Category Archives: Painting

Posts, articles and links mostly concerning the painting of miniatures. Lead Painters League posts, links to resources and inspiration elsewhere, and such.

Inspiration, Painting

Fancy Photo Setup (or not…)

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After I was done taking photos of my Lead Painters League Round Five entry, I figured the setup I use might be of interest to others. So here’s a photo of the highly sophisticated setup I used for this week’s Russian Civil War-based entry!

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Fancy photo studio… click for full size.

Some leftover 3mm MDF balanced across a couple of junk chairs a roommate pulled out of the basement for some reason, on a porch that badly needs repainting! My little tabletop tripod at lower left is balanced on top of one of the banker’s boxes I used to store and transport scenery. The ground is a square of craft felt I sprayed with brown ink a few years ago; the colour backdrop is one of the ones I have available here on the Warbard for anyone to print.

The building is of course my scratch-built Russian onion-domed church; the wagon, hedge and tree should all be familiar to regular readers. The Russian Orthodox cemetery is the most recent addition, with it’s laser-cut crosses.

Lighting was provided by that convenient nearby fusion reaction (eight and a half light-minutes away is nearby by cosmic standards…) and agreeable meteorology.

A home-made lightbox has been on my to-do list for… about a decade now. When the weather allows, an outdoor setup works nearly as well.

There are a number of great photo-taking tutorials aimed at wargamers out there; check Google or YouTube for more details. One of these days I should do a links post to my favourites!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Four

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Last week’s LPL entry moves from the Lost Worlds of Round Three to the mysterious corners of the Indian subcontinent with some 28mm Thuggee cultists, also from Pulp Figures.

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The Dread Thuggee. Click to view larger.

These murderous chaps come from three different Pulp Figures packs. The three right-hand figures – the leader, acolyte and sword-bearing bodyguard – are all from PBT-24 The Mad Guru. The swordsman is from PBT-21 Thuggee w/ separate assorted Weapons & Picks, and finally the rifleman is from PBT 23 Thuggee Fighters w/Martini Rifles. I’ve got another six or so figures to finish, as well as a couple of neat scenery bits that come in the Mad Guru pack.

Most of the skin tone comes from W&N Burnt Umber acrylic artist’s ink, applied nearly full-strength over a basecoat of Reaper Intense Brown with a quick highlight (before the ink goes on) of Reaper Oiled Leather. The hair is mostly Reaper Walnut Brown, which is a very-nearly-black dark brown.

Unfortunately for them, these skulking murderers ran straight into a really spectacular group of cavalry from one of the best painters in the contest, and got soundly thrashed, although lots of people said nice things about them! Luck of the draw; I’m a pretty solidly middle-of-the-road painter so a lot of how well I do in LPL sometimes comes down to who the random matchup for a given round is!

Round Five of LPL7 is running over on Lead Adventure as you read this. Round Five is one of the Theme Bonus Point rounds, with this round’s theme being “Historical Civil Wars”. That’s right up my alley, so go see how my Russian Civil War figures are faring this week!

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Three

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More Pulp Figures goodness from last week’s LPL round. This crew of underdressed primitives was started sometime last year, finished over the winter, and have finally gotten their moment of glory, beating a very nice little regiment of 15mm Napoleonic figures in the third round of LPL7.

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The Shaman’s Crew, all from Pulp Figures. Click to view full-size.

Round Four is going on as you read this, and can be viewed over on Lead Adventure. Alas, the Thuggee figures I’ve fielded in Round Four aren’t doing as well as the Neanderthals did. Perhaps they’re overdressed?

Painting, Pulp

Lead Painters League 7, Round Two

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Round Two of the ten-week Lead Painters League over on Lead Adventure Forum didn’t go so well for me, but at least the Blood Bowl dwarf team my reporters lost to was full of unique figures well painted!

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LPL7 Round Two – Reporters from Pulp Figures. Click for full size.

The reporters are from Pulp Figures, of course.

The 7th Lead Painters League contest continues for another eight weeks over on LAF. It’s a fantastic contest on a great forum; I compete to force myself to push my painting up a notch and get stuff painted and finished! My Round Three entry is in already and will go up over on LAF Sunday morning; Rounds Four and Six are done except for basework and photography; Round Five is going to take most of the time before it’s deadline to complete, as it’s a bonus round with a big crowd of figures to finish off! Beyond that I have enough figures in progress to cover Rounds Seven through Ten, although I’m still debating what to do for bonus points and a spectacular finish in Round Ten… wish me luck!

Painting

The Workbench This Week, 27 April 2013

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Much activity on my workbench this week, with a frankly intimidating number of figures under the paintbrush, along with some other stuff like a set of the luggage I got a while back.

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Deliberately bad photo – see the next few weeks of LPL7 entries for what’s hiding behind the dragon & the paint jars!

However, given that I’ve committed to the Lead Painter’s League 7 contest for the next eight weeks or so, you’ll have to forgive the line of paint jars obscuring most of the really interesting stuff on the bench! The dragon, cave men and captive have been lurking in the back of my bench for ages, so I moved them to the front to show them off a bit! The dragon is from Reaper and probably mostly done, unless I decide it’s entirely too blue and head back to the drawing board. The cave dudes are Copplestone; their captive is from Pulp Figures. The figures in behind are from… mostly Pulp Figures, actually. You’ll have to follow my progress in the LPL over on LAF to see them sooner than here!

