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Blog Alraune's Blog of Figuring Stuff Out

Discussion in 'Personal Paint Logs' started by ArtsyAlraune, Aug 30, 2022.

  1. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Hey hey! I'll try to keep the introduction to this thread short and sweet. I'm totally new to the wargaming hobby-- to the point that, at the time of writing I don't actually know how to play yet-- and I'm about to sink my teeth into an army of Seraphon! I intend to keep OP of this blog serve as a sort of index for the finished pieces, as I post WIPs along the way. I'm very happy to share my experiences and techniques that I'm trying out, if I don't just frontload that stuff right away with each post, so feel free to ask anything!

    Completed:
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2023
  2. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Let's start with my first completed fig, a Carnosaur with a Scar-Veteran rider! The story behind this is, before I bought the Start Collecting Seraphon box, I wasn't really interested in Warhammer (although my husband was into it as a kid and keeps trying to find time to rebuild his Necron army). It just seemed like a really expensive thing that I wouldn't have much time to play. But this August, my local game store, the Hall of Heroes, initiated a painting contest to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (the Hall does a lot of fundraisers for suicide prevention!), specifically for Games Workshop models. The primary colors have to be purple and turquoise (or reasonably close to it), the suicide awareness ribbon colors. Each entry has a little donation box, and one votes for their favorites by putting a donation of any amount into that box. Whichever mini accrues the most donations by the end of September is the winner.
    Now, this excited me, because I'm really into painting minis, I've just never done Warhammer ones before. 40k never really interested me, because I'm not really interested in all the sci-fi, space marines, skeleton robots or whatever. But there was that Start Collecting Seraphon box, with that enticing Carnosaur on it. I almost chickened out and chose a smaller mini, but I decided to fight the fear of painting something so large and took the plunge. It took me most of the month to complete, but... Here they are!!
    carno1.jpeg carno2.jpeg carno3.jpeg carno4.jpeg
     
  3. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Here's some more detail shots, I had enough that it needed to be uploaded into a separate post. Compared to how long it took to paint the Scar Veteran and Carnosaur, I feel like the base took no time at all, but I'm no less pleased with the end result! carno09.jpeg carno08.jpeg
     

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  4. Imrahil
    Slann

    Imrahil Thirtheenth Spawning

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    Wow! :wideyed::woot:

    First off what a great idea from your LGS for the competiton goal I hope there will be lots of votes all around.
    Secondly you have painted your Carnosaur spot on. Great pattern of colors and painted very cleanly.

    I am so much in love with your base :woot::woot: that little pont is amazing. And the ruined stone has so mich detail. You will get pretty far in this competition.

    Grrr, Imrahil
     
  5. JTSleep
    Stegadon

    JTSleep Well-Known Member

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    Welcome and looking forward to seeing more from you.

    Good thing you did, that carnosaur looks stunning!
     
  6. Sudsinabucket
    Skar-Veteran

    Sudsinabucket Well-Known Member

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    Speechless.

    Welcome to the Jungle.

    Clearly a Slann.
     
  7. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Thank you all for the kind words and warm welcomes!
    While I'm on lunch today, let me share a little preview of what I'll be working on next...

    After I finished my Carnosaur, a friend of mine asked if I would be interested in helping him finish and build his old lizardmen and seraphon. He's got a big old crate of stuff from, like, 20 years ago or more? There's metal stuff, guys on old square bases (I'll need to figure out how to pop those off so they can be put on round bases, I think?)... I'm so excited to dig into it!!
    20220828_154812.jpg 20220828_154834.jpg

    I've also got a few WIP pics of the kitbashes I started in between paint sessions on the Carnosaur...
    Astrolith Bearer! This one is pretty much ready to paint. The disc part is a 3D print of an item on Thingiverse that I found in one of the threads here that's specifically for this kitbash.
    20220803_131413.jpg

    And this one is going to be a Sunblood! I tried carving out his eye and gouging up his head where the eye is so that it looks scarred up like the official model. He needs more greenstuff around his neck and shoulders to beef him up. 20220805_220351.jpg 20220805_220322.jpg
     
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2022
  8. Explodingzeb
    Bastiladon

    Explodingzeb Well-Known Member

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    Welcome to Lustria! :)

    That is such a good idea for a painting competition. Your Carnosaur looks fantastic and I love the colours! (definitely not biased by all my Lizards being painted purple and turquoise lol).
    I can't wait to see more of you Seraphon moving forward.

