The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Rust is alright

 

Krylon has redeemed itself in my eyes. Though I was originally very upset with their black primer, as I felt it ruined a lot of the details on my gargant, they apparently make a rust colored primer that I discovered today. After a few preliminary trials, I am in love with this - it's the perfect primer for ork vehicles.

The color, of course, needs a fair bit of tempering. I think a decent inking will bring all the details back out and make them pop again, but I believe what comes next is the toning process where I carefully airbrush a more desaturated brown onto the parts. The nice thing about this rust-orange primer color is that it's really easy to go in the directions I want - that is to say, red on some plates, brown rust on the others. The parts I paint blue I think will have to be coated in a black and worked up from a dark blue again, as I don't picture blue will go on well over orange.

I am certainly going to use this primer for my other ork vehicles in future, though.

Krylon is crap in a can

After a great deal of searching, I finally found Krylon black primer, on the recommendation of my friends. The new GW black just isn't a suitable primer, anyway. I hit the gargant up with it because recently I've been in the mood to paint this sucker, but I was immediately dissapointed by the Krylon primer - it was so watery, even a little bit would pool, drip, and run! I shook the hell out of that can first, too, and I even tried the other one I bought - they were both like that. Needless to say, I am super-dissapointed, and as a result of the poor spray I ended on putting the primer on a bit thicker than I would have liked. I am probably going to have to take some super-fine grit sanding paper to a spot or two that has paint on it too thick already.

Still, here we go. The grot rocket isn't primed yet because I forgot I had to wash it with soap and water, being a resin piece, and it's drying off for now.

 

Some all-around touchups needed to the base black, but nothing I can't handle with a brush. I am not recommending Krylon to anyone, ever, though. Stuff sprays like water.

Now, I've been considering the best way to paint this. I haven't been able to until recently as my airbrush compressor was on loan and needed to be returned, but I finally got the money to go ahead and get myself one of my own. I've been looking at this gargant and according to the general painting method of that one, the whole gargant was airbrushed intermittenly with a rusty brown color. I could try that out on mine, but mine has a whole lot more individual panels and such and I'm not so certain that would look good.

What I'm basically saying is I'm not sure how to proceed. Largely because I don't have much of a paint scheme in mind - all I know is that I want it rusty with the occasional mismatched red or blue panel - but I'm not sure where to begin.

Advice is, as always, much appreciated.

The finer details

I probably should have put these colors on sooner.

I started picking out some details here and there - I figure before I go any farther with the ground work, I need to get the colors on some of these details so that they'll get all dirtied up. I do realize that stuff like the sandbags and barrel are clean right now, but they'll be drybrushed with scorched brown and then progressively brighter dirt colors to fit in better, I hope.

I'm really not that good at painting by hand, it seems. Those tiles in the corner have been giving me hell - I wanted to get them up to a marbly white, but every successive brighter coat I applied got chalkier and chalkier until it just looked awful. It's stuck somewhere around a messy Khaki right now. I'm hoping it will look better once I start drybrushing dirt back onto them, because they're just a mess right now.

 

I probably should have chosen a different color for the barrel - I wanted it to be leaking some sort of green slime, but the barrel ended up a brighter green than I was hoping for. I think I'm going to try going over it again with something a shade or so darker to try and tone it down a bit.

I actually think the sandbags don't look awful, as the overspray from when I was airbrushing them lends a bit to a spilled-sand appearance surrounding them. They need a bit of toning, though - I tried washing them with a brown ink, but it just pools in weird ways on the tops and doesn't look good, so I don't know what to do with them.

I coated the grot in a medium green tone - I'm going to highlight him and then hopefully drybrush him (or maybe lightly airbrush him) back into the ground with scorched brown. I also gave the girders and the lascannon a bit of a go with some dark gunmetal colors from vallejo, though I'm not fond of their metals - I actually drybrushed a brighter chainmail onto the lascannon a bit, but it doesn't look.. right, you know what I mean?

Basically, I'm hoping that once I start drybrushing my darker browns and brightening up some of the dirt patches this will all look a bit better, as right now I'm not very happy with it. The tiles need a lot of love still.

Airbush abuse

Played around with it a bit more. I drybrushed beastial brown onto the base, and it looked really bad at first, so I went back and went over it a bit with rotted flesh.. I also hit the ground up with an unusual substance - I found some 'old english' dark wood wax/stain/shiner whatever the heck it was and ran it through there. It made the ground look a bit wet and evened out the browns a bit, which was nice. I felt the buildings were a bit too bright to begin with, so I mixed up an unusual concoction of black ink, future floor cleaner, vallejo matte finish, and water - it worked surprisingly well in the airbrush to 'smoke' everything and darken the colors up without obscuring them. I then went back and drybrushed the color I'd originally based them with around the edges to try and bring out the surface details. I tried to leave them darker towards the bottom, which I think shows nicely in the little comparison animation above.

 

The base's overall color direction has probably gone a bit more orange than I was intending on with the drybrushing, but I don't think it looks bad, not yet. I want to keep that footprint with the grot in it a really deep earthy color, as it makes it look more 'sunk-in' the ground, if you know what I mean. The grot hasn't gotten paint on him yet, but he will shortly, I imagine.

