CRC’s Crazy Compendium 2; Eclectic Boogaloo

Tried seeing what more pictures in the .gif does to the smoothness of the final piece. Works nicely. Also made some rotating pictures with SPINZAM that you can drag to spin them around! Hopefully the embedded one will work, but if not I’ll add the link.

<iframe src=”https://spinzam.com/shot/embed/?idx=377890″ width=”640″ height=”640″ scrolling=”no” style=”max-width:100%; max-height:100vw;”></iframe>

Link: https://spinzam.com/shot/?idx=377890

I’m a bit taken with photography at the moment…so I’ve been playing. All using free software (IRFAN for batch resizing and GIMP for .gif generation). Took me a while to get the frame speed just the way I wanted it, but it’s actually really simple to put together. Thought I’d use my finished Eliminator Squad that I started a while back and took a few pictures on a turntable as I rotated it (about 45 degrees each time to give me 8 pictures.

I manually cropped the images to the same pixel counts, but IRFAN can do this for you as well, but I haven’t played much with it. I used IRFAN to reduce the size of the images to about 30% of their original size (which is also a good size for uploading them, I find) then loaded the images as layers into GIMP, used the ‘animation’ options under the ‘Filters’ tab to optimise for .gif. You can look at a playback afterwards under the same options. Following that you Export As, making sure to change the filetype to .gif in the name (it defaults to .png), then fill out the export options that pop up after hitting the ‘Export’ button and your .gif is done! Really quite simple. Here’s what mine ended up with. Not bad for a first try!

Been away a fair bit with school and future plans, but I’ve been able to borrow some photography equipment for my Photogrammetry class, so I’ve been taking some nice pictures of minis I’ve finished. Here’s a few:

Adeptus Custodes Shield-Captain! These were some early lighting experiments. Lighting for photogrammetry is a bit different from just picture taking, but I was rather enjoying playing around with things.

Heresy Ultramarines Praetor! Went with a bright red for retro reasons, and I’m glad I did. It also meant that I had to redo another thing that I planned to use for Heresy…or at least the weapon casings…

This SHOULD be the last change I make on this Predator…maybe…

Updates may be sparse; I’ve been very busy with school and such, but I’m enjoying the use of the equipment, so I might be taking some more shots of minis with it in the near future, so we’ll see what happens!

Been a while… I spent the summer on the Canadian Shield doing fieldwork…so no hobby got done until I was back. Haven’t been focusing too much on the forums because I’m just getting generally distracted by everything, but I’ve gotten some painting done. I’ve even played a few games, too! So here’s the latest that I’ve gotten done; a Firestrike Servo-Turret and an Eliminator Sergeant (the rest of the squad is sort of half done…). The Techmarine has his ‘Mars markings’ picked out in Khorne Red (GW) where the 3rd Coy. markings are picked out in Mephiston Red (GW) to differentiate the two colours. I think it works ok. The Eliminators are something a bit different as I ‘camo’ed’ their armour as well with a nod to the camo patterns of old Rogue Trader era, but still holding to the colours of modern 40k. I’m pretty pleased with how he turned out…though the decals caused me enough problems that I ordered some Microset and sol so I don’t have to find other ways around the decal problem…

Still got 2 more Eliminators to finish up, and 20 Tommies so I can have a full platoon painted ready to actually game with… Not sure how regular updates will be happening, but we’ll see.

The camo pattern on the top is done, and I even finished off the little bits and pieces on the mini, too…minus the glass; wasn’t sure what to do with that…I’ll get back to it later.

Then I picked out some extra details to finish it off. Red on the wings to mimic the red bands near the machine guns on a Spitfire, also a read casing on the end of the blasters just for a flash of colour. The little rectangle beneath the cockpit was too perfectly flag shaped to not do SOMETHING. The metal was based Leadbelcher (GW) and either coated in Black Templar Contrast (GW) or Wyldwood Contrast (GW) then drybrushed with Stormhost Silver (GW). The canopy glass was just blocked in with Stegadon Scale Green (GW) for now, as I’m not sure what to do with it. I was going to gloss it, but I want to do a bit more work, so I left it for now. I’ll get to it later, but for now she’s done.

Bit tricky to take pics of the underside once she’s on the stand…but I covered that below pretty well. 😛

Not sure what’s up next…maybe more Marines? We’ll see…my Macragge Blue spray is getting pretty low…

I’ve been using the box as a stand long enough! The Age of the Marine is over*; the Age of the T-47 has come!

The basic plan for my T-47 is to mimic old WW2 camo that’s often used on things like Spitfires, but I started with the underside first. That being said, lets have a quick look at some reference images.