    You said you paint other kinds of minis outside of Warhammer. Which kinds out of curiosity?
     
  9. Lizards of Renown
    Slann

    Lizards of Renown Herald of Creation

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  10. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    A couple years ago hubby and I moved across the state to a very small town for work and found here a LGS with a thriving TTRPG community, and I started painting minis for D&D and Pathfinder characters. Mostly 3D printed-- I'm sort of addicted to 3D printing. So as to not clog up the thread with multiple posts' worth of non-Seraphon models, I'll collage some of my favorite minis into a few images here:

    The latest minis I did, these models are by Titan Forge Miniatures. My LGS was a sponsor of a recent small comic convention and I speedpainted minis at their vendor table, and these were the three examples I concocted, mostly to see if I actually could achieve a finished mini in under 3 hours, because I'm notoriously slow, and when they offered me that task I panicked a little...! But I really like how they turned out. Contrast Paints did a lot of work here. The mages are my favorites. I've decided they're three generations of one family of heroes.
    upload_2022-8-30_18-46-3.png

    Bronze Dragons are my favorites and I recently picked up the Nolzur's bronze dragon wyrmling to paint up. I need to get a better lightbox so I can take better pictures of this one, because I love how it turned out!
    upload_2022-8-30_18-49-33.png

    This little guy is a character that I sculpted myself to 3D print, based on some artwork I made! It's a myconid. I didn't get to play much of it but I had a lot of really cool concepts for this character. I put it on myminifactory but maybe I should put em on Thingiverse too. It's designed after a bovine bolete, the third pic I was trying to get a good shot of the pores under the mushroom cap.
    upload_2022-8-30_18-55-57.png

    This one is older and was my first attempt at OSL. This model is by Artisan Guild and I made this last year for an annual D&D competition that my LGS holds (again as a fundraiser), where you make a level 10 character from the core rulebook only and try to survive a level 20 dungeon. The final three survivors then proceed to a PVP free for all. My Dragonborn Vengeance Paladin ALMOST made it to the PVP phase, I'm looking forward to trying again this September!
    upload_2022-8-30_19-6-25.png


    Next time I'm at the Hall I'll take a picture of the store window where all the painting competition entries are being displayed! There's lots of other cool entries up in there too.
     
    Last edited: Aug 31, 2022
  11. Explodingzeb
    Bastiladon

    Explodingzeb Well-Known Member

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    Those are some nice minis! :)
    Don't feel like you have to limit your posting to only Seraphon models. You could post them here or set up a separate thread to log your other mini painting endeavours. Plenty of folks on here paint a variety of stuff, myself included.
     
  12. Lizards of Renown
    Slann

    Lizards of Renown Herald of Creation

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    These are great paint jobs matey. Nice one.
     
  13. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Had a bit of a busy week, but I have some stuff to share! Unfortunately I had a hard time getting a picture of the window display of all the paint contest entries due to the shape of the window itself and glare from the sun and things, so I'll try to figure something out there later.

    But first I'll share a bit about my friend's collection that I'm going to help build, paint up and make a proper army out of. I'll put it in a spoiler on account of the size of all the pictures I'm embedding and captioning here.
    There's a lot of stuff in here that's almost as old as I am. There's dozens of these little skinks with bows that I'm pretty sure wouldn't really work for Age of Sigmar since they don't have bows anymore, right? He actually doesn't want me to do anything with those anyway because his wife painted them. I want to share them here because I think they're really charming.
    upload_2022-9-5_17-32-34.png
    Most of them are yellow like the one on the right, but the one on the left has a little modification by his wife to serve as a sort of leader for the group, I think? I love the little blood on his giant knife.
    upload_2022-9-5_17-34-26.png
    He's got eight of these old metal Kroxigors in a few different poses. He says these are his favorites (along with the big dinosaurs of course) so I'm definitely going to be working on these guys!
    upload_2022-9-5_17-36-19.png
    I think the sculpt of this "Saurus Lord" looks really neat, so it's also on the list.
    upload_2022-9-5_17-43-14.png
    I was dumb and didn't take an actual picture of this Skink standard bearer, but I found it online on the Lost Minis Wiki (which I think is a bit of a misnomer, I guess its purpose is to keep these minis from becoming lost? it's the first really good catalog I could find of all this old stuff though!) so that's where the other picture is from. I'm not sure what his function in AoS would be, but I think he's really charming so I want to figure out how to use him.

