Alpha Legion Color Scheme

Well after what seems like ages of trying to figure out what color scheme I wanted to do I think I have finally figured it out.  As I was writing my last post about color schemes and picking a Horus Heresy Army I posted this picture, which I love, and realized I wanted to figure out a color scheme as close to this as possible, while giving it a bit of my own flair.  So, what do I love about this scheme?  I love the metallic blue paired with grey/silver.

So, as I was perusing blogs I came across a post (unfortunately I can't remember whose or I would link it here) where they talked about spraying a glaze onto a model instead of brushing.  This allowed a relatively even coat and you could make it darker or lighter depending on how many coats you did.  Well, I decided to try it out with a bright metallic base with a badab black wash and got the following after two passes.  

I really like the color scheme of this model.  You can tell that it is metallic blue and the glaze makes real shadows as the light hits it from different directions.  As an added bonus it is relatively quick and I feel that it looks different from a typical Ultramarines blue.  I really like the white helmets and I can't really figure out why except for the contrast.  I also like the grey detailing but I'm still trying to figure out what the spot color should be.  What do you think, orange or green?

On the model above you can see that after washing the original metallic color with black I went back and line highlighted with the metallic color.  I decided not to do this on the final models mainly because I don't like the look.  I really enjoyed the finished look of the blue model above and how it contrasts with the line highlighted grey detailing.

So, that leaves me with a color scheme mostly decided upon (besides a spot color) and I can now get to work on my Legion Reconnaissance Squad.  I have loved this squad since Forgeworld first put them out and hope I can do it justice.  I'm also going to try doing some battle damage with drybrushed silver and so we'll see how that goes.  This is my last post of the week which means I'll be going to 2 or 3 posts a week from now on.  In the next post I hope to have some really good updates on the legion tactical squad for your comments and criticism!  Until next time.

The Interwebs of the Week 6/22 - 6/29

I decided that periodically (meaning as often as I can remember) I will highlight some of my favorite posts from the week or recent past.  This week there is definitely a flavor of Horus Heresy to the posts because it has been heavily on my mind as I try to figure out the way I'm going to paint my resin addiction.  This is one of the ways that I started following a lot of awesome blogs and getting really inspired in my own hobby.  Without further ado here are the posts:

The Spikey Rat Pack recently started a project to model a full army of Squats using the new dwarf models.  This is by far the coolest model he has made yet and the integration of the dwarf model with the dreadknigh(?) body and other pieces is pretty awesome.  The paint job is also really cool and I look forward to seeing more from the blog in the near future.

Eye of Error is starting a new Dark Mechanicus Army from the wonderful fluff in the most recent Horus Heresy Book 3.  The Mechanicus models put out by Forgeworld are insanely awesome and have inspired quite a few people to take up the mantle of the automatons.  This will be a really cool project to follow and don't those paint jobs look seamless?  Oh wait, they aren't actually paint jobs they are photoshop!  Frikin sweet right?  I think this army is going to look awesome and even wet my appetite for a Mechanicus army while I have so much other unpainted resin on my painting desk.

Up next is a blogpost from The Dark Templar that highlights the difficulty I am having with figuring out paint schemes.  I must admit that painting yellow the right color is ridiculously difficult and I'm running into the same problems.  Looking through his posts I can tell that he's not only going at this systematically but also that once he settles on the right color scheme it will be awesome.  I must admit that one of the reasons I am posting this here is to remind not only of the trouble with the color yellow, but also in the hope that he'll find a good recipe I can use!

The final post is from the great Dave Taylor.  I think that if you know anything about Warhammer you already know about Dave Taylor and his excellent modeling and painting skills.  He's been one of my hobby heroes for quite a long time and I even got to meet him personally at Adepticon in April which was really fun.  Among his many armies Dave has started a Death Guard one with his typically beautiful and simplistic color schemes.  If you aren't already following his blog you should be, because his modeling and painting are quite awesome.

With that we've got the end of this post.  I hope you enjoyed it, will follow these blogs, and make sure to come back and visit my blog tomorrow when I have some more Alpha Legion painting to show you. As always, comments and criticism are welcome!

New Airbrush

So today a wonderful little gift arrived in the mail from that wonderful place called Amazon.  A few days ago someone on the Facebook group Warhammer for Grown-Ups said that Amazon had a great deal on Badger Sotar 20/20.  I read through some of the reviews saying it was a great airbrush, perfect for fine detail, and many people said that it was like all other well made and well supported Badger products.  I'm really happy with how quickly the airbrush arrived and especially that since I bought the last one on Amazon it was 90% off!  I've heard of other people getting these deals but it's the first time I've ever gotten one.  

