Byron's first few Painting Challenge Entries

Unlike Greg, I have not been very good about cross posting entries from the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, but have been participating in it as well.  So, rather than cross post 4 different entries each separately now, I am just going to post some highlights from each and a link to the original if anyone wants to see some more detail. I will try to remember to cross post more regularly as we move forward.

On the plus side, I have painted over 400 points in the first month of the challenge, so have already hit 40% of my goal this year!  Not that I am staying on my planned items at all, but that's a whole different story.

First Entry - Kingdom Death Survivors

Day 1 and I started out with five 35mm scale Kingdom Death survivors.  These are bare bones starting survivors so all they have are lanterns and founding stones (sharpened stones as makeshift knives).

The survivors all have a very basic attempt at OSL (Object Source Lighting) for the lanterns on them, but only very basic.  They are after all basic survivors and game pieces, which both of my sons (and all their friends) will handle while playing Kingdom Death as they just can't get enough of the game.

Second Entry -  Kingdom Death Monsters

Ok, another day another entry!  Sticking with the Kingdom Death theme I worked on the first and second monster that most players with fight, the White Lion and the Screaming Antelope.  However, in typical KD style there is nothing normal about these seemingly normally named creatures.  The Lion has strangely human hands and the Antelope has a mouth where its gut should be.

The 28mm WW1 figure is just included to show the scale of these figures,
there is nothing small about Kingdom Death!
(including the game itself which weighs in at 17lbs for the core set alone!)

All of my Kingdom Death figures are going to be played with and I want them to be very visual, so a lot of the highlights and shadows are a lot more pronounced than most of my painting.  This is being done on purpose to show up and emphasis the details from tabletop.  While not as clean looking in these close up pictures as some of my figures, they do really pop at tabletop distance better than a lot of things that I shade in using more subtle colour variations. 

 Third Entry - Epic 30k Death Guard Army (Part 1)
 
tried doing everything to match my current 28mm Death Guard 30k army.  I figured out early on though that I can not do the same weathering as on my 28mm models as in 6mm the models just become sepia / rust coloured blobs. So I went with a much harder light / dark look.

The infantry and rhinos are the old school original plastics, but I think they still hold up just fine (and I have a ton of them still on sprue) so I am just using them for most infantry, instead of the real 30k metal ones.

Now onto some of the figures that I have really wanted to paint for a long while!  A squad of three Sicarans and Sicaran Venators!  These are amazing models in 28mm and the 6mm versions are just as clean, every single panel line and cable from the full size version is there on the 6mm version. 

These two versions of the Sicaran are my favourite tanks in 30k as I feel they are one of the best looking sci-fi tank hulls out there in any game or fiction.  They have huge guns, an aggressive sloped stance that just scream speed and aggression, what more could you want.

Lastly, 3 super heavy tanks, because why just kill something when you can kill it, then vaporize it, then annihilate any dust left from it.  When you want something dead, overkill is the only way to go.  Besides, all 3 of these vehicles are just stunning.

The whole force was painted very quickly (as you can tell from the images) but I think came out very well for anything 6mm and have a suitable dirty used look for me, but not too dirty that you can't tell what they are. 

Fourth Entry - I HATE Horses! 28mm French Napoleonic Dragoons

This entry has been 2+ years is the making as I keep trying to get to them and keep leaving them, because I hate painting horses.  In miniature, painting horses intimidates me as they are much like painting human flesh, just a lot more of it.  It is really hard to get right, insanely easy to screw up, and everyone will notice and point out when it isn't right.  Therefore I really try to avoid painting horses if at all possible.

I have however needed to get a unit of cavalry done for my (very slowly) growing 28mm French Napoleonic force for a while now, and this unit got primed for last years challenge and then set aside as I just didn't want to deal with them.  This year I decided I better get to them sooner rather than later or they would once again roll over to the next years challenge.

Minor issues aside, while I disliked painting the project, I am actually OK with the results close up, and I am very happy with how they look on the tabletop.  Which is what Napoleonics are all about, tabletop effect, and that they have. 



Theses are all the plastic 28mm Perry Miniatures Dragoons with a Flag Dude banner.  Knowing that I disliked the horses, I started with them.  Having read that the Dragoons were the bottom of the Cavalry types (having started as infantry being trained as cavalry) and therefore very often had to deal with any mounts they obtain rather than being able to count on standard or uniform mounts for a regiment, I decided to make the unit up of as many different types of horses as I could.  Not knowing anything about horses though I had to go looking to find out what kinds and colours they did have.

 After finding out about Bays, Palominos, Chestnuts, Greys, and more, I got to work.  Then I found out about facial markings and socks.  Did I mention, I hate horses?  Anyway, after far too long on the painting table, I came out with the following which I am actually OK with.  Which is fairly uncommon for me, as I tend to think of 80% of the stuff I paint as crap, but despite my dislike for the animals and painting them, I am actually OK with how these look.

Minor issues aside, while I disliked painting the project, I am actually OK with the results close up, and I am very happy with how they look on the tabletop.  Which is what Napoleonics are all about, tabletop effect, and that they have. 

Fifth Entry - 28mm Modern Militia and Terrorists

A small submission to keep my progress going this week. The entry is an amalgamation of some left over African Militia from Spectre miniatures and some Islamic Terrorists from Spectre as well (Sorry Curt, those words probably just got this blog flagged by the CIA, FBI, and more).  The figures themselves are awesome as usual from Spectre, lots of detail on them and accurate (if thin) weapons.