    Another thing I didn't get pictures of were his old Slann Mage Priests-- they come with a palanquin being carried by four Saurus guys, in various states of repair. He has two of them, one of which was assembled once upon a time with a macabre combination of metal pins and glue, and the other was never completely assembled. Both of their raised arms had broken off. I attempted some first-aid on them and realized I'm going to need to do some homework on how to work with these pewter minis. I'm also thinking about how to convert them into more modern-style Slann in floating chairs, because the palanquins are simultaneously heavy and super fragile, too.

    On to the new stuff! Because my friend built a Troglodon with his Start Collecting box (because he has an old Kroq-Gar and Carnosaur ready to be put together), so that means he had that Oldblood body to play around with, and I was really excited to try an Astrolith Bearer kitbash like Deed525's. I like the idea of making the Astrolith Bearer stand out from the other Saurus in an army, but I also enjoyed getting the Astroliths themselves to more closely resemble the official ones.
    upload_2022-9-5_18-2-46.png
    At first I had to make modifications to the left wrist (so the weapon wouldn't be trying to occupy the same space as the head) and the right elbow, but even with that initial adjustment, the Astrolith was leaning forward way too much. So I managed to pry the right arm up even after I had it glued down, and I was able to wedge some green stuff into the gap I had made to raise the angle of the arm. The Astrolith is held up almost completely straight now!
    upload_2022-9-5_18-5-2.png

    Next to the Astrolith Bearer I made for myself, these two really look like the Virgin and Chad memes.
    upload_2022-9-5_18-5-57.png

    Here's the current state of the beefy Astrolith Bearer (pics taken on a friend's phone because long story, I'm bad at getting good pics with phones anyway, sorry for the lack of focus)
    upload_2022-9-5_18-7-18.png
    upload_2022-9-5_18-7-27.png

    I really enjoy wet blending with contrast paints. I'm still thinking of a color scheme for the Astrolith itself, but the Saurus bearing it is going to be similar to the Scar-Veteran on my Carnosaur. My friend liked the idea of an army in the suicide awareness colors, and we're even working on a little homebrew Starhost for both of our armies. We're still working on the name and lore but I've got some rough design stuff already planned:
    upload_2022-9-5_18-10-54.png
     
  14. Sudsinabucket
    Skar-Veteran

    Sudsinabucket Well-Known Member

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    I love the theme and I love the scheme. I cant wait to hear the homebrew!

    Awesome start to the bearer!
     
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  15. Warden
    Slann

    Warden Tenth Spawning

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    I really like how you painted that carnosaur! The purple looks fantastic... as does the base! :lurking: Great job on the water-ripple effects emanating from the clawed foot, that is a beautiful touch. :cool:
     
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  16. Lord-Marcus
    Slann

    Lord-Marcus Sixth Spawning

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    You may need an undercoat to establish opacity on the barroth blue
     
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  17. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Thank you both so much!

    May be, or at least a couple layers of it, since it's such a thin paint. It's the color I used as the basis for the carnosaur's stripes, before I washed over it, and it definitely took a few applications, but it's such a lovely color!

    I hoped to post more this month, but one of my Thursdays (the only day I can really sit down and paint) was eaten up by being stuck at work for parent-teacher conferences (and no parents showed up, surprising none of us). But I did finish the Astrolith Bearer this week! Not sure when I'll be able to get nice lightbox photos for it, but here's some I took at the table (which also happened to be taken up by a bunch of nerd themed wax melts that day, don't mind them)
    photo_2022-10-02_00-02-51.jpg photo_2022-10-02_00-03-00.jpg photo_2022-10-02_00-03-02.jpg
    The little dial of the astrolith itself was a bit of an experiment. I couldn't make the entire thing gold, but I didn't want to do stone either, so I tried mixing some paints with pearlescent mixing medium that I bought a huge bottle of for a separate project I never got around to, just to see what sort of effect it would make. My camera unfortunately doesn't do it justice, but it flashes really neatly in the light. At first I tried mixing it with regular paint, but going over it with a wash afterwards just ruined the color. So my next thought was, what would happen if I mixed it with a contrast instead? The result you see here is a little bit of Aethermatic Blue, Akhelian Green, Contrast Medium, and the pearlescent paint medium.