Like many have already said, the Sotars 20/20 does not come with a hard case like many other badger airbrushes, but the cardboard box it arrives in is sturdy and adequate.  As you can tell from the picture above, it comes with an extra needle, a few other replacement parts, and all the tools you need to take apart and clean the airbrush.  I actually think the replacement needle might be a different gauge so that you can change out the thickness of paint you can use in the gun.  I'm not completely certain, though, as I haven't had the chance to switch out the needles and compare the spray patterns.The main reason I got an additional airbrush was to do very targeted pre-shading and highlighting on models without bleeding into areas I didn't want to affect.  The Patriot 105 is a great airbrush but I couldn't figure out a way to make really thin and consistent lines so let's see if the Sotar 20/20 can help!

In the picture above you can see that the 20/20 ends with an additional nut that has numbers circling it dash marks periodically.  This is the coolest feature of the 20/20 so far.  What you do is screw this nut in all the way and it completely locks the two-stage trigger from pulling back and sending any paint through the airbrush.  Then, as you unscrew the nut pictured above you slowly allow the trigger to move more and more, making your spray pattern larger.  This is great because if you are going to make a lot of lines the same thickness you can simply set this nut at say 1.5 and pull the trigger back all the way knowing that every line will be the exact same thickness.  I know that if I were a better airbrusher it wouldn't matter but for a beginner this is awesome.  You can even adjust it as you go so you can switch from a 1.5 to a 3.0 in two seconds. You can see the effects below.

This picture shows you the consistency and control available to you while using this airbrush.  I was amazed at how simple it was and how it made putting paint where I wanted it to go so much easier and quicker.  With the detail available there are a few things I've noticed that are different than my Patriot 105.  First, the paint dries on the needle tip a lot more quickly.  I think this may be because I need to thin out the paint more and also turn up the PSI on my compressor a little more but I haven't tested that out yet.  However, I did learn that if I use the two step trigger to stop the paint and then stop the air, rather than just letting off the trigger completely, it did help.  This may be something that people already know, but I've never seen the tip to let the trigger push all the way forward before letting off the air so I thought I would include it.

Overall, after one day I really like this airbrush.  As a beginner it is simple to use and really gives me a lot of control.  The one downside is that it doesn't come with good instructions about the airbrush itself. However, my Patriot 105 didn't come with good instructions either so it must be a Badger thing.  Would I recommend paying $400 for the airbrush?  Probably not unless you are going to be using it for your job.  However, right now on Amazon it is 80% off and will likely keep being reduced.  For that price I would definitely recommend you purchase it if you want to do more detailed airbrushing and don't trust your own ability to maintain consistent, small lines.

Kabal of a Thousand Nights

The Kabal of a Thousands Nights is the very small and WIP Dark Eldar army.  I've long been a supporter of the Craftworld Eldar but wanted to take the dive and try out a Dark Eldar army.  The updated models are absolutely gorgeous and the difficult play style is something I wanted to try out.  So, if you can tell from my iPhone photos, these Dark Eldar are not dark at all.  They are painted in Dheneb Stone/Rakarth Flesh with Blue/Grey weapons and green leather/flesh.  As I thought about the DE I decided that I wanted to do something out of the norm and so I began brainstorming army ideas, background, color schemes, names, etc.

Something I love about the Dark Eldar is their semi-nomadic nature in real space.  The appear seemingly from nowhere, descend upon isolated settlements or worlds, take what they need and want, then vanish.  This idea reminded me of the marauding tribes in pre-islamic Arabia that would descend out of the desert and attack villages, trade caravans, etc.  So, I wanted a color scheme that was simple, striking, gave homage to Islam and the history of the Middle East (I studied Arabic, Farsi, and the Middle East in University).  So the armor is painted to look like sand and camouflage the raiders and warriors as they attack out of the desert.  The green color is fun to paint, striking with the desert colors, and is recognized as the color of Islam because this is the color that Muhammed wore.  Not only that, but I thought that it looked remarkably like Ork skin and that the nomadic nature of the DE could transfer into them hunting, and herding tribes of Orks in addition to terrorizing other peoples.

As I hope you can see in the photos I used greenstuff to create scarves around the faces of each of the models.  This will be a recurring theme throughout the army (except possibly on the Incubi who are too awesome to need scarves).  This is a throwback again to pre-islamic marauders, but also a realistic way for the DE to keep the sand and sun away from their mouths and skin.  I am really bad with green stuff so it also gives me an opportunity to practice and get more comfortable with the medium.  Perhaps I'll do a short tutorial on how to make them for people that are interested.

I don't want to write a novel and have a ton of work that I should be doing instead so I'll leave the back story until a later post.  I know that the army badge will be Arabic script for one thousand in a stylized and brutal way.  I really enjoy writing Arabic so it will be fun to incorporate it into the models.  I'm actually hoping to practice painting a few of these guys with the airbrush soon and see if I can speed up the laborious line highlight process.  We'll see how that goes (I don't have a lot of hope because of the thickness of the paints).  I'll leave you with two more WIP models.  I haven't quite decided on the basing scheme.  I had thought to use desert themed but know that contrast is nice so I might base them in an urban theme as if they had just entered the city.  I don't know yet.

