vehicles). One is intentionally porous, and the other is intentionally not; they’re used for different kinds baking purposes.
I use plain old parchment paper out of our kitchen for my wet palette, and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. It’s about $3 for over 30 feet of the stuff.
Oh, I had tried a number of different brands but it appeared that they were all waxed. I did see that some people had tried boiling the paper first to melt the wax off – maybe non-waxed parchment just isn’t a thing in aus?
Even our local office works (like an Office Depot) didn’t know what I was asking for haha. Will have a look around 🙂 Thankyou!
Hmm, weird. Apparently ‘baking paper’ in Australia should generally be parchment (waxed paper is called ‘greaseproof’?).
In my own experience, parchment paper needs a moment to saturate before it’s really usable. I put the parchment baking paper atop my wet paper towel and it’ll curl up as one side gets moist. Then I flip it over and get the other side totally wet, at which point it flattens back out and is a really effective surface; just porous enough.
An image of my own hilariously low-budget wet palette can be found on my blog:
http://wp.me/p2T8kX-Q
Oooh! It looks good! 😀 And budget miniatures supplies for the win! Hmm..I haven’t been able to find it! I must try again, because really if it works well – at $3 a roll I will be sooooo happy 🙂 Thankyou so much for all the help!
Ask what they use over on Auspainters or in the painting section of wargamer.au. I’m sure someone there will be able to help you.
Oh thanks. Didn’t even know about those sites! Will be checking them out 🙂
Your horse looks like Mr Ed.
But excellent work!! It’s a tough model to paint and I bet $100 yours looks better than the GW studio paint job at the time.
Bottom line it’s not the nicest horse mini I’ve seen (sculpt wise) but you have done a great job bringing Mr Ed to life.
Hahaha. Thanks! Ended up remembering when you were stepping me through highlighting the brown wood on Marcus you got me to add an orange type brown to bring it up a shade instead of white – so tried that!
I think the highlighting turned out much better this way.
I still do wonder though – why does this horse have human teeth??? That’s just creepy.
Horse paint looks much better now, but it’s never going to look great as it’s a crappy model. This was GW’s first attempt to make “elven steeds” distinct from human steeds. They instead came up with cartoon-faced “horses”. The new ones are much better, while these ones are a bit of a (bad) joke…
Hahaha thankyou. As much as I tend to agree about it not being the greatest sculpt, via trolling on CMON I have discovered that even the crappiest mini can be made to look pretty epic. Haha, one step at a time I suppose!! 😀
They can be made to look better, certainly, but what you end up with then is some great paint on a crappy model. IMO figures like this are best used either as faceless wargaming fodder, where you only look at them from across a table, and as “learn-to-paint” projects – so the horse is working as intended.
If you treat figures appropriately, and don’t beat yourself up about not-perfect paint on not-perfect figures, it’ll be less stressful and you’ll find you just learn more stuff through experience while being more relaxed. If you look at the golem and troll I put up on my site a couple posts ago, neither are top shelf showcase work, but both were practice in learning and practicing new things. Even the purple worms which I’m much happier with fall into the same category. Treat this horse and similar figures like that and the Infinity and Malifaux as your “top tier”. (Also, Reaper Bones models are great for this as well.)