Thursday, February 19, 2015

Preparing to cast Judgement

Ever since I painted the Holy Order of Man heavy support vehicle, and then the Flame Truck, I really wanted to have a Heavy Support of my own.

So, the Judgement heavy support for the Lawmen was eagerly anticipated!

This was an early form of Shaded Basecoat, done to hash out how I wanted the lights and darks to play out.  When you have this many angles pointing in so many directions, it's best to plan that out ahead!

I am using large brushes, as usual... such as the filbert and the #8 round craft brushes.

As you know, I like to use different color mixes to make my grays.  For the wheels, I used a seafoam green and a yellowish brown.  I will be doing a lot of weathering on them, and the lighter color will make that stand out even more.

In addition, the "temperature" of that grey was different than what was around it.  That is, it is a cooler green as opposed to the warmer, reddish gray.

For the forward prow (on the right), I used a  very purple gray... once again, looking for a bit of color variety in order to keep this from being too boring to look at!

With the Shaded Basecoat phase complete, it was time to glaze and tint!

The usual suspects... Secret Weapon and Vallejo washes.

I use them both together, and as a result, I get a huge variety of shades.  Also, the Vallejo washes are a thicker consistency than the Secret Weapon washes, so combining them means that I can alter the way the Secret Weapon wash flows on the surface.

Also, note that some parts are turned upside down.  This is an old watercolor trick, using this exotic force called gravity.

Since the NMM style usually means that the darkest colors are towards the top edge, I let whatever 'loose' wash there is flow to that area.  By turning them upside down, I can force them to do that.

There's even a bit of 'regular' paint included in some of these mixes.  This serves to stabilize them even more, making them darker, but still transparent.

I moved from section to section, turning the pieces to do the gravity attack on the washes.

Much more to come, so stay tuned!

Taking the show on the road.

Given the task at hand for the next several days, I thought it might be interesting for you to see what it is like to haul around a good portion of the studio to another location.

This beast is just one of several containers that were needed.

The Bag of Holding was just that, as it seemed like a bottomless pit when I unloaded the contents!

Containers great and small, holding one kind of project or another.

One of the ways to keep the line moving is to always have a variety of projects in different stages of completion... that is, a project that will fit an available time slot.

For instance, having these bases handy for painting means that I can put some paint on them if I happen to have that color already on the palette.  It might only save a minute or two, but at this volume, that translates into many hours later on.

There's a never ending pile of pewter, plastic and resin to get through.  It's the most basic of all tasks to file or scrape mould lines, and I try to make sure that smaller block of time are filled with these kinds of simple chores.

Being interrupted suddenly is not as tragic as it would be if I was painting something like to Octopus man or the Judgement vehicle.

Priming is a task I do when I am very tired.  Yeah, that's mostly all the time now, but doing brush on primer is a great way to warm up, instead of screwing up painting a figure!

The Sukubus Studios gals have been getting work on the bases.  Cathy and I will be teaming up to sculpt lots of tentacles and other Chaosy kind of things to finish those off!  Stay tuned for more images on that...

Since green stuff is a material that you have to work with in phases, structuring other tasks around it as a layer cures is very efficient.

Take me to the church on time.  Some items from Burn in Designs are also ready and waiting for paint.

When I am going to be away from the home studio this long, it means bringing as much of the photo setup as possible.

This is just a portion of my basing materials.  I left the other half at home :-)

The computer setup for reference images, processing new images, and posting things to this blog...

An overall view of the remote studio nearly operational!!

One still requires workers, especially on the road, so Wage rounded up some of his buddies to help.