Still not sure if I’ll go with the Early War brown and green or the later grey and green, but for now I started with the underside. Now, the reference pictures show a bit of variation in the ‘blueness’ of the colour, and I think the colours I chose are a little too far into the blue for an ‘accurate’ colour, but my brother and I were discussing it earlier and he has an alternate method that he’s going to try on a Spitfire he has lying around that I think sounds pretty good.

And that’s the underside finished! Maybe I’ll get to the topside this evening…and I’m leaning towards the grey, I think…

The system my brother is going to try, though, it is to basecoat with Grey Seer (GW) maybe with some Fenrisian Grey (GW) mixed in, then a thinned down (pretty much to a glaze) coat of Gryphound Grey Contrast (GW) before highlighting (probably drybrushing) with Fenrisian Grey again. I think it should look good, but we haven’t tested it yet!

I’m supposed to be writing a paper, but I got distracted and went to check on the forums to this week’s Community Spotlight and I was very surprised to see my work alongside the fantastic work of FOGH and henrileite. Go check out their projects, if you haven’t already; they are both fantastic displays of skill! Is this just a vapid ‘I got a Golden Butt Butt’ post, though?

Ben mentioned that he liked the idea of updating a paintjob and I hadn’t really had much time to put into the actual project log for the Puma and Churchill, so I thought I’d use the opportunity to add a little extra…and of course to procrastinate on the paper I’m supposed to be writing. Win-win, right?

First tip I will give is before you start a ‘glow up’ project is to consider any decals you may have used. I was pretty lucky in that I have quite an extensive collection of decals that I’ve kept over the years (I have some of the decal sheets for GW kits from the mid 2000’s, I think…) but depending on how extensive your repaint is you might end up needing to reapply some of them. As you can see from my Puma I actually ended up adding more than I originally had, but even though the vehicle number is the same from old to new, I did have to paint over those places and add new decals. Important to consider.

Second thing is that you can do this in stages. The whole glow up on the Puma started because I painted the Jerry Cans the same sandy colour as the rest of the vehicle and this is where realism and artistic license begin to mix. It’s accurate that Jerry Cans were painted in the dunkelgelb colour, but that doesn’t mean that was the only colour of paint they had!

Usually, if you have something that works, you keep using it, so I decided to pick them out in a dark grey, then thought, ‘now they are all grey…’ so added in some green then thought, ‘I have the green out, may as well add some camo patterns…’ and the whole thing grew from there! I’m sure anyone who is a perfectionist with their minis understands the pull of ‘just one small change’ and then realising they’ve painted a whole mini again… Originally, I wasn’t going to make the sandy colour a bit brighter, then decided ‘why not?’ after I finished up the green.

A mini is never 100% finished with me, I guess. 😛

Another thing I’ve talked about in previous projects is weathering, but weathering is always one of those things I never truly do the same way twice (which is probably a good thing!) and I like to experiment with what I can get a paint to do. With the Churchill I went a little heavier with my weathering, whereas I was a little more subtle on the Puma. I try to use 2 tones of brown paint for the mud. Usually I use Tallarn Sand (GW) and Dryad Bark (GW), but anything really works and soils are all sorts of colours! I tend to find that the initial pass of the lighter brown drybrushed in a circular motion against the lower half of the tank works for dried mud and dust that is thrown up, whereas a stippling motion of the darker paint on top give a nice fresh mud look. You could use texture paints to add a bit more, but at the scale of Bolt Action tanks I find that’s a bit much (would work well for the slightly bigger 40k stuff, though!).

My other favourite thing to do with weathering is using watered down contrast paints. I haven’t tested with the new Speed Paints, but in theory it should work the same way. The trick is to water down the paint a lot with water and not medium; you kind of want it to make the paint a bit odd. Then take this paint and run it into recesses or under bolts and plates and such. Give it a short time (like maybe 20 seconds) to start to dry then pull it down a bit to give a streak effect. It’s far from perfect, but I also have these paints lying around and I don’t have pigment powders. It might take time to get the mixes down to where you want them, so I’d suggest testing this technique out on a test mini, or event a piece of scenery or something like that.

Hopefully this adds a little more to the process of painting my Puma and Churchill, and thanks again for the appreciation from the team!

So the odd colours on the left shoulder and the shield are because my Ultras are 3rd company and their Captain, Fabian, has personal heraldry that switches from the standard blue field and red trim to red field and blue trim. I just made the decision to make a Primaris version for my Ultras because no book says he hasn’t crossed the Rubicon yet, and because I don’t care anymore if it upsets people that hate new GW lore. Not much else to add because I should be packing/writing and not doing this…

Not sure if a Puma counts as a ‘Big Cat’…it’s a big vehicle…and is named after a cat… Who knows; not I! Anyway, the old paintjob I had was a bit bland with no colours to really break up that slightly dulled down dunklegelb colour… It looked a tad bit boring…

The paintjob itself isn’t great. Realistically I should have done a full strip and repaint (and maybe I will later), but a nice update was something I’m happy with for now. The camo pattern here was just some Waaargh! Flesh stippled on to give a bit of a diffuse contact. It’s not perfect, but it works great for an ad hoc camo application in the field.

