Book Review - Storm of Iron by Graham McNeill

Hi All,

Another quick post, this time to record the fact that I've  finished another Black Library book.
This time was the STORM of IRON an Iron Warriors novel by Graham McNeill.
This was a recommendation that my buddy Estevao (The Painting Frog) made in one of our Podcast Episodes (Papo de Mesa Podcast).
It's about a siege set by the Iron Warriors into a remote Imperial station in the far corner of the universe. The citadel whose the Iron Warriors is trying to breach is defended by an IG castellan and his company and in conjunction with the God Machine's faithful servants, the Adeptus Mechanicus.
There are several plots occurring in parallel always centered around different characters, such as an Iron Warrior Half Bread, the IG Castellan, a not well behaved private, a Slave and her hatred for the Chaos, an Iron Warriors terminator leader and so on... and they are all stitched together very well as the history develops.
I believe it became a fast paced book on its second half which for me was good enough. It exploits a lot the characteristics that distinguish the Iron Warriors from other chapters. Brings several elements that enriches the overall knowledge about this chapter and Chaos ways of working in this fantastic and complex universe.
I'm a Good guys supporter and half way through the history I wasn't sure who I was supposed to cheer for.

My final note is that it was a great book to read. I recommend!

see you next time

"Ultra"Marcos

Killakans - Ebay Project

Inquisitor Coteaz

Hi All,

early last year I got myself an Inquisitor Coteaz from the Fine Cast line. I was a little disappointed with the quality of the material and some serious bubble had to be fixed before painting. 

As I do with many of my projects...I've assembled, intending to be part of my Grey Knights army renovation but something else got on its way and was left on my WIP Tupperware.

Well Recently on my "finish all WIP" spree, I took it over and decided to work on it....oh...by the way it had some serious wash with the water that comes out of the painting cups I use while I'm painting as I let my daughter to "paint it" with me while I was doing something else.

The final result turned out fairly good with nothing remarkable to tell.

And BTW, don't forget to check the "Papo de Mesa Podcast". A show that me , my buddy Estevao from The Painting Frog and other guests talk about miniature and boardgames. (It's n portuguese though.)

Cheers

"Ultra"Marcos

Weathering... First Pass - Blood Angels Vindicator

Hi all,


recently I saw some tutorials about weathering  tanks and decided to give it a go. I had one Vindicator that was half way through it's completion and I used it as guinea pig.
I basically painted it the same way I always paint, all the way till the end...just left the Manufactorium production line...sparkling new. Once finished and with a varnish layer, I started the weathering process.

• 1st. with a piece of foam that comes in blisters, just plucking a little piece to be small enough I started to staple a white color. I actually used P3's Menoth White Highlight, that is a tone browner than white but does the trick. Things started to go south here as I over did the stapling...you know the concept of less is more...well this is one of those cases.

• than using bits of blister foam again I applied a mix of red and brown to get some sort of reddish rusty tone. The mix turned out to be to light red....didn't turned out as I wanted.
• same as above but now using a metal color. I think was GWs boltgun metal.

at the end of it....the tank looked like having a severe case of chickenpox. Obviously I wasn't happy...so what to do next?....first I applied with the airbrush a red primer that I have from valejo, in order to make some of the marks disappear and bring back more of the base Blood Angels red. By applying it I realized that the primer red tone was what I wanted for the rust effect....so I went back and replaced, using airbrush all the previous brown/red with that primer too.

For the BA red, with the airbrush I brought back the tone I wanted in the areas that I made the weathering disappear.

After all that ,I prepared a 50/50 wash of Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil from GW and applied sparingly all over the miniature with the intention to swab the excess with a cue tip . Some how it dried so fast that I barely could remove it as I wanted....another learned lesson...if you intend to swab things, make sure you do a session at a time instead of the whole model!

A still wanted to give mud effect to the miniature...and add some snow but when I mixed the snow for application it just didn't got to the right consistency...I dropped those 2 last steps...applied a layer of future (that I use as a Gloss Varnish) straight from the bottle to the airbrush and once dry a layer of matt varnish...Vallejo straight from the bottle with airbrush.

Well..that's it for now....it was a great experience, lots of frustration but I certainly learned a lot in the process... for sure will invest more on weathering moving forward.

Cheers
"Ultra"Marcos

Papo De Mesa Podcast....episodios sobre Boardgames!!!

