Sunday, January 25, 2009

Inking Frenzy

I hope ink comes out in the shower. I made many coats of red paint mixes with various inks today. One of the things I found is that my original color palette of reds was too close to each other. The difference between the dark purple-red (GW Red Gore) and my middle shade (Reaper Brick Red) although startling in the bottle is virtually indistinguishable on the model. So I will have to downgrade the palette from five to three, and maybe see about incorporating a lighter-est red, maybe P3 Khador Red Base.

I got Reaper Red Steel color last week, but I haven't had a chance to experiment at all with it. Not sure if I want to experiment on my Vlad warkasters. On significant breakthrough is with Tamiya Clear Red. One of the Vlad models I am working on was going the standard way; base coat, ink wash, highlight, dry brush. Clear red is just that, like a clear varnish of red. It also taints whats underneath reddish. I may just paint in all the details, stark highlights and dark recesses then slap the whole thing with clear red to see how it comes out. Pictures will follow.

Not having digital camera = suck.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

The Angst of Time

Or the sweet vacuum of getting what you want. It's late, that doesn't make sense.

Yes, Red and I battle in less than a week. I've has a busy three days of work and I look forward to painting tomorrow. Red is further along on his Trenchers than I am on my Winterguard. I still have bare primer here and there with plans for the shading but nothing done.

Tomorrow, I will have to draw the line between painted, and painted enough. The downside is that I don't want to 'settle.' That would suck; I would feel not only like I failed, but I cheapened the exercise.

On the building front, I made my first forays into puttying with P3 sculpting putty. A suggestion to P3, make smaller logs! I can't believe how much I wasted in the 120-odd minutes I had from malleable goop to rock. Neither do I want to delay my whole army trying to save up enough miniatures that need putty to make it worth my time to mix up a batch. *Sigh*

Also from the building front, and incorporating the putty news, I completed my Doomreaver 'FemBot' conversions. I always liked the back story of the Doomreavers; criminals chained to fell swords and sent to do the bidding of the Motherland. Doomreavers

Some years after the WM rulebook came out, GW released a further refinement of the Adeptas Soroitas and a special unit called the Sisters Repentia. Repentia

So I was thinking to myself, who said all the criminals had to be male?

I fill follow with pictures as they come available.

And just to add insult to grievous injury, I came across the ultimate in mean, wicked, rotten cruel 350 point Khador lists on the WM forums. Red should feel lucky I cannot afford this nor have it ready in time, and thus will share with all.

Vlad, Dark Prince
Fenris
Doomreaver 1
Doomreaver 2
350 points.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Don't look now, but Sorcha is a hottie!

(takes a few moments to stare at it...)

Anyway, this is the Sorscha Kratikoff that I painted. The reds are much brighter than the Juggernaut and Destroyer, but the flash has brightened them even more than natural light. The reds are Reaper Blood Red and Bright Red and GW Blood Red.

As with the Warjacks, you can see me using the base as a test palette. It's hard to highlight the icy blue glow that's supposed to emanate from Frostfang.

Also, I really didn't like the way the hat turned out. Its dark gray highlighted with light gray. Also, the only artwork I had to work from was the base art on the battle box. It wasn't until WM:Apotheosis and later that we started to get more and better artwork to paint from.

My only criticism of the sculpt is that it is too seamless from the hat, to the hair to the collar of the greatcoat. Hard to draw out details from such a small area.

Again, for the same reasons, it is not fully based, and there are still details I need to finish. The armor need another layer or two of highlights. I am not sure if I finished the eyes. Plus I need maybe to fix the hat.

The second Sorcha I had from my aforementioned second starter box broke in assembly. The slot tab broke from the feet, and I don't trust just gluing a flat foot to the plastic base without some other means of support. Guess I'll have to hit up the 'bits site.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Not my Kratikoff


Dare I continue? I say, "Dare I not?" (would you rather I delete my laughing at my own cleverness? just sayin'...)

Continuing with the battle box theme, I present to you, Sorcha Kratikoff. This one however, was not painted my me. (gasps of horror!)
'Tis true, 'tis true, I purchased this one on evil-bay. The price was right and it looked good and I figured, what the heck, another Sorcha to use while I finished detailing mine.

