Ships, Take 2

This time I think I got it.  Fewer colors, more washes.

For the hull I'm going with a blue base coat so I can work it up to white.  This hasn't changed from the original color scheme.

You can see the wash around the parts that are going to be gold, once I get to them.  I wanted these to stand out.  You'll also notice the rivets didn't get the same treatment. See my previous post about getting too caught up in the details.

This is the wooden deck.  I do like the way the space between the boards pops when I added the brown wash.  Two coats of wash because the first one just didn't have enough emphasis.  Not all the ships have a wooden deck but for those that do this will work nicely.

Everything that is still white and some parts that are blue got painted with the metallic base coat last night.  I need to touch up a few places with the original blue and then I'm ready to do finishing work.  Yes, finishing work so soon.  I did say I was overworking these paint jobs the first time around.

And into the Simple Green they went

The little ships are much different from painting minis.  There's a lot of great detail on these but it turns out not all of it gets painted.  Weird.

My ships went into the Simple Green bath last night and are now sitting here in spiffy new coats of primer.  I also couldn't glue them onto craft sticks like other mini.  That made it very difficult to get to areas to paint.  They're now on individual bottle caps and I used poster tack to hold them in place.  The resin is very slick and the glue didn't 'take'.  Live and learn.

My paint scheme idea was about 75% good.  Problems included, but were not limited to, having too many colors and trying to paint too many things.  I'm going to take silver and grey out of the mix and do the blue-white and gold.  The "power source" is a blue-green per the fluff so that will be in there as well but shouldn't look that bad.  It's not in a lot of places but it is there.

I also painted some of the areas out of order.  That one was my fault entirely.  I know better than that.

The experience I gained will serve me in good stead.  I also looked at some of the larger ships and found out what will work better on the smaller ones.  Some of the detail just isn't there on the larger ones so I don't have to worry about it as much on the small ones.  This pleases me.

Tonight I hope to at least put on the blue base coat again.  That will take 2 coats since I need to put on thin layers.  It would be too easy to clog up the fine detail and I use thin layers anyway.  If I get that done then I'll shade the areas that will get the gold detail.  That will be plenty for one night and will get me started on them again.

I'll try to take pictures of them this time around and post WIP shots as I go.  My guess is that I won't be using the Simple Green again but even if I do it's good to see what happened and why it didn't work.

Painting little ships is .. different

Sorry - no pictures just yet.  I'm not ready to post progress.  I do have a reputation to uphold after all.

I'm still working on the Spartan Games Dystopian Wars Covenant of Antarctica frigates and I'm using them as a test of the color scheme and how to paint the things.  Already I'm finding out what details are important to paint and which ones aren't.  So I've "wasted" a fair amount of time painting bits that I'm now painting over.  Learning experience, right?

That's why I started with the group of frigates.  They're small enough that they'll get lost in the mass of ships and painting a set of them lets me see how it all works.  I'm not exactly happy with them but not unhappy enough to strip and start over.

I think the color scheme is going to work well once I get through the process.  I'm going with blue-white (to match the faction flag) and I'm trying something new to me.  I have a light blue that is both the darkest color for the white and the lightest color for the blue.  I don't think I can get much more coordinated than that.

By the way - silver rivets on white are NOT worth the effort.  I shall not be making that effort/mistake on the rest of them.

Once this army is done I picked up a Russian Coalition one.  If I match their flag I'll be painting red and black.  Two difficult colors I would never use in an army.  Or a navy.  Or an air force.  We all know I'll find a way to work them in at least as accent colors but geez.  Red and black?

Happy early Christmas to me

I only get presents if I buy them for myself.  That's the way it goes.  I decided that I didn't need anything this year so I wasn't planning on anything.

Having said that it seems like I bought myself some early presents.  The guys here have been playing Dystopian Wars and I figured I might as well get an army and give it a shot.  My present to myself is the rulebook and an army.  Yes, another army to paint.

I've been wanting to paint up vehicles and this is the perfect game to do that.  I'll have to see if there are canon color schemes or if I can just have fun.

This might also be a chance for me to play with my airbrush.  I've got some 40K vehicles that could benefit from it as well.  And maybe some Litko bases since I'll have it set up.

I believe this makes army #5 in need of paint.  And my dungeon crawl minis.

Maybe some 15mm again?

I finally gave in and bought a copy of Napoleon's Battles from Lost Battalion Games.  This seems to be the baseline rules for Napoleonic games and there's almost always a chance of getting a game going.

I barely got any of my 15mm based for Lasalle so rebasing for Nappy's Battles won't be much work.  Finishing painting however will be.

I've got some motivation to paint now that I have a goal.  If nothing else it would be nice to have them done and packed in travel cases.  It means ordering more bases since these are different sizes from Lasalle.  A Litko order is in the near future for me.  I'm still counting how many bases I'll need.

I went back to one of my old blog posts since I knew I had done a breakdown of how many minis I had for this army.  It was better than digging them out and counting. Again.

Update without much content

The subject warned you.

I finally bought an air compressor to go with the air brush I bought off Craigslist a while ago.  The airbrush is new and a pretty basic double action.  The compressor is a decent one.  I got very good deals on both of them which is only to be expected.  I want to try doing the base coat of my Hirst pieces with the airbrush to see if I can get one-coat coverage and not have to go back and do touchups like I have every time I've used a brush.  I also want to try doing the base coats of large minis.

I've been fairly active getting my business RastlWorld Minis going.  My two most difficult tasks are doing the research for new minis and finding enough sculptors to get them done.

Otherwise I haven't been doing anything hobby-wise.

I painted!

Actually I painted twice but I don't consider a black ink wash "painting".

Tonight I pulled out the kobolds I started painting about a year ago and finally fixed the colors.  I picked the wrong color way back in the beginning for part of the figures and then stopped painting.  I thought fixing and finishing those would be a good way to get started again.

Tonight was just the base coat to start those areas again but it's progress.  I think I need to get stronger reading glasses to paint now but that's just a trip to the dollar store.

Did it feel good to paint?  Kinda.  Not being able to see them as well as I used to was frustrating and repainting is never fun.  But it's a start and that's what matters.  These are dungeon crawl minis so I'm not overly concerned about a bit of stray paint.