The Final Push – Lawnor approaches 100% painted

The new season of Diablo 3 has taken over my brain and most of my free time.  I’ve done little else this week.  I havent touched the game in years and I’ve never done the Seasons before but I’m really enjoying it.  I’ve already done everything I set out to.  I unlocked the extra stash space which is all I wanted.  Problem is, I’m now one achievement away from completing everything and it’s a shame to leave it that way.  I need to do a 4 minute speed run of a Torment 13 normal rift.  I can do one in about 4mins 30 seconds so I’m now levelling up Legendary gems to buff all my gear.  This could take a while and I have until December-ish I think so hopefully I’ll focus more on my painting now.  We will see.  I always feel a few hours off the next target which is a problem.

Anyway.  Hobby.

I’ve primed all the models I built last week and while I had the airbrush out I did the base coat on the four guys wearing plate.  I’ve made some progress beyond that too.

I’ve had a new model turn up too.  The current MWF challenge mini is here and apparently I have to paint it using the Grisaille method (Do all the black and white preshading and then ink/glaize over the top).  I’ve done bits of this in the past without knowing that name.  He also wants a non-standard direction of lighting.  Should be interesting, although why he’s chosen a model with no visible light source and then asked for OSL and opted for a traditionally all black model for this I don’t know.

I won a prize from Januinevision a while back and it finally arrived.  I’ll look in to using these basing decorations on nicer pieces than these 3d printed D&D characters.  I’ve KDM tunring up in a couple of months.  Might be an opportunity to play around.  The chocolate was very nice.  Very rich.  I don’t normally like dark chocolate or whiskey but this worked for me.  I could certainly eat more.  I’ve used those flesh tones on the people above.  Not bad.  A good mid tone flesh range for rank and file.

Diablo 3 totally owned me this week.  I’ve done little else.  I’m most of the way to completing the season and I hope to have my focus shift afterwards.  I also got a meatspace game in this week for the first time in 18 months.  My friends and I have been talking about learning 40k and running a Crusade fo funsies for about a year now.  With lockdowns easing we arranged for 6 of us to get together two days ago and learn the rules with a few 25pl games.  Three people actually turned up in the end and we got in two games that should have taken 45 minutes a piece but took 2-3 hours each as we didn’t know what we were doing and kept looking up rules clarifications.

Im a Warmachine player and 40k takes the abstraction far further and oversimplifies a lot, such as “19 guys hiding behind a building, but the 20th is partially visible so I can shoot and kill them all”.  Things like this feels wrong to me so its gonna take a little getting used to.  Once I’ve adjusted, I can see me having some fun with it but caring/thinking less than with Warmachine or other games.

We played with mostly just the Core Rules PDF rules only so far.  No strategems, but we did allow the reroll stratagem and looked at the terrain rules.  We wanted to keep things simple.  Next time we play we will add stratagems in and try and build up the layers.

The Daemons below are mine.

I also got a little building done.  I assembled 44 of the remaining 47 models.  The last ones are fancy bust-type models that I may want to work with in subassemblies so I’ll build them when I’m ready to paint them.  Next time I sit down for a couple of hours (Today?  Tomorrow?) I’ll get out my airbush and prime the lot.

One of my prints had a problem.  The elf bust has lots of spots over her.  I think whats happened is that I didn’t change my curing water often enough and particulate sin the water settled and cured on her.  I’ve taken some sandpaper to her but theres places that I can’t get to.  I’m hoping that once she’s primed she looks better.  I’m prepared to go back and do more cleanup on them all once the primer is dry.  Something about the resin does funny things to the light making it really had to see what you’re looking at.  Primer fixes that so I imagine I’ll find I missed some stuff during cleanup.

The heat has been ridiculous this week and it’s been messing with my paints and my motivation.  I was able to finish off a Keeper of Secrets I’d started a couple of weeks ago.  I’d previously base coated and shaded her flesh and just needed to highlight it.  It didn’t go to well.  At arms length she looks fine, but in pics, or any closer, and it looks blotchy and patchy.  It was weird.  On some parts of her it felt like it was going down fine, but on others it was just messy and too thick.  I was doing it all at the same time with the same paint and the same technique.  It didn’t make any sense to me.  I knew this was a technique I needed to practise, but I’m still choosing to blame some of this on the heat and humidity messing with my paint.

