Showcase - Necron Doom Sythe

Well with my 41'st (Millennium) Birthday just past, I was given a shiney Necron flyer as a most thoughtful gift.

Never having tackled large Necron vehicles before I had to re-think the way I paint a bit for this as these need a different skill set to painting my more normal fare of high elves and space wolves. So undaunted I dusted off my far to idle airbrush to provide some soft panel edging before striking hard and fast with the brush for edge highlighting.

I'm pleased with the result, see what you think

 

Top Tip - Recipe Cards

Today I'm gonna share with you one of the techniques I use to achieve consistency across a given force (the one shown is the photos is my Space Wolves but that's just as the photo has a perfect demonstration in it).

We all know that painting a reasonable size army is not only a labour of love but also very time consuming meaning a force can often take years to finish (especially with rule changes and changes to force distribution and 'new stuff' to include) that being the case how do you paint something the same way as you did that miniature you painted two years ago?

Most of us are blessed with the ability to just about remember how it was done and with a bit of trial and error can do a reasonable copy of the original. My method removes the trial and error part and allows you to focus on the fun part the actual painting.

I call it the Recipe Card  (wonders if he should try and trademark this as its so simple)............

Tutorial - Basic Techniques - Overbrushing/Drybrushing

Following on from the last Basic skills tutorial (which can be found here) we were left with a Space Wolf base coated and washed to really darken those recessed areas (see Picture below)

This tutorial will introduce the first step in highlighting the raised area of the miniature, and this step is called Overbrushing, while often called drybrushing, this is actually incorrect as drybrushing and overbrushing share the same technique but differ in paint saturation.

Tutorial - Basic Techniques - The Wash

I was in my local Games Workshop yesterday to do some painting and due to some case confusion picked up my space wolves not my high elves thereby confounding the painting plan, however being in the store anyway I was chatting to another fellow hobbyist, and as these thing always do talk very quickly turned to painting techniques.
It transpired that my fellow hobbyist had little experience with the wonder that is the world of washes and it has occurred to me that there may be a few painters out there that don't know just what washes will do for them.
So for my first ever Tutorial I have chosen this very topic.

Showcase - Chaos Space Marine Dark Apostle

As a bonus post for the day I thought I would put up another one of those miniatures that's just hanging about in the battle bunker (that's the nickname given to my hobby room in case you hadn't guessed).
Again this was done for a painting contest with the theme of Heroes in the Peterborough Games Workshop store (my local one) and features a couple of minor conversions.

Some Pictures From Games Day 2013

As a regional winner for Armies On Parade I was fortunate enough to go to Games Workshops flagship event Games Day this year and as I'm sure you can imagine I did spend a good deal of time taking hints and tips from my fellow competitors many of  these ideas I recorded in the form of photos and here are a few of them

The origin of inspiration

Entering Armies on parade 2013 has made me sit down on think about the origin of inspiration, certainly from an artistic/modelling perspective. For this year's entry mine was one of the great number of Space Wolves entries and as far as inspiration always a simple choice for me as many years ago when I last had a 40k army it was space wolves so the history was a well known beast to me. Using this knowledge of the background fluff I selected an iconic location (in this case Fenris the space wolves home planet) for this kind of work I always think it's best to use something instantly recognizable to your target audience,  this in many way will dictate the look your finished work should portray.

The Finished Item