Painting test

So on to some test runs. I wanted to start small, so pulled out some extra bases and some green stuff and build a couple of lava bases. Basic flows, a couple of rocks, bubble or two. Nothing to fancy yet, this is just to get the colors right and start working on my technique.

I'm pretty happy with how my base modeling came out. I think that I can spend a little time and make a lava flow look right. Problem is now I have to paint it.

First couple of attempts, horrible. Disastrous. Terrible. Ugly. etc. etc. Working with yellows and oranges is tough and I can't really get the wet blending down right. My transitions didn't look right and I couldn't really find a color pallet I'm happy with. But not to be daunted, I re primed everything and tried again.

Next attempts were still pretty bad, but slightly better. I think I finally got the theory of what wet blending is supposed to be, but I can't get the technique down right. I think I'm using too much water and paint because it's just looking sloppy. I'm still not happy with my colors yet and my transitions are slightly better but still very ugly. Whelp lets try again.

Re primed everything and because I wanted to get out of the house went to the local store. One of our local painters saw me trying and failing with my bases and decided to give it a shot. he ended up doing the base on the left. He worked from the reds down to yellow. Not too bad. I want mine to look hotter, so more orange and yellows. I probably won't use much white if any at all. So widen the "cracks" up a lot and try again. But the important thing here is I got the correct colors down and know what paints I want to use.

So off to try again, and the base on the right is what I did. Much much better than my earlier attempts. It's still a little more layered than I would like. I attempted some wet blending but didn't quite make it for all the color transitions. I still want it to go hotter though. Next attempt I'm going to extend my yellows down further so that yellow-orange is the primary color involved. Also I'm going to try a different method. Instead of going from dark to light or light to dark I'm going to start with a medium color as my base and go up and down from their. I'll give it another try and post my results as soon as I'm done.

Colors used:
Chaos Black
Scab Red
Blazing Orange
Golden Yellow
Sunburst yellow

Time took: About 2 hours, but that's mostly because I'm still learning.

Inspiration

So when planing on what I wanted my blood angles army to look like I started talking with lots of people. Someone suggested doing a demon themed army, which I think would look pretty cool for blood angles. However, I don't want it to look like Chaos demons, so I started looking for inspiration. I decided the way I'd like to do it is using lava demons as my primary theme. So lots of hot lava with guys basically made out of molten lava. I want to make a bunch of scaly guys made out of lava but avoid making them look rocky like "The Thing" from the fantastic 4.



So with that in mind I set out to start looking for inspiration. After google imaging lots of different lava flows this is basically what I want to take my inspiration from: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.southwestbirders.com/Hawaii_2002/lava%2520flow%2520i.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.southwestbirders.com/hawaii.htm&usg=__tEcTOmIoNInQp52jbRBPFE3WunM=&h=569&w=450&sz=54&hl=en&start=9&sig2=8N_pqY_hpKvnwdzHsuNixw&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=PykgK2VsWo0h4M:&tbnh=134&tbnw=106&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dlava%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2GZAZ_enUS372%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=cGa3S-HXOYKWNa_-0OEL



So there is my color pallet. Deep yellows, lots of orange to a glowing red and finally red-black where it cools off. I want to keep my lava to the hot end, so I'll be shifting it slightly to the orange-yellow. So with that in mind it's off to look at how other people paint their lava to get some painting ideas.



The first place I found was this. If you stopped at step 4 that's basically the effect I am looking for for, still molten but not quite crusty. So they go from yellow to back through orange and red with white highlights. Not bad but lots of wet blending involved. I haven't ever really wet blended before so now I'm starting to get scared.



So more research, more wet blending required. This is starting to look like a daunting project, maybe I should give up? But then I found this. PERFECT! This is exactly what I want the guys in my army to look like. This is going to require some insanity to get through, but damn if I could do an entire army like that just imagine how amazing it would look.



On to some test runs.

Hello World

Hello blog world. I don't expect anyone to read this for a while, but I figured I would go ahead and get started.



So a little about me. My name is Ryan Holliday and I live in the Northern Virgina area. I've been playing wargames since 2000 and started playing competitively in the last couple of years playing both fantasy and 40k. In the last year or so I've been pretty consistently winning or placing high in local tournaments so I've gathered a little bit of a reputation as one of the better players in the area. I just got back from Adepticon where I wanted to stretch my wings into the larger tournament scenes. I did very well in the fantasy side of the house and my 40k was still up to par with the "best players".



However, one thing that really hit home is that I need to step up my painting skills, and build my armies differently if I want to win the wacky scenarios. First off the inclusion of "soft scores" in tournaments is an unfortunate fact of life. I can bitch about it all day long, but in the end you have to play by their rules to win the huge prizes. Maybe I'll rant about it some day if I ever care enough to do so, but really I don't mind doing an awesome paint job since it looks so freaking cool. I have been inspired ;). Secondly, the scenarios at most events seem to be getting wacky recently. I noticed this in local tournaments, and it seems to be carrying over from the big national GT's. Nothing really "wrong" with this per say, but I really don't want to have to customize my army for every event because of one extra bonus point on scenarios two requires 3 elite choices. I've been building armies that can win easily, but I really need to go back to building armies that can table people reliably.

So with that in mind it's time to start a new army, and make it look beautiful. I'm going to do a blood angles army because I think it's going to be one of the new powerhouse builds and with enough in your face close combat punch that I have a very good shot at tabling someone. I also want to make the army look amazing by doing lots of conversions and really make the army just feel different.

So with that in mind I'm starting this blog. Mostly so I can keep track of how my army is progressing and starting to take shape. I'll post a couple of tactics, but I don't think that's going to be the primary focus of this blog...at least at first.

So without further ado, hello blog sphere.