The painter, who never identified himself, and I AM IN NO WAY TAKING CREDIT FOR HIS WORK, has a different style than mine, but has the same appreciation for the deep Khador reds that I do. The weapon is in a different position than the traditional sculpt, and there is some additional detailing on the base. My only real critiques are that the skin tone is so dark, and that the red of both the armor and the cloak are highlighted with white or light gray.

Well, and there is little detail in the eye area. Anyway, all in all a good miniature and it saved me some time.

New 3D Objective Marker

Red and I have been bouncing around the idea of making an objective much more interesting if it were a 'dingus.' A 'widget.' Something aside from a point on a map.

Heavy Artillery

Yeah, it's way too big of a scale. However, the text from the Second siege of Northgard tells us that the cannons Irusk used had never been seen before, and were specially made for the siege. Whatever, love it, hate it, it is cool.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Cracked Rear View

I demanded a little artistic tantrum with my photographer on this one. As with most Warmachine, the last thing you think about is the boiler. I mean with the likes of flame cannons and spiky fists, bombards and Earthquake hammers, how exciting would a boiler be?

And in that lies the story. "I mean, have I ever spoken about the thing with the blueberry pudding pop and the elliptical machine ?" *If you didn't get the quote, please adjourn yourself to the nearest DVD/DVR/TiVo and watch all of the ABC show 'The Middleman." I thank you.* To continue...

I have been a fan of trains and locomotives all my life. My father worked for the railroad, as did my maternal grandfather. I grew up with stories of danger and steam. My dad would often sing me ballads of 'the Wabash Cannonball,' and tell stories of Casey Jones.

What a shocker that I fell into like, then love with Warm-machine. Anyhoo, for a steam fan/addict/junkie it's important. I chose regular bitumen black, since I was painting two of the run of the mill everyday 'jacks from the battle box. If I ever get access to some of the photo etched brass steam whistles and bells, you can be sure they will be on my Warjacks too. After all, Khador is the home of over-engineering. If it's worth doing, it's worth hanging 5 tons of pig iron armor on!

I envision, as I paint more and more of the more advanced Khador warjacks, I will get more creative. How, you ask? Glad you mentioned it! In many later pictures of locos nearing the end of the steam era (never!) you will see many of the boiler housings finished with a lighter metal cladding or sheath, like these examples.
In the last example, you'll a glorious example of an engine after years of hard use. Grime, oil, dirt, rust...glorious! Why bother, you ask? It does make for an interesting variance in painting. It shows progress, evolution and change, time and hard use.

Yeah.

Monday, January 19, 2009

Juggernaut says "Hello."

Continuing in my lengthy droning on and on about my miniatures, I continue with the Juggernaut Khador heavy warjack. (Man, I thought it was spelled like 'Dreadnought.') Anyway, here it is.

'Awesome' is a truly inadequate word.

Again, it is not fully based. I was at the time, and still am contemplating with what flocking material I wish to base my Khador army in.

Due to several sales early on, and a fortunate contest prize, I came into a second battle box. The story and the background of Khador is very Soviet, so I thought a cool alternate paint scheme would be a 'winter camo,' with white/snow colors replacing the brilliant reds.

Shortly thereafter, or maybe a long time after, I found real life GW snow flock. That being said, I wasn't going to make Every base a snow base. "It's never winter all the time."

Then again, the greenish flock I have is really green. Hmm, the quest continues. The Ice Axe as pictured is not highlighted, just a base coat of GW Hideous Blue.

I promised I would talk about the metals. The base metal color is either GW Boltgun metal or Chainmail from Ral Partha. The inky highlights are detailed in the Warmachine Escalation paining section using Tamiya Smoke. Having used it, I won't ever not use it again!

The Bronze color is the stumper. (wanders over to the paint table....) Ahhh....GW Brazen Brass, with the same smoky highlights mentioned above.

