More weathering experiments

After the rust experiments the other week on the barriers and crates, it was time to try and tackle some more terrain for Necromunda. I've seen many tutorials using salt recently picked up some of the AK Interactive chipping liquid and wanted to see how that worked as, in theory, it should make life a bit easier than a bit of sponge but works best with an airbrush as it means less work to get it off.

I've had an airbrush for years, but never really had anywhere to set it up and play. Today I finally managed to unpack it and have a play. This is a bit of a teaser for a future Challenge entry, so the final steps won't be shown in this post, but will come as a part 2 after it is done.

The wall was initially undercoated black and then a rusty colour was sprayed over the top in a patchy way using some car undercoats, to give it a slightly mottled base layer. Over the rusty red areas I sprayed some of the chipping effect so that as the next few layers are pulled back, you'll start to see a rusty chip colour

Across the bottom two thirds, I put a layer of pale green. I think it is a tank interior, I can't remember from the sofa. Whatever it was, it has taken nearly an entire bottle of the paint to do all of the walls!  Do airbrushes really churn through paint really quickly? There are a lot of walls, so I guess it is fair enough.

Across the top half I went for a much lighter grey so it looks like the walls were originally pale grey and have slowly been covered up in grime.

Now the colours are on, it was just a case of taking a toothbrush, a little bit of water and scrubbing the wall a bit to reveal the rusty basecoat colour. As you can see, it can be worn of gently, or large chips.

It looks good enough to call done, but I want to dirty it up even more. You could just as easily replace the airbrush with some other cans of spray paint. I suspect you'll want model spray, rather than car spray as I'm not convinced that water would break up the car undercoat to give you the chipped effect.

The walls come from a great company called Blotz and are well worth adding to your Necromunda collection as it really adds to the atmosphere. Here are a couple of extra shots after they have been rusted up a bit with the last dregs of my Modelmates rust. Now I really do need to invest in a bottle of that other liquid and pray it really is the same stuff.

Below is an example set up on the kitchen floor as I got a bit carried away. Now I need to find a big table mat that looks like the underhive for when the tile sets are not enough

The dungeons have a delivery

With another week until the painting competition starts I've been trying not to start work on any new figures... so some more furniture has been finished for Dungeon Saga. The next three photos do include the last set of stonework furniture as well, so that they show the complete group of each type for the DS project page. The originals are slightly darker. I must have used a different grey as the base... but variation is good.

 

And now we move onto the wooden items. There are still plenty of barrels and chests left to do.

Last time around I was asked for the brown recipe. I can't remember how I did the tables and bookshelves, but for these I used the following steps:

1) Undercoat in black
2) Heavy drybrush of Citadel Rhinox Hide
3) Drybrush the top half with Citadel Skavenblight Dinge
4) Drybrush the top quarter with Vallejo Neutral Grey
5) Paint on the metalwork using Citadel Boltgun Metal
6) Wash all over with Citadel Agrax Earthshade
7) Targetted second wash to the lower quarter with another layer of Agrax Earthshade
8) Rust spots added with ModelMates Rust effect.

The new Wargames Illustrated painting special  contains some really good step by step guides to different types of wood as well as a plethora of other interesting articles on painting covering things like faces, horses, fabrics, basing techniques and shields. It is well written with some nice, clear photos to show the steps. Highly recommended.

Over the hills...

Continuing on the vaguely Napoleonic theme of my reading recently, I took advantage of the Warlord offer last month and picked up the Black Powder book with a free box of British Peninsular troops to have a go at painting as I've not ever tried painting Napoleonics.

I'm very impressed with the quality of the book so far, much more so than the bland looking Bolt Action one. I really like all the little call-outs dotted throughout the book and the sense of humour that seeps through the whole thing.  The plastics are also very nice for a marching regiment and seem quick to put together compared to more flexible kits, which is probably a good thing when painting large numbers of the same figure.

The original aim was to paint up the box and sell it... but Matakishi's  Peninsular skirmish thread over on Lead Adventure (http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=75952.0) has given me other ideas. We will see how painting them goes... speaking of which. Here's the test model to work out colours and overall scheme.