    Feeling a little bit of paint fatigue though, I'm excited to be able to move on to something else-- since it's technically not my army (though I'm sure he'd be happy to share), I don't want to start and half-finish a bunch of things all at once, and actually finish one chunk at a time. So next up was the old box of skinks! Some of them were built but attached to slotted square bases, so first I had to de-base them, and then I put the rest of the box together. He wanted all of them with shields and melee weapons. but I tried to make some variety in their poses and which hand was holding what. With all these shields they'll be a great way to show off their unique cohort symbol!
    photo_2022-10-02_00-03-07.jpg
    Of course I can't take same sort of time I spent on the Carnosaur and Astrolith Bearer for every unit so I'm excited to try the "slapchop" technique on these guys to speedpaint them. This army is eventually going to have a lot more skinks, not just these. I'm imagining their scheme will be quite simple, blue with purple head frills or something. The one in the middle with his frill and sword raised is supposed to be a sort of champion or leader type so I'll probably add some more little bits and bobs from my Saurus Knight sprues to make him stand out more.

    And, finally... yesterday was the last day to donate/vote in the painting contest, so the results were announced today. I won! Some of my friends spoke to me afterwards as if it had been a foregone conclusion, even though the individual donation amounts were kept secret and I had a late start, and that kind of made me a little uncomfortable. It's been a long time since I've had real self-esteem issues with my work, I'm generally pleased with the things I make even when I can see room for improvement, but I know I still have a lot of that room for improvement when it comes to this stuff, and there were other entries that I felt were at least as good as mine was in terms of technique/skill. I guess I'm still not sure how to respond when the reception to something I've made is so disconnected to my own perception of it. I'm definitely proud of my Carnosaur, but he's certainly not perfect. I'm excited to see where I can go from here, though!
    But enough of the introspection, sorry for carrying on, enjoy this picture of the Carnosaur with his new Astrolith-bearing brother in arms! photo_2022-10-02_00-03-05.jpg

    This upcoming week is our fall break and my husband and I will be out of town all week visiting our families, so it'll be a little while before I'll have updates on the skinks, but I'm real excited for those!
     
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  18. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    Last week was our schools' fall break, so I was out of town visiting my family and in-laws. I didn't get any painting done, but I found a box of fellows I'm excited about at my hometown's FLGS! 20221013_210121.jpg

    My own FLGS had these last year but a D&D player bought them to use as lizardfolk or something, I think, and after I started painting seraphon I was thinking how nice it would've been to have these. I was excited to find them!

    I also got started with the "slapchop" on those skinks. The results are... well, a little underwhelming at the moment, but there's still some detail work to do that will probably bring it all together. I need to adjust my expectations, I think, since I'm forcing myself to not spend a ton of time on these numerous rank-and-file sort of guys. But I still want them to look good on their own. 20221013_203506.jpg 20221013_203615.jpg
    I want their color scheme to be similar to the two Saurus that I've painted so far, just... lighter, because it seems to me Skinks are usually a shade or so lighter than Saurus are.

    Thirdly, I've got another little project that isn't Seraphon related, but it is a gift for the friend whose army I'm working on. He won our FLGS's annual D&D tournament last month (the one I entered with the green Dragonborn I posted about earlier... And I got 2nd place!! most fun I've had in a very long time), so for his birthday next weekend, I'm making a little HeroForge mini of the character he won with... Or at least, my interpretation of him, since I don't think he really had much in mind visually, because the competition is strictly combat focused with little roleplay. The actual mini he used the day of was some random goblin. He ran a gnome wizard, School of Enchantment, an extremely "off-meta build", if such a thing could exist. We both had so much fun and I thought it'd be a nice birthday gift/commemoration of the event. 20221013_211354.jpg
    Printed and primed! I'm going to have to find time to discreetly paint it while he's not around so that it remains a surprise.
     

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  19. JTSleep
    Stegadon

    JTSleep Well-Known Member

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    Try to use lighter colors for drybrush or drybrush more. I think those skinks were at similar level as heroforge character and that is a bit dark.
    My recipe is to basically drybrush with grey until basically everything but deepest corners are grey and then drybrush lightly with pale sand (off-white).

    Hope it helps you.

    Result looks like this:
    IMG20220926140448.jpg
     
  20. ArtsyAlraune
    Skink

    ArtsyAlraune Active Member

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    And here I was worried I might have hit some of them too hard! I tried priming them all at once and they turned out a little uneven in brightness. I'll go back and prime the ones I haven't painted yet with some more Wraithbone and re-drybrush them. Thanks for the tip!
     
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