Getting back to Ral Partha paints, Red and I were talking about them last Saturday when we were working on some terrain. We both remember using and liking them. Sadly them seem to be discontinued. Ah well, live, grow, evolve, develop 5-ton land leviathans and crush your enemies.

Fun with the Destroyer

As posted earlier, (earlier today, hah!) I had completed painting my Khador battle box. I thought I would post the limited amount of success I've had so far, and let everyone see what's to come.

These are pictures of my Destroyer, a heavy Khador Warjack. It isn't based, and if you look close enough, you can see where I tried out several paint colors on the base primer color to see how they looked. I prefer Armory Gray or Armory Black primer, btw.

If you are familiar with Warmachine and the endless tips for painting, you would know that the basic Khador paint scheme is red, lightened by orange or an orangy-yellow.

NO THANKS!

After watching Coppola's Dracula, and lots of other vampire movies, I think it looked less like blood, and more like orange crayons. The Khador back story is all about the blood of the ancestors. This is reinforced by Dark Prince Vlad (in his very dracula-esque armor btw) and by the lakes spilled by the Butcher and the Doomreavers.

So anyway, I decided to have the brick/bright red of the suggested paint scheme be my finishing or brightest highlight color, and start much MUCH darker red. This model is mostly GW Red Gore or Reaper Blood Red. These paints were tinted with magenta or red inks to give instant shades and tints.

The Metals will be addressed in the post with the Juggernaught.

A word on my username

I chose Airport because I used to work at one. I had hoped to work with the same team again, but my friends are victims of the merger mania and the economic downturn. The station, which was Fort Wayne's only major airport hub for many years, has been subsumed by another company. At least that company was staffed with good people also.

Also, at Airports, there is always something happening where you can't see, without clearance of course.

Greetings from Airport, in which I offer NO explanation

Okay, so this is my first blogging exercise and I offer no apologies for committing all the beginner blog errors and offend, well, pretty much everyone I know. So there!

To begin. I, like my friend Red from 'Lightning Strykes,' began my gaming sojourn with the purplish box of basic D&D. From there we moved on to the other TSR products. (Heck, there wasn't anything else at the time!) I did RPG's for many years, finally moving outside the realms of fantasy with things like Hero system and Villains & Vigilantes. I resisted the CCG craze for about a month.... I made the leap into miniature games with a small game based on Civil War naval combat, eventually moving on to WW2 naval, Warhammer 40k, Target games Warzone, and a few others.

I feel proud to say that I truly got into Warmachine on the bottom floor. I was sitting at a table at my LHS when the shipment of original Warmachine books and starter packs were unpacked from the distributor. Up to that time, I had played the above games, usually losing interest from the daunting task of having to paint a truly monstrous army to get anything accomplished, or from byzantine rules about army selection and composition. The first thing that struck me about Warmachine was the incredible complexity of the back story followed immediately by the PRICE! Never was a intro set of rules for a minis game $20! Unheard of! Outrageous!

Well, after getting a copy, I was even more impressed. You could actually play meaningful battles with just the contents of the starter box. Battles that would teach you the whole rules. Warmachine was a product I was going to support, and I bought my first army box, Cryx!
(gasps of horror)
Yes, if things had worked out as I thought this would be a scaly and glowing Cryx blog. Like Red, I think it's no fun if every one wants to be the fighter. As such, after the initial frenzy at the LHS was over, four of the original six players wanted to or were playing Cryx. So I decided to switch factions to The Red Machine; Khador.

I played, completed painting my base box, did a tournament or two. Then, I slipped into the tragic error, I began collecting instead of hobby-ing. I would grab a couple of new releases and hide them in the Basemento of Doom. I stayed current on the rule books and such. Eventually the pile of WM got large, it moved into its own box, then two, then a storage tote. Every so often, I would plan out a few units and reinforce my growing collection of madness.

Through financial hardships, I re-evaluated my gaming and realized there WAS a Basemento of Doom, and it was full of stuff I didn't use. Thank God Red came to my rescue. He got fired up about WM again and brought me with him. We started planning, playing, and painting again. We got involved with local WM gamers and are having (looks around and whispers) fun.
(shrieks of outrage and horror!!)