Painting vampire counts skeletons as tomb kings!

To start off, I took some vampire skeletons I had sitting around and put some grit on the bases (actually a mix of artist's gel medium, craft glue, grit, and water) and I primed these suckers white.

Then using reaper master series paints, I threw on the following colors

Bone – Base coat in Aged Bone

Helm and, belt, scabbard – base coat in Leather Brown

Blade – base coat in Ancient Bronze

Hair and cloth – base coat in Linen White

Metallic details – base coat in Antique Gold

Base grit – base coat in Amber Gold (not a metallic color)

Darken it with a dark brown wash of some kind. I made my own wash with the following method. two thirds water, one third future floor wax, and I add Muddy Brown to that until I get a wash of the desired intensity. ALWAYS TEST OUT YOUR WASH ON SOMETHING UNIMPORTANT FIRST!

Next I just did a quick round of highlights

Bone – highlighted with Polished Bone

Helm, belt, and scabbard – highlight with Tanned Leather

Blade – brush Ancient Bronze over the blade, and lightly brush on Honed Steel

Hair and cloth – highlight with Pure White

Metallic detailes – highlight with New Gold

Base grit – drybrushed with Linen White

 Then I added a shield I painted in advance and added a bit of static grass and DONE. It wouldn't be too hard to have a tournament ready army in this scheme with some dedication, and you can even skip the highlighting step to save time. Happy Tomb Kings!

-Ian Douglass

Bikes and Big Uglies, Work in Progress

I took a break for the holiday and I'm back to the hobby again and I've been doing some work on my bikes. Here I've got 3 built with primer, and I've started painting my Arena Champion, who is hanging off the side of his bike to take a stab at enemy troops.

My other project is a conversion for my Archon's bodyguards, the Sslyth. The book describes them as serpentine humanoids with 4 arms, but with S5 T5 and W2, they've gotta be big and beefy to do their stats justice. I poked around and couldn't really find any snake people that would be big enough to use without too much conversion work, so I settled on some Warhammer River Trolls. Though they aren't snake-like, they are certainly amphibian looking, so I'll be converting them out with some Kabalite Armor on and off for the next month or so.

Side Project: a Class Painting

Here I've painted an acrillic painting on Davy Board for my Intro to Fiction class

My attempt with this piece was to present Jane’s fears, concerns, and anxieties through the lens of a nightmare. Though the audience is aware of the events that surround Jane, often we don’t parse out what they all add up to. Jane’s story is a human struggle, and to better understand her struggle I sought out to arrange it in a more organic way. In nightmares, our anxieties come out in abstract ways, and they are compounded by other natural fears, such as darkness, heights, not knowing which way is up, ect. By arranging Jane’s fears in this way, we can see them all at once, and can sympathize with Jane in a more direct way. I've set it up in such a way that in flipping it upside down, the motion of the dripping blood and flowing soda are reversed, drawing on the coke recipe scene and the editing scene from the novel. There is a kicker here in that I ignored the elephant in the room, the child. Something so important to Jane I omitted entirely, and as such I portrayed her as in search of something lost.

First of Many

I've kicked out a fully painted squad of warriors, and I've been working on raiders and jet bikes lately (and gosh,  the raiders take a lot of work to get looking good. I had to build it partially, paint individual sections, and then finish building it and touching it up).

Warrior Pics: entire squad

Leader

Dark Lance

Other individuals

 I'll have a Scorpion Mechaniloid update soon, and eventually some sneak peaks of my lesser and greater Thralls (which will make great wracks, grotesques, and haemonculi).
until then,
Ian Douglass

On Sculpting

Along side my Dark Eldar painting project, I've been sculpting a giant mechanical scorpion inspired by the Talos art in the Dark Eldar Codex. lately I've been re-working the limb designs, and overall I've decided that I'm going for a more organic looking model. Here is a sneak peek, even though the pic doesn't really do it's face justice.

I've also been working on some terrain to go along side my new army of terror as shown below.

Fear the mighty wall of cake!

First Blood!

I got some sweet sweet new plastics last weekend, so I've been hard at work getting them built and looking presentable. Army of choice at the moment is Dark Eldar, as they got some swanky new sculpts, and by the gods are they gorgeous! No seriously, you'd have to see them in-person, built or on the sprue to know what I'm talking about. I've got my first squad of warriors built and painted up nicely, and here is the pic of my test model.

Some things in the pipeline for the future are another squad of the warriors, 6 bikes, 2 raiders, and an Archon.