The rear ‘license plate’ (not sure on the technical name in English…let alone German…) may not be correct, but it sort of works for my purposes. Like I said, not a perfect paintjob (if you look closely you can see gaps and the underside is just awful), but good enough for now!

Finally got my Victrix Honour Guard finished (after having them for about 2 years)! I built them as subassemblies so I could get the lining of the cloak and the legs painted relatively easily. Downside there is that it meant the shoulder over the shield arms had to be fixed on afterwards…and the seam shows… I did my best to ‘hide’ it by making sure that the gap wasn’t too visible, but I didn’t succeed very well…

I’ve had this Churchill lying around for a while, so I thought I’d get it done. I have it marked as 4th Tank Battalion, Grenadier Guards, B Squadron. I was going to add a name, but I couldn’t actually find the list of names that are available for the other battalions in the 6th Guards Tank Brigade, so this is what we have. Went with plenty of mud, because that’s what an Infantry Tank SHOULD have!

The snowspeeder from the box beneath might show up soon, we’ll see. Hopefully these updates can get a bit more regular, but we’ll see.

Jaquen H’ghar is next up. Didn’t take me too long to get him finished, but I almost forgot about his hair until I looked up what colour it was supposed to be in the books. Pretty pleased with the contrast between the more dour colours of his clothes and the brightness of his hair.

Not many details on HOW I painted these, but I’m just updating what I’ve been working on. Hopefully things can calm down a bit and I can get back to doing this properly… A possible pause on Game of Thrones stuff, though; I stored most of it at my parents place for a bit while I move flats at the end of the school year.

Been busy with schoolwork, but the next few posts are projects I’ve been doing on the side when I just need to stop looking at papers and numbers, so here’s the first; another Glover Outrider, now with more sword! He’s painted the same way just with a few changes to where some colours are used to give the impression of uniformity with variations.

The first mini I painted in 2022. Doesn’t look like it’ll be a productive year for getting stuff painted… More to come!

Been a bit tumultuous the past few months for me, and I haven’t got much hobby done, but this evening I got bored and decided to go back to the decal on the last mini I paints; the House Glover Stark Outrider. I swear it’s be more logical to actually name the factions after the regions…but I realise why they did it the way they did. Anyway, this is what the shield looked like before I started.

And that is the total painting I’ve done for 2.5 months…I’m bad at this whole efficiency thing. Hopefully I can get more done soon, but no promises; uni is mild chaos right now…

Another mini down! Today is a Stark Outrider from CMON’s A Song of Ice and Fire Miniatures Game. Typing that out I can see why people use acronyms for things… Anyhoo, I made one modification to this chaps which was to remove the sculpted Direwolf from the shield so I could replace it with the fist emblem here so I could paint the chap up as a Glover. Technically I should paint the white portions of the decal in silver, but for now I’m leaving it as it is. This is also why the tabbard is scarlet. I like mixing it up and bit, and a medieval-based setting like this is a great opportunity to add heraldry in here and there. I like heraldic things.

As a small note, I had to mess about with the brightness to try and match the colour it ACTUALLY looks in person, but the lighting in my flat is terrible… I tried…

No immediate plans for what’s coming next, but we’ll see what I have time for; school is getting a bit busy at the moment with it being midterm season… Happy Hobby, everyone!

Her glorious hair wouldn’t fit in the helmet, for a start. But here she is! GW gave a name like Morgwaeth, or something like that, but Elskling is a character name I keep using in Warhammer Total War when I play it, so that’s the name I’m going with for this one. I have a Sorceress mini in the same colours called Cosmic for a similar reason…though I can’t type her original last name here… Anyway, silly names aside, this completes my Shadespire team for the Murder Girls which has taken a fair bit of time to paint 5 minis… I don’t recall if I started them in this project or last year’s project, if I’m honest. Anyhoo, here she is:

Managed to get some priming done so I could finish off my Trainee Chaplain. I think I’ll call him Jeffrey…because I call everything Jeffrey… However the base is dominated by a dead ork, who I’ll call Gus, for reasons.

I suppose there IS purple on the mini…but not on the ork, so he’s not invisible…this time. There’s a few things I want to touch on with Gus before I get to the finished product, so lets start with how he turned out.