Historicals, Painting

Lead Painters League 7, Round One

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Round One of Lead Adventure Forum’s Lead Painters League 7 (LPL7) painting contest has wrapped up. The (non-mandatory) bonus theme for this opening round was “Headquarters”, so I touched up some of my Russian Civil War White Russian figures from Brigade Games.

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My LPL7 Round One entry — a Russian Civil War White Russian colour party.

By the time this is posted the Whites will have won their round against a rather nice Second World War company HQ of French goumiers – North African colonial troops – and Round Two will have opened. You can check out the whole contest over on LAF. LPL7 is ten rounds long, so ten weeks. I’ve got Rounds One, Two & Three done and entered, but things are going to continue to be fairly quiet around here as I’m neck-deep in painting up Rounds Four through Ten!

Painting

Lead Painters League 7!

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Over on my favourite wargaming forum ever, the Lead Adventure Forum (LAF), the approximately annual Lead Painters League painting contest has begun to accept participants. This is the 7th time LPL has been run, and it’s always great fun to spectate and vote, and even more fun (although also more work!) to enter the contest. I participated in LPL3 in 2009 and LPL5 in 2011, and have sent my entries in to participate in LPL7 now.

It’s a fun, friendly competition, very much in keeping with the overall spirit of LAF. Participants submit photographs of teams of five (or more) figures; they’re randomly paired with one of the other participants, and may the best team win! The use of groups of five figures – all of whom have to appear in the main photograph together – makes LPL a balance between painting skill, photography skill and presentation skill. It’s a great chance to stretch my painting abilities and my photography skills, and clear unpainted or unfinished figures out of the lead mountain.

I should be able to finish this year’s LPL, including all three bonus rounds, without buying any more figures. It helps that all three of the bonus rounds are close to areas of interest, and it’s nice to put a ten-week fifty figure dent in the unfinished figure pile!

The rules are in this LAF thread, and as I write this there are only 18 entries in for 50 total slots, so get to it and enter!

Historicals, Painting

All Of Them

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Doing final organization for my Trumpeter Salute Russian Civil War game this evening, I did something I’ve never actually done in the two years of this project — laid out every single painted, game-ready RCW figure and model I have together. The lighting in my dining room is awful, so this is a terrible photo, but it’s fun to see everything laid out for review!

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Whites on the left, Bolsheviks on the right. See text for more details, and click for larger.

On the left, the White Russians. Officers and machine gun in front, two dozen Cossack riflemen, then a couple more officers, then 32 rifles from a regular rifle regiment. All of my White Russian figures are from Brigade Games.

In the centre, the 77mm field gun (nominally Red), sixteen cavalry, one armoured car, and one protected railcar. These figures are (so far, at least) all deliberately painted without much in the way of identifying insignia, so they can and have appeared for both sides in our games.

On the right, the Bolsheviks. Officers, machine gun and banners in front, and the long column is forty ordinary Red riflemen. Far right is twenty Red Sailors and their leaders, and behind them is the Red militia of 15 rifles. The Bolsheviks all happen to be from Copplestone.

This gives me a total of 56 White rifles, 75 Bolshevik rifles, and a grand total figure count (including gun crews) of exactly 190 figures, apparently. I’ll tick over 200 fairly soon, as there’s another round of White rifles to paint up. That’ll pretty much finish off the regular infantry, although I do want another section or two of Red sailors. After that it’s off to more of the toys and quirky bits, tchankas, armoured cars and such!

Historicals, Painting

The Workbench This Week, 3 April 2013

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Even more chaotic than usual as I prep for Trumpeter Salute 2013 this coming weekend!

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Protected car festooned with Bolshie flags, and other random clutter!

The centrepiece is, of course, the sandbag-and-rail tie flatcar that will be one of the centrepieces of my Russian Civil War game. I got the sandbags to a satisfactory paint job, and if I have some extra time before Friday I’ll do one last round of drybrushing and weathering on the whole car. I can’t really call it an “armoured” train car, so I’ve been referring to it as the “sandbag car” or a “protected railcar”. Anyway, it looks good, especially with some red Bolshie flags hanging off it to proclaim it’s current owners to the world.

The US Navy gunboat sailors crowded around the back of the railcar are part of my “Well, I’m painting, might as well paint something else” drive. They’ve sat on my painting bench for a terribly long time — you can see them in the blurry background of quite a number of previous workbench photos on this blog… a bit of extra paint moves them slightly closer to being done, at least!

The six extra Russian cavalry (Brigade Games Cossack figures, to be precise) are also coming along nicely. That’s the Cossack horses in amongst the sailors there.

Three days until Trumpeter! (although I only really have Wednesday evening to myself, with other commitments Thursday then off to Vancouver Friday… yikes…)

Painting, Tutorials

Trying A Wet Palette

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I’d heard of “wet palette painting” before, but for no particular reason hadn’t sought out information on the technique or looked into it at all. Then a few nights ago I was rummaging around among YouTube’s wargaming-related videos, as one does, and this wet palette howto video from Corvus Miniatures caught my attention.

Turns out to be pretty straightforward – an old container lid from the recycling bin, paper towel, water, baking parchment. We had all those things knocking around the kitchen, so I set up a wet palette and tried it out while doing the main blocking colours on six Cossack horses from Brigade Games and a swamp-monster thing from Reaper.

Compared to the dry palette I’m used to (an old CD!) you get hugely extended working time with your paints, which is especially useful when you’re block-coating six 28mm horses and a highly textured monster. I forsee fewer sad little blobs of half-dry unusable paint in my future! Blending is also easier, which is nice when you want slight variations to make your horses (or whatever else) look more interesting.