Stoneward and Woldstalkers

I would like to have a more Hallowe'en themed post for the day that is in it. Hallowe'en is not really celebrated here in Germany so I am celebrating it by playing Hunter: The Vigil tonight. The session should see us finishing our current campaign, unless my players are being particularly dumb. I am still progressing on the remnants of my Circle force. The Stoneward was thankfully handy enough to do despite the fact that I made a mess of his cloak. I fixed it a little but it still is far from perfect. I mixed a brown glaze improperly and ended up with a really streaky effect. The Wwoldstalkers were easy enough to get done once I sat down and concentrated some effort on them. Now I am working on the Sentry Stone. It is simple but the Mannikins are a real pain. I will try to get some photographs of the WIP up tomorrow. Then I am wondering what I should do next. Tharn Wolfriders or a Wold Guardian?

Friday Showcase - Warpwolf

So it has been a remarkably slow week of painting. I am not sure if it is the grey german skies or what but I struggle to be productive when I sit down. Again I guess it is because I am flitting between a number of projects at once. At least I have pictures of old stuff I can show. This Wwarpwolf has been photographed a lot. I have posted him before on Privateer Press and Wwarhammer fora but I have never managed to take good photographs of him. So here he is finally somewhat properly photographed. He is still a little over exposed but with a darker model like this it isn't as apparent as with the menites. The large white models lose all definition and shading when I photograph them with my current set up. Thankfully it is fine with my darker Circle.
I painted the warpwolf in the same scheme as shown in the Brushthralls article. As with the Argus the guide was great and following the steps really improved my painting one hundred fold. You learn where and how to place the highlights. After following that I was able to begin to apply this to other models. I still struggle with cloth and armour in terms og where exactly to place highlights but I really am pretty good now with highlighting flesh areas. As this is often a large proportion of a model this really helps. I don't know if the other guides are as good but I really recommend anyone considering panting Circle in the future to check it out. It can be found here.

A Tale of Three Gamers - test colours

One of the most important things when starting a new army is to test the colours you want to use for it. I can't stress that enough! If you don't test the colours it will be far too late once you have finished a few ranks to go back and try something else. So next week sees the start of the project and I don't want to be jumping in to anything without having made my mind up with how to do it. I have started Orcs before and after I painted about one hundred boys I realised that I hated how I did the green. That army is now and probably forever will be residing on a shelf. It is just too much effort to strip them and start again and its too much of a pain to finish off the army seing as how horrible they turned out. Once burned, twice shy!

I know Gar is pretty happy with the colour scheme of his Dwarves as he already has a number of them painted. However I have never really painted a beastman before. I have somewhere a beastman warband for Mordheim where I painted them in flesh colours, emphasising the men far more than the beast. They came out fairly well but it isn't something I wanted to continue throughout a whole army. So instead I went for a khaki toned skin. I actually think the colour is called Khaki. It is from Vajello. I think it is fine but maybe too light. I haven't been able to get much of a change in the tone towards a flesh colour. I will paint a second guy to see if I can manage a darker tone to the skin areas. I still want it to be generally like I have it here but with a little more apparent contrast. I went with a neutral green for the robe. It adds a nce contrast to the skin without being overbearing. I was thinking I could go for red but that might be too strong. Maybe when it comes to doing other regiments I can mix it up a little. The weapons are fairly dark. I mixed black and bolt gun metal for them. I think this is still a little lighter than I had intended and I will try on the next Ungor to get it right. The horns are where I think this model fails a little. Well the paintjob not the model. I am not sure if I got them right at all. Looking at the models on the box these are generally done in grey. I don't know how that might end up looking but I guess I will try it out.

So next Thursday we will all have here what we are committing to painting for November. It is the first month so I am guessing nothing too ambitious!

On the Desk

So this was a bad weekend for painting. I managed to get a lot of stuff worked on but at the moment I am lacking motivation to get things finished. I have quite a lot of projects on the go at once. On my desk at the moment I have fifteen different units from five systems. So finding some focus amongst this chaos is not going to be easy! This week I want to focus on getting through the backlog and clearing the desk so I am free to start with the Tale of Three Gamers next week. Thats pretty ambitious but lets see what I can manage! Getting the sentry stone finished would be great but I am not enjoying the mannikins much. The bone grinders I have while nice are a pain to paint. Nothing that I have built is really calling to me. I guess most hoobyists are in the same boat though?

Friday Showcase - Gorax

Continuing on from last Friday here is another of my Circle Orboros models, this time the Gorax. It is the old ugly model but that was the only one available for a long long time. I really don't know what Privateer Press were thinking when they allowed this through. The new one is awesome and someday I will have to go out and pick it up. For now however this is enough. I went with a yellow tone for the skin as I wanted to do something a little different. It came out okay. I was still learning the rudiments of highlighting back then and now it shows. Sadly there was no Brush Thralls article to follow like I had with the Argus. He turned out fine in the end however and he can proudly stand amongst the rest of my Circle force, at least in terms of the paint job if not quite from a model point of view.