Total there are 18 figures here, all done to a very basic table top level.  Essentially a base colour, wash, highlight, some very small details.  Since all of these miniatures will be on, and then off the table so quickly, I just couldn't justify a whole lot of time on them (as is evident in the pictures).

To play the games I want with them, I need about 40-50 Terrorists or Militia facing 4-8 special forces troopers, so I tend to spend time on the spec ops guys as they will be the focus of any game as they stick around for the whole time (normally). 


Up to date 

So, there we are, my five regular entries so far in the challenge. I will try to keep up better cross posting so that the posts don't get so long in the future.

Painting Challenge Entries so far... Update 1,2,3, and 4

Greg asked that all of us in the Analogue Painting Challenge that Curt runs, also post entries here in our own blog.  I have been forgetting to go that, so am posting one post with all of my entries to date in an effort to both catch up and to not flood the blog with 4 updates in one day.  So, here goes....

I started off with a good plan (The madness begins again...) and then like any plan, it started falling apart right away.  Oh well.

Entry #1 - 15mm Sherman Tanks (30 Points)


I started off the challenge with a really quick 1 day (3 hour) paint job on 5 plastic soldier company Sherman tanks for a quick 30 points. The tanks were really fast as I did some base highlighting on the primer level (airbrushed on black and white primer to pre-shade) and then a few thin coats of glaze consistency green through the airbrush.

I then only had to touch up details like the tracks, guns, and ports, and then use some pigment powders to weather them, and done.  Quick and dirty, but think they came out pretty well for the time spent.

Entry #2 - 'Nostalgia' from ByronM - Eldar Farseer 

This was a theme week entry for Nostalgia and I figured what better thing to do than something from my first 40k army.  Well, ok, maybe there was something better out there, but I couldn't think of anything so this is what I did!

The first Eldar army I did (I painted several over the last almost 20 years) was the Ulthwe colour scheme which is a simple black and bone scheme to show that they come from a world with very few living souls left. Black is always hard to pull off and have any depth showing so I actually painted the whole model a neutral grey and then layered in black ink in glaze coats. I still had to go back and add some hard edge highlights on the staff as the glaze method would not work on the really hard corners, but I think it worked out ok on the rest of the model.  

The gems were easy to get back to as well, since I had painted hundreds of them using a very simple 5 colour method from an old Eldar book, that I expanded to 7 colours.  After painting probably 1000 of them over the years I played Eldar, it was like riding a bike doing them again.

 
Entry #3 - French WW1 rifle sections (95 points)



My third entry was an expansion to my World War 1 project to add some colour to the table.  This meant adding some really nice French early war figures from Renegade miniatures to my collection.

They were base coated with the airbrush and then the horizon blue was layered on with the airbrush as well.  I then moved into detail work to finish up.  I know many of our club have an aversion to airbrushes (looks at Greg!) but really, they make life so much easier for this mass kind of work.  The layers go on faster and more evenly than what I can do by hand, and it makes the job so much quicker.  Now if only I could do the super fine work that people like Angel Giraldez do with an airbrush!

Anyway, once the blue was done, it was onto some details and faces and then base work. 

I did the bases in my normal WW1 mud style but added a bunch of yellow and brown vegetation to show the effect of the gas being used in the area and to keep them different looking than my Canadians and Germans.

Entry #4 - Spectre 28mm Modern African Militia (100 points)

My latest submission was a group of modern militia that was a blast to paint.  Since there were so many different sculpts and each had a ton of character it was hard not to deep dive into the details.  I tried to keep each one different in colour but limited the overall details to the basics.  After all, a ton of these are needed for a game, yet each one is essentially cannon fodder.  I think points wise for a game I need about 40 of these, and only 4-6 professional or elite soldiers, so the time these guys can expect to survive on the battlefield is pretty close to 0.

I did have fun painting a NWA shirt, various hightop runners, baseball caps, and some bright coloured Crocs.

I especially had fun with things like people wearing khaki shirts or pants, but then putting on bright colour shorts of shirts, afterall anyone who thinks holding the gun sideways helps with aim would obviously also believe that baby blue is a good camo colour, right?

Overall so far...

In the last few years I have come to the conclusion that if I want to get things done I really can not try to paint every figure as a character, I need to paint more to a tabletop level. That means doing a bit more of a basic level for most troops instead of worrying about doing 3-5 layers in each colour and trying to treat each figure as a character.

The overall table top effect remains the pretty much the same, but it still feels kind of like cheating as these were not done to a high standard, and they kind of fall apart close up, but from table top level they look pretty good.

I still do some character figures trying to get as much detail as possible, but in general am trying a more "table top effect style" look than a painting competition style painting. I always marvel at how fast Dallas and Greg can get amazing looking armies done and am just starting to figure out that the trick is Don't try to paint everything as if it was going into a competition or to be looked at close up, paint it to be seen from the table top.... not something I am good at.

So, almost 4 weeks into the challenge and only 280 points done, which is a bit behind where I should be since it is only 3 months long this year.  I do have several things in the queue almost done though, so I should be ok.  Here is a sneak peak... 

Oh, and I will try to be better about posting updates here in the future.