The 3D print had some problems.  Firstly, I hollowed out the hair and put in a couple of drain holes where I thought they wouldn’t be seen once assembled. I was wrong and had to fill them up with green stuff which I then couldn’t get a file to, to smooth down.  There were also some bubbles on her hair.  Many thin coats of gloss varnish before painting seems to have smoothed this all out.  Her left eye didn’t fully print so that’s mostly just painted on.  One of her but cheecks had a large flat section, but a few minutes with a file made her more natural.

I’d already painted up a Slaaneshi starter set last year and I wanted to colour match everything for her.  For some reason I didn’t make any notes about anything so I had to try anf figure it all out from the same starting point and by holding up old models next to paint pots for comparrison.  I think I got it right.

I do not have a copy of KDM yet.  I bought it during the Black Friday sale in November and it’s been delayed until October this year.  He’s also revealed that tax has not been factored in yet which he didn’t realise might be an issue for people/foreigners.  I’ve already spent a small fortune on this and was gambling over customs charges.  Now he’s telling everyone there could be another 20ish% on top yet to come?  I’ve bought a house and been put on 6 months furlough since I ordered this.  This is not great news.

Whenever my resin was running low and I didn’t think I’d have enough to print a whole model I’d print off a little terrain for Kindom Death Monster and the resin usually went much further than I expected.  I don’t have a full set yet and I don’t plan on buying any more resin any time soon.  I tried to focus on the tiles models couldn’t stand on once I thought about it.  I’ll stick with tokens for the rest.  I don’t want models falling over.

I have a recipe for a ceramic paint scheme I was thinking of using or adapting here.  Until I saw those pillars.  Look at all that detail.  Painting this lot by hand would take weeks and would be suuuuper tedious, especially as it’s all one colour.  Also, one of those paints is almost empty.  I opted to try drybrushing them instead.  I tested out a new scheme on one of the ore tiles as I may not use them so they could look ugly if needed.  I think it’s come out quite well.  Here’s my method so I can replicate it later:

Base: P3 Trollblood Highlight

Light overbrush/heavy drybrush: GW Karak Stone

Heavy-Medium drybrush: GW Screaming Skull

Drybrush: P3 Menoth White Highlight

Finally, I took an old soft drubrush and rubbed lots of Vallejo Pigments 73111 Green Earth in to everything, tapped off the excess and then airbrush varnished everthing immediately. (I tried a different pigment first on one tile and didn’t like it.  For some reason it didn’t fade as much as the green I put over it)

The pigment is almost completely gone, but has some effect.  I really need a way to make it stay as a powder/dust when I varnish.  I’ve never quite got the hang of pigments.

I don’t think I’m going to get much / any painting done this week.  I’m supposed to be hosting a learn to play 40k day this weekend so I need to take the time to read the rules and then play a solo demo game to show how little I took in, and keep re-reading whole sections as I play.  I also need to tidy up 18 months of solo lockdown isolation laziness/madness, and set up three tables.

I’m also deep in a Diablo 3 addiction and the new season just started.  I’ve never done the Seasons or the ladder before and I’m looking to push through to complete this one.

The remainder of my models are still in need of assembly too, so thats got to come next, no matter what.

I finished off the MWF community challenge minis and made very good progress on my Keeper of Secrets proxy.  I also lost a lot of time to Diablo 3 again.  I feel like I’m really slowing down now.  This is fine.  Thats the goal.  Get near the end, don’t let things pile up again, and enjoy both painting and other things.  other things have been forgotten for many years.

These slingers look cool, but they are dumb.  That backpack would 100% be in the way of doing anything.  It also doubles the space the models take up in storage foam.

The challenge said not to use any out-of-the-bottle green on these models so there is no green on them.  The flesh isn’t green.  It’s thinned Vallejo Game Ink Sepia over a preshade.  Looks green to me, but I swear it’s not.