The colours are a bit off as it is a quick snap, but it gives you a good idea of where it is going. So I can remember what happened for the next one, this is the process

1) Undercoat - Army Painter Chaotic Red spray. This is basically VMC Hull Red and acts as a good shade for skin and the red coat.

2) Trousers - Base coat of VMA Sea Grey, layer of VMC Sky Grey, thinned highlights of VMC Offwhite. Glaze of Warpaints Boney Spikes/Gloss Medium to add dirt around the bottom

3) Jacket/Hat trim - Thinned layers of VMC Carmine Red; trims Citadel Warpstone Glow; final wash with Devlan Mud. Random glaze of Warpaints Boney Spikes/Gloss Medium to add dirt

4) Straps/Hat trim top - VMC Off White; wash of Devlan mud

5) Boots/ bags/ shako - Black with VMA Grey Green highlights.

6) Musket - VMC Leather Brown wood; Boltgun Metal for metalwork; overall wash ofNuln Oil

7) Skin - VMC Cork Brown; thinned layer of  VMC Basic Skintone; wash with Devlan Mud. Stubble: 50/50 Black/VMC Basic Skintone painted onto jaw

8) Canteen - VMC French Mirage; Wash with devlan mud then Nuln Oil

9) Hair - VMC Leather Brown; wash with Nuln Oil

10) Bed roll - VMC Neutral Grey; wash with Nuln Oil

11) Sack - VMC Stone Grey; wash with Devlan Mud; stains with Warpaints Boney Spikes glaze.

12) Hat badge - VMC Bronze; wash with Devlan Mud

Doing one took about 2 hours, so we shall see how long it takes to do 4 more...

Experiments with snow pt1

After posting my challenge casualty the other day, I got some nice comments about the snow asking how I'd done it. It's been  a while since I've just sat down and had a play with different techniques, so here are some notes I made last year (fleshed out a bit). I'll do a part 2 sometime soon, onc eI've worked out how to take better photos of the snow!!

GW Snow effect

The GW winter effects pack looked fairly promising in the shop, but getting it home and trying to use it was... interesting. This stuff is, as far as I'm concerned, pretty naff if you want to create actual snow as it is basically white static grass. It can be useful for the odd bit of frost covered grass when applied over white glue or varnish; other than that... I wouldn't bother.

Interestingly (or not) their effects packs contain no instructions at all on how to use the stuff. I guess they just assume you'll use it in the same way as flock, but I ran some experiments with it anyway. I wanted to see  how this GW snow reacts with different mediums; in this case, white glue (WG), MIG acrylic resin (R) and GW 'Ardcote gloss varnish (V). The image is a little tricky to see some of the differences; zooming in does help a bit.



Going left to right we've got each medium either mixed (+), or used to stick the flock on (-> ). For example top left is a mixture of the Vallejo resin and the snow flock (R+F) and bottom left is a layer of resin painted onto the base, with some flock over the top (R->F).

As you can see, in all the cases where the flock is laid over the top of the sticky medium it's fairly transparent so you can see a difference between the colours underneath. Whichever medium is chosen, you get light, fluffy looking effect that looks fresh, but thin. If you're doing this, white glue is probably your best (and cheapest) bet. For deeper snow you could try painting the surface with a very very pale blue first to give it a deeper, colder feel.

Mixing the flock with the different mediums is where we start to get some more interesting effects. In each case I've not been overly careful on quantities, but I did learn that mixing a small batch and applying it, then mixing a little bit more works better than trying to do a larger batch in one go as it tends to become clumpy.

Gloss varnish and the resin seem to give very similar effects; I would imagine water effect would also give the same look. In each case, the snow is quite thick, but slightly shiny, as if it's slowly melting in the sun, or under foot. Mixing the snow effect with the pva glue gives a very matt, almost paper-ish looking snow, which is good for very dense, compacted snow, or using as a base for another snow effect.

In future articles I'll be covering some other effects, including crushed glass and baking soda