The shock prow already looks like
it has Arabic Script on it!

Thoughts on Heresy Armies

So, I know one of the big things that drives people to a blog is content which means that to start this sucker off I am going to see if I can blog every day for at least the first week.  This will include a lot of different subjects but hopefully things that will catch everyone's interest and show some of my skills (if the blessed internet actually thinks I have any).

This post will be about my thoughts on Horus Heresy Armies.  I bought quite a few bits of gorgeous Forgeworld Horus Heresy models and now need to figure out how to paint them.  So, lets go through the armies I really like and what they have going for them including any specialist units and paint schemes.

Iron Warriors (Pre-Heresy)

Found Here: http://goo.gl/88jeUU

     I have loved Iron Warriors almost since I first got into the game.  I have loved their gritty style, the fact that the chaos version doesn't deal with mutations or a particular Chaos God, and the fact they are siege specialists.  I have always thought Iron Warriors are really cool and the Angelus Exterminatus only helped flesh out their awesomeness in addition to the Ultramarines series.  I can't wait until Forgeworld comes out with Perturabo I think it is going to be a really amazing model.  Also, the special rules for the Iron Warriors terminators and havocs are awesome and I think the models will look really good. Another great thing is that the tactics of the Iron Warriors are straight forward.  Bring lots of big guns, blow the crap out of you, and then charge right at you.  A very different set of tactics then the Eldar I'm used to playing.

Doesn't this guy look awesome?  Bad A!

So what are the downsides of the Iron Warriors?  There are really only two reasons.  First, the color scheme is really simple which means I could paint it fast but it is also really simple.  The airbrush would help with the chevrons, and overall it would be dark which isn't exactly what I wanted with the airbrush and Forgeworld stuff.  Second, while I love most of their background the fact that they don't care about the lives of their Battle-Brothers bugs me.  It's weird but fluff is very important to me so I'm a little reticent to embrace the background here.  I like the brotherhood of the Space Marines, and superior tactics, not just throwing bodies at a wall until it falls.





Alpha Legion (Pre/Post Heresy)


Alpha Legion are really cool.  They are rumored to be one of the largest chapters (along with the Iron Warriors and Ultramarines) and focus on subtlety and misdirection.  Their color scheme is pretty much anything you want varying between metallics, blues, greens, etc.  The guy to the left is awesome, he looks brutal and the silver Hydra is really cool.  Some of my favorite conversions online are of true-scale alpha legion and I could use the Legion of the Damned rules along with the Militarium Tempestus to create a really cool and "flufftastic" army.   Not only that, but unlike the Iron Warriors their colors can be bright and make good use of the airbrush.  Their marks of armor are mostly the newer, more sleek versions, and their fluff shows that they made the ultimate sacrifice to save humanity (although I think the Heresy novels will show that they were really duped by a bunch of aliens).  Also, twin primarchs!?  I know there aren't rules in the new Heresy Book from Forgeworld but the models would be sweet.

So what's wrong with the Alpha Legion?  Well, their fluff is cool but until really recently when awesome pictures like this one from Dave Taylor's Blog showed up and I thought about how I could do that with an airbrush.  They are pretty sweet because they are bright, beautiful, and a good mix of colors.  Another great example (although a little too bright for me) is Marc Raley's Alpha Legion.  I like these bright schemes but am still out on the weathering and pigments.  I'm just starting to figure out the use of the airbrush and adding battle damage seems like a technique to learn another day.  Finally, I don't really want to pick a legion just because I think they're pretty you know?  But that hydra, such a sweet legion symbol!



Imperial Fists

http://studiocolrouphobia.net/

A lot of reasons for me liking the Iron Warriors apply to my like of the Imperial Fists as well.  They are freakin' hard core and built the Imperial Palace to hold of the forces of Horus and protect the Emperor.  They are forward, hard, and Sigismund was the best fighter of any Space Marine in any legion.  Whereas the Iron Warriors threw their men at fortresses willy-nilly, the Imperial Fists were more tactical and cared about the Battle Brothers.  After the rest of the post, I'm sure you can understand that the bright yellow color scheme is well to my liking because of it's brightness and difficulty.  Also, there is a ton of fists stuff scattered throughout the 40k and 30k universes.  I also really like the rules for their special units especially the special Breacher Squads which are some of my favorite models in the whole HH line.

