Birthday Fun

Still hanging out at my local GW shop because painting is so much more fun in good company.

Here's a pic of the birthday present waiting for me at the painting desk ... :-)

As I have had a lot of hobby time lately, I have made good progress on my A-team dwarfs:

8 are complete now (no pic). The next three of them only need a bit more metal highlighting and details like gemstones:

I used orange / purple for highlighting / shading the skin (better pics to follow as soon as they are finished).

And here are another four I have already started with:

As you can see, I've been experimenting with various skin tones. The last batch is painted with Scale 75 colours and still needs a lot of highlighting.

The purple skin tone might work fine in the end. I don't know yet how to proceed from here, but will try and do my best to progress them today.

Skin has always been one of the fields I feel I could do much better. So I enrolled in Roman Lappat's Advanced Painting Class in April to learn more about it. Which will be fun because the list of participants looks like it's going to be a reunion of my extended painter family, and I'm looking forward to this very much. A birthday present from me .... to me! :-)

Christmas Fun

Participating in one of the Xmas events of my local GW shop has been great fun so far. People can hang up socks for Santa Claus there and get a little something when they spend at least 15 minutes there hobbying (gaming or painting). I spent quite some time there in the last few days painting another batch of my A-team dwarfs.

WIP pics:

Today's progress

Today the next batch of A-team dwarfs got a new fancy hair colour. In fact, I've experimented with two different tones, purple and blue.

I might highlight it further when everything else is done.

Here's another WIP pic of my SMC display base (plasticard adapted, upper part with Milliput and plasticard sanded):

What happened to the original plan (finish painting the camel, glue it to the base, start to create a desert landscape and use ardcoat to seal the entire thing)? Well, I've just undercoated the camel again after putting it into acetone again. Not my best painting day, but I've learnt a lot while trying to achieve the result I wanted ... 2 weeks to go!

A-Team Dwarfs - better pics

A group shot of the 8 A-Team Dwarfs I have finished so far (except for the tattoos - I'm going to add these as soon as my very first attempt on one or two test minis is done):

I'm trying to experiment with skin tones. As you can see, I've used two of them so far.

 

How do like them so far? Which skin tone do you like better and why? Anything else you would change? I know there are much better painters out there ... Let me know what you would like me to try. Feel free to post suggestions, links etc. in the comments. I'd love to improve my painting skills!

Sign of life

Long time, no see ... I haven't been lazy though, spent some weeks on Majorca where I had a great time among the locals in a cosy AirBnB apartment in the historic centre of Palma, attended another painters' meeting in August (see pic below), worked on current projects and started planning my contribution for my first international painting competition ...

Here are some (crappy mobile phone) pics of the next batch of A-Team Dwarfs I have just finished (pics of other projects I've been working on will follow in the next few days - so stay tuned!):

The last pic shows the challenge I'm currently facing: Better shading and blending of metal parts (see  battle axe on the left). Something new I'm still learning. Before giving it a try, I used to paint metal with two different metal tones and an ink (in this case, it would have been Ironbreaker, Mithril Silver and Nuln Oil). Any recommendations how I could improve? Comments, links to helpful tutorials etc. are greatly appreciated, as always!

Is anyone reading this blog? If so, send me a sign of life as well.

Mr. T and the A-team dwarfs

A project that has always been near to my heart coming true:

The conversion consists of a dwarf body from the Avatar of War range (lots of individual parts to choose from) and a GW flagellant head:

For the new index and the chains I used wire.

Mr. T is accompanied by a whole bunch of A-team dwarfs. Some of them are painted already.

Several others are still in progress. As they are a whole bunch, I'm trying to vary their skin tones:

If you know any tutorials on skin tone variations that could be useful, feel free to post a link (as well as any other comments - C&C welcome!)