My Lord of Decay won a golden button recently.  Thanks guys!

https://www.ontabletop.com/warhammer-40k/community-spotlight-mutants-daemons-primaris-minotaurs/

We got our Gloomhaven group together for the first time since Covid arrived and unlocked two unpainted minis, so I’ve got them painted ready for next session, which hpopefully won’t be 18 months away again.  I also finished the Skeleton T-Rex I’d already started.

MWF’s july Community Challenge models have arrived.  Two Orc Slingers which I’m currently working on.  Whats the challenge?  We can’t use any out-of-the-bottle greens.  We can mix up and use our own, but we are being encouraged not to paint the orc flesh green.

This week I finished off my Great Unclean one following the Vallejo Non-Death Chaos paint guide.  I’ve figured out that sometimes when Angel Giraldez says “wash” he means waaaay thinner than normal, but doesn’t distinguish, at least in these low word coutn guides.  As such, this scheme came out better than during my recent Putrid Humalkas model.  I’ve started using the other half of this guide on a Keeper of Secrets proxy too, and thrown myself in to working on an undead T-Rex.

I didn’t finish a second model as I played through and lost another mission on Reichbusters, and my Gloomhaven group were able to get together for the first time since Covid came along.  We spent 3 days playing and unlocked two new models I have to paint so they’ve been added to my total.

This week I finished off the Skull Cannon from the SC box, which finishes that box off.  I then started work on the Titan Forge Lord of Decay (almost done) and prepared his base and the base for the Keeper of Secrets proxy.  While I was at it I also rebased my old Bloodthirster.

He was on a round 60mm base but under current rules he should be on a 120 x 92mm oval base.  I didn’t want to remove him from the old base as that’d damage him.  I also wanted to raise him up as his whip was already touching the table top, so I glued a piece of MDF under his base and glued that to the oval base.  This gave enough clearance under the whip to allow for basing materials to be added.  I glued down another piece of MDF elsehwere to break up the shape of his old round base, and then tried to build up sloped edges with PVA.  This didn’t work too well, but did help glue everything down and fill in some gaps.  In the end I made up a mix of PVA, Sand, and water and used this paste/concrete to build up a more natural slope and add some texture to things.  Once this was dry I coated it all in PVA and dirt, and then sealed that in with more watery PVA.  It’s not done a bad job, now it’s all painted up

My errata pack for Reichbusters turned up last week so I spent 2-3 hours integrating that.  It had to be done in one go as they didn’t print version numbers on anything so getting confused or lost was a high risk if I took a break. I’ve completed two more missions since, and theres three left to go in the box, and a fourth fan one I’ll probably do, which will check off another item from my 2021 Hobby Pledges.

To whoever it is who clicked all the bottons before I’d finished writing this or the previous update: Thanks for the love, but don’t you want to at least wait for me to finish before thumbs-upping and moving on?  There weren’t even any pics yet this week.

I’ve made solid progress on the Daemons I picked up with my OTT voucher.  14 models are done and I’ve done a lot of the groundwork for the final piece, the Skull Cannon.

With only model left to paint I thought it was time to prep more ready to paint.  I always like to have the next project ready to do before I finish the current one so there’s no lost downtime while I wait for glues or primer to dry and I don’t rush anything and botch something.  As such I’ve built and primed a handful of models ready to go.

One of my 3D prints had a catastrophic failure.  This is a bust of Avatar Korra I found on MMF.  I upscaled her quite a bit and tried to hollow her out, but I think the channel between the voids got blocked and trapped some resin and perhaps some air.  When  I put her in some warm soapy water to clean her up ready to  paint she cracked open everywhere, revealing some oddly set resin inside; kindy rubbery and kinda chalky at the same time.  I thought I’d have a go at fixing her but the gunk must have expanded and it didn;t want to come out and it quickly became apparent that I’d end up with a billion gunky shards if I tried.  As such I’m considering this a failed print.

Let this be a lesson to everyone: Ensure all your voids can drain, and if you think you have resin trapped after a print, drill a new hole to let it out before you UV cure the piece.  Remember to wear goggles as who knows how it will react to a release in trapped pressure.