What are the cons?  Honestly their aren't a ton.  I don't like Rogal Dorn as much as either Alpharius/Omegon or Perturabo but being the second best is pretty awesome.  Everything else is pretty awesome, except I am having a lot of trouble with painting yellow through the airbrush.  I know this was a plus, but it's also a con because it really is difficult.  However, if I can pull it off I know it would be awesome.

http://thepaintingbunker.com/

Other Sweet Chapters I've Thought About

Sons of Horus - Cons, I hate Horus.  Pros- Loken is awesome and so are their tactics, fluff, and color scheme.
Thousand Sons - The most tragic story of the whole Horus Heresy and Magnus is a pretty sweet.  I love their aesthetics, fluff, tactics, pretty much everything except the Dark red and bone.  Also, their special units and models haven't been released.
Salamanders - Along with the Imperial Fists these have been a favorite for a while (my original DIY chapter was a successor chapter using both sets of geneseed).  I love their primarch, he's immortal and a freakin beast!  Their models coming out of Forgeworld are awesome, their tactics and fluff are fun, and their color scheme would be cool and easy to paint.

What Have I Decided?
Well, this may seem like a loser move but I think my answer is all of them!  No one around here plays 30k so it's not like I need a uniform army.  I don't really want to be another marine player in the area so I want to play them as 30k where you don't have a choice.  Plus, there are such sweet models coming out of Forgeworld that painting them multiple different paint schemes just seems like the right thing to do.  So, now I just have to figure out ways to paint them all and we'll be on our way right?  Hopefully I'll have some updates soon!

Alpha Legion Test Models

So I've been using the Dark Vengeance Dark Angels to try out the airbrush and figure out what scheme I like the most for Alpha Legion if that's what I decide to go for with my Forgeworld Horus Heresy stuff.  This is the first time I've ever panted without a base and I must say that it is really fun, much easier, and makes me feel way more legit because it's what I see on other people's blogs.  One of the hardest things to figure out about painting Alpha Legion is what color to paint them!  Pictures I've seen put them in dark blue, light blue, all shades of green, and even purple like the cover of the Legion book.

"Metallic Look"

These are three of the looks that I have been trying out.  Unfortunately I actually like them all I think but I have to pick just one right?  So, if anyone ever sees this I'd love to get your take on what you think is coolest or most accurate.  Another consideration is time.  Line highlighting sort of sucks and maybe the new airbrush will help me speed that up.  Not only that, but airbrush line highlighting will make the color modulation a lot better and a lot cleaner.

I posted these pictures on a facebook group and one person said they like the metallic one the best.  At first it wasn't my favorite but I'm actually starting to lean towards it.  It looks pretty cool, different, and changes based on how you look at it sort of like the Alpha Legion.  Anyway, we'll see which one I end up using if I don't go with Iron Warriors or Imperial Fists instead.

Blue

Greenish Blue

Let's Try this Again

So I've tried to blog about my miniature addiction a few times and always found myself getting too busy and dropping the hobby for awhile.  However, this always occurred close to the end of a semester at University, and since I just graduated I don't think that will be an issue anymore.  However, my wife is due in a month and a half with our first child so who knows what will happen.  Regardless of the future, I'm going to try again and see if I can blog for as long as possible this team.  Maybe I'll even be able to get a few followers, or develop a community with some of the many blogs that I read on a daily basis.  We'll see I suppose.

As a way of introduction, I have been collecting and playing Warhammer for over a decade now and started way back in the days of glorious 3rd edition with DIY Space Marine Chapter called the "Blazing Fists".  After a few years of the Space Marines I switched over to Eldar and have been playing them for the past 6 or 7 years.  I really started to collect them when the first Apocalypse came out and so I have a lot of multiples (like 4 old-school metal Fire Prisms still in their shrink wrap).  Recently I branched out a bit with a small force of Dark Eldar, a few Tau models, and at Adepticon this year I bought my first Forgeworld purchases in the form of HH Marines and Death Korps of Krieg.

I also recently purchased an airbrush and as this picture can show you I've started the learning curve!  I really enjoy airbrushing so far but it is definitely a hard technique.  I have a Badger Patriot 105 now and last night I impulse bought the Badger Air-Brush Co Sotar 2020-2F Large Gravity Feed Airbrush with Fine Head for 90% off.  My wife wasn't too happy this morning when I told her but she understands my addiction and it was less than $50 so it was all good.  I got the airbrush to quickly paint light colors so I'm hoping to use it on some Imperial Fists and Alpha Legion.  We'll see how it turns out especially since the 2020 is supposed to allow me to do clean lines for shading.

This blog, for now, will likely chronicle a lot of my painting attempts, maybe some list building, and model building.  I wish I was better at conversions and green stuff but maybe that's the next part of the hobby I'll try!  Unfortunately the local seen for warhammer playing is quite dry but there is a tournament coming up next month I might try to play in.  We'll see.

For my next post I'll talk about the name of the blog, some of the background on my armies, and maybe any updates on painting exploits.  We'll also see I can take some good photos but for a little while at least it's gonna be iphone photos.