So we’ll kick off with the obvious point of ‘what colour is ork blood’? Because that’s been a back and forth all over the place for years. I went with red tones here for one very good reason (and a reason once given in a GW publication SOMEWHERE in the long ago); red shows up better. So the innards of poor Gus were done with that in mind. I could have highlighted them up more, or added a bit of gloss for ‘wetness’ but I decided to push ‘realism’ too far.

I also went for a triad system for painting the skin so there’s no shades on it at all. Basically, I realised just how dark of a colour WAAARGH Flesh already is as a base and didn’t want it any darker in case to the Carroburg Crimson didn’t show up at the wound edges like I wanted it to. I also used Ellysian Green as a final highlight which is maybe a bit of an odd jump, but the overall look here worked well enough. Nurgling Green (or whatever the equivalent is) would have maybe been a better option.

For clothing I wanted a good contrast against the more dour colours of the Marine, so I went almost 2nd Ed. with them. Going straight for the bright red of Evil Sunz Scarlet for the armour plate and a nice bright yellow for the shirt. It worked out well, I think, and really does give a nice contrast as you’ll see with the finished product.

The leather straps are an experiment I’m quite pleased with. Since I had a base of Zandri Dust, I wanted to see how it would look with a Black Templar Contrast paint over top of it. It came out ok, but was lacking something a bit more leathery, so I did some broad highlights with Dryad Bark, and then almost stipple highlighted on some Gorthor Brown along the edges to get that old, worn leather look. I rather like how it turned out, though if I do it next time I might use Wyldwood Contrast rather than Black Templar.

Anyway, onto the final deal!

It’s another Marine, but he is what I had primed and I just wanted to paint something. I don’t remember which special edition mini this is (I have Sergeant Jovian in my head, but that might not be right), but I decided a while ago that I was going to paint him as a trainee Chaplain and use him as a Lieutenant in games, though I already have a LOT of them lying around… Anyway, it’s just the main mini for now because I never got around to priming the dead ork on the base, so that’ll have to wait for later.

Specifically, I was going for a Haudensaunee look (Iroquois for those who aren’t aware of their own name for themselves) which is why I picked purple and white for the heraldry colours. I was going to try and do a whole shin guard in purple with the white symbol on the Haudensaunee Confederacy flag, but free-handing squares is a pain and the purple just didn’t stand out enough from the blue, so I improvised a bit. The knee pad is reverse colours of the flag with just the central ‘fire’ symbol shown.

So other than those possible changes and tweaks, he’s done except for the base. Not sure what to do with the ork, to be honest, but I might try and make him a bit fun and bright just to counter some of the darker tones I have on the main mini, but we’ll have to see what I come up with.

Finished up the other 4 Marines from my Assault Intercessor squad. Pretty pleased with how they turned out, even if it did take me a bit longer than I planned to finish them up. They will eventually get some grass tufts on their bases; I just don’t have any right now. Anyway, here’s the gang!

The next two I’ve taken to calling the Twins…seeing as they’re duplicate poses…obviously. I could have done some work to change them up a bit, but I just didn’t feel like it, so these chaps are the main reason for the random panels being picked out in red. I also noticed when taking the pictures that one is a bit of a darker blue than the other…must have had less paint on the bristles when drybrushing and not noticed it… I also gave one of them a bullet decal, which is apparently a badge for accuracy. Either way, these guys started the whole thing of putting some kind of pattern or something individual on the armour, and I like how that idea turned out.

And now with extra Sergeant!

Not sure what’s up next as school is right around the corner, but I have another Marine primed that I was going to paint as a trainee Chaplain…but I also want to get my Murder Girls finished and there’s only one lady left to paint there, so we’ll see.

Almost 2 months since my last post…that’s longer than I thought it was… Anyway, moving problems and just general burnout and other issues finally subsided enough for me to get something done. It technically hasn’t taken me 2 months to paint one mini…but I have been working on this group for almost a month-ish. Efficiency!

Anyway, there was a bit of a ‘sell off your spares’ thingy at my FLGS in early July and I managed to snag 5 Assault Intercessors for a damn good price and they were already primed, too. Had to do one head fix because the pose was just awful, and they were primed white instead of my typical blue, but it was a VERY good price. Basecoating Marine armour is not something I’ve done for a while with a brush, though, so that stage just took a long time. I decided, though, that following my additions of heraldry on many of my minis I also wanted to take the idea of individualism that little bit further and took a bit of inspiration from the Clone Wars series. If they can make literal clones of the same man look like individuals, then I could do it with Marines.

I did say I got a squad of them…and I did start them at the same time, but I’m not very good at batch painting and just decided to steam on with the Sergeant. But the others are coming too…slowly. I also apologise for the lighting in the pictures, but that’s a bit downside of living in a basement. I really wish I could have got a proper student house, but you get what you can find these days. Anyway, here’s the proof of the others, and hopefully I can get them done over the next week or so.