I'm not sure what details to pick out on the buildings or in what colors yet, and I still haven't figured out what to do with the tiles - I tried a variety of colors in photoshop as a test, but nothing looked right.

It’s all shades of grey

Man.

I just got back from some airbrushing adventures, and wow. That is one fickle beast to use, eh? Getting the mixture just right so that it comes out properly is more art than science, I think - I made a proper mess of pretty much everything I sprayed near, including the board, which I then tried to clean up.

Anyhow, I'd started by drybrushing the buildings with a blackened fortress gray in the hopes I'd see something fruitful, but it was too inconsistent and wasn't making me all that happy - the 'gradienting' I wanted between the gray, concrete-dusted areas and the soil/mud was far too harsh with just drybrushing.

So, I whipped out the airbrush, and after a lot (and I mean a lot of trial and error) got it to spit out a reasonable darkish gray color.

SOME FREE ADVICE: ETHANOL AIRBRUSH THINNER AND VALLEJO PAINTS DO NOT A HAPPY AIRBRUSH MAKE - it seemed to clump all of the pigment in the vallejo paint up, which subsequently jammed my airbrush up all nice. It took me a few tries to figure out what the hell was going on before I decided that the bottle of thinner I bought maybe wasn't helping me, and switched back to water. Blissful water. I'll never take you for granted in airbrushing again, even if you do dry slower.

It's odd, too, because on my test sprays earlier with a vallejo flesh color the thinner worked wonderfully, but it flat-out globbed the greys up.

So, of course, having a working airbrush I proceeded to go totally overboard on spraying the grays down. This was mostly because I got a bit over-triumphant and started spraying areas I know I shouldn't have touched with grays.

The good news, for what it's worth, is that I came to my senses shortly after, re-loaded the airbrush with scorched brown, and proceeded to use a wide-angle nozzle to roll the greys back a bit into the rubble piles.

 

Now, I'm not going to lie - the browns and the greys are a bit harsh together at the moment because you're basically looking at completely unhighlighted soil on the ground - it still needs drybrushing to brighten it up properly, save for the muddy areas, which will bring it more in line with the brightness of the grey areas. I'm also going to drybrush all of the grey areas with a lighter shade to hopefully pop out the details a bit, and I'm thinking I may do a black ink wash over all of it as well - there's actually a bit of GW's roughcoat spray on the buildings at this point, as I put it on shortly before the initial black priming, which should help add a bit of surface detail.

I've not yet figured out what I'm doing with those busted-up floor tiles in terms of color.

It's got a ways to go.

Dirt ugly

Here we go.

 

I don't know if my photography is getting better or worse. I think I need to turn my exposure down a bit.

I've laid down most of the base layer of Scorched Brown on this, and it doesn't look all that bad. I've been working out how I'm going to paint the entire thing up, and here's what I've basically come to so far:

The general thought I have on this is that the building ruins should have some greys on the base around them.. the muddy areas are ones I'm going to have to work out a bit to try and maintain that soft and squishy appearance. The reds are where I'll probably drybrush a firmer rock color down, as the entire thing can't be one bit sinkhole, and the sand is just to represent some of the sandbags that have been torn open and stomped about.

I'm not sure how to best execute the grey areas, the mud, or the sand, and I'm only guessing that the brighter spots need to have a drybrushing of progressively lighter brown.

Same goes for the buildings. My initial impression was to drybrush them using boltgun or something along those lines, but I think I'm going to forego the metallics in favor of codex and fortress gray...

Blackened earth

So, I feel at this point I should mention that my choice of basing material might not have been a great idea - in future, I'll try and base properly, rather than finding a wood-putty paste in my garage and using that. The general reason is evident once you look at primed pictures of the base - the overall appearance is a bit 'muddy'.

 

Even though this has been left to dry for a very long time, some spots appear very slick and shiny, and some appear smooth - apparently areas where I may have skimped a bit on the surface sand and gravel detail. The only way I can figure out working with those spots is painting them up a bit muddy, I guess - particularly the footprint area. I did try and go light on the primer, but Citadel's new Chaos Black is a bit finicky. I think the ruins will look fine, but some of the open, bare patches that are supposed to be dirt look a bit screwy.

I'm open to ideas as to how to paint this. I don't know if flat-out drybrushing it terrain colors will do with the 'muddy' spots.

Sculpting the flames

So, that guy that's being squished by the stompa kept losing his hand. A lot. Probably because the old one was too thin I couldn't even pin it. This eventually led to the hand falling off and going missing.

I've since dug through my parts and replaced it with the one other human right hand bit I had, which happens to be holding a grenade. I pinned this one properly, I'll greenstuff around the wrist just a bit to close the seam.

I think it changes the dynamics interestingly. Humie gettin' squished has a grenade? Will he be able to set it off?

I pinned the stormboyz in place with proper greenstuffed flames.

 

Paint to come!

Stormboyz prowling the diorama

I've been wanting to put these on the diorama for a while, but I finally got my hands on two stormboyz thanks to a bitz trade. They're pinned in to be suspended in the air. I imagine I have to sculpt rocket fire to help conceal the pin, but I'm not looking forward to that.

 

Grot Captain 2.0

 

The grots need a bit of touching up, as I can see mold lines and the likes, but I like this captain more than the older one. He just looks meaner.