Salve Galera,

se voce ainda nao sabe, eu ,o Estevao do Painting Frog e mais recentemente auxiliados pelo Andre "Tocha" tocamos um podcast chamado Papo de Mesa podcast veja o link ai do lado ===>

Nesse mes de Janeiro de 2014, lancamos 2 episodios o qual falamos de Boardgames...confira ai os links:

Episodio 7a
Episodio 7b

 abraco

"Ultra"Marcos

Commander Dante - Quick job to knock this one out.

Hi Guys,

While massing around with my BAs, the other day, I noticed Commander Dante again. I never had use for this mini on my games but was part of my collection for sometime already. When I saw it there on my BA tray I said to myself...what a great oportunity to try OSL (Object Source light).

The painting scheme was as simple as 1,2,3. Black Primer (Vallejo, Airbrushed), heavy brush of Chocolate Brown (Vallejo Model collor), drybrush with Vallejo Gold (Model color) washed with diluted flesh ink from Vallejo and details went from there...

I did the live jump pack painting and the glowing eyes by using a very dark blue (probably GW not remember the name), a medium tone blue (I will say Ultramarine blue...), than Ice Blue and a final touch of a 50/50 mix of Ice Blue and white!

Base is from Back-to-Base-ix Autralia...I use them on all my BAs and others as I got a huge lot of those. Black primer, dark blue, codex grey, mix 50/50 grey and white and white!

That's it, great learning oportunity and another Check on my BA collection.

Cheers
"Ultra"Marcos

*Sorry again for the lame pics quality...I'll get them in better quality....some day!!!!

Salamanders Master of the Chapter - Paint job for a good Friend

Hi Guys,


long long time ago (3 or 4 years ago) Andre Streem, a good fried of mine and the head of the Youtube chanel Reload asked me to Paint one of his figs....a Space Marine Chapter Master on Salamanders colors.
Well I obviously was honored by the request and...well 3 years later, before my most recent trip to Brazil in November 2013, I decided to give some TLC to his mini and get it done.

I've been exploiting the Zenithal primer concept which is basically pre shade the miniature using Black, Grey and White primer before any other collor. With that the shades and highlights are sort of already there. Well I used that to start with and a basecoat of a Vallejo Dark green....I'm bad with color names so forgive me for that I will try to improve for comming posts...airbrushed the miniature all over with the same collor except the cape....unfortunately the green coat was too thick and the Zenithal effect was lost on the armour but respected on the cape...oh well!!! Using a technic called 2 brushes blending I started to manually highligh the green with multiple layers of a mix of Green and Yellow that went gradually to yellow....the 2 brushes technic is fairly simple but requires practice...which I'm doing as often as I can. The idea is to dilute the paint a little  less than whats used for airbrushing but a little more than what you normally use for brush....you keep one brush that will be used for the paint and one clean that you will basically lick and use your saliva will to help blend the layers....yeah, your saliva...so don't go ahead lend brushes from your friends if you care a little about hygene.The effect turned out very smooth and was fun to do.

After that I tackled the cape...same concept but with shades of dark red but since the Zenithal was preserved and I was aplying using brush instead of airbrush I was able to get a much better effect and in no time got a nice cape done.

For the head I decide to use a Chocolate brown skin tone, starting from dark brown and black and brown washes to smooth things out. Red yes to sort of stick to the Salamanders fluff!

The shield and Axe was the fun part of it and where I learned the most with the mini. I was trying to get a flame effect out of it....so I painted the internal trim and the axe blade with a gradient effect but istead of going from the darker to lighter I went from the lighter to darker....I don't know if you noticed but fire is actually white in its center and dark brown/redish in the outside.

The shiled I did it carefully with brush...from a Chocolate Brown, passing through a blood red, orange, yellow and white in the very center. I used a No. 1 or 2 size brush....the trick is good quality brush that can hold a good amount of paint and maintain it's tip.

The axe, same collor scheme but with the airbrush....I masked the whole mini, Oh By the way....I gave a nice coat of Future, to use as gloss varnish to protect the paint job done so far!....so I masked the mini with PVC film and masking tape and started to work....initially I did free hand....and the result was awlfull....more of the orange than anything else, very little control....then I had the idea to use a template....used a small GW plastic round base...proped agains the axe with a little gap..and sprayed from the back (hard to explain really) so it could get just a little mist of the new layer over the previous layer of collor to blend...if it makes sense...well probably not! Two trials later I got the end result....you still can see a little rough transition but was a good start as it was the first time for me!

 

For the base I used a resin base from the australian Back-2 Bas-ix, same that I use for my BAs as I have a ton of those. Black Primer, some dark grey highlight and on the cracks I tried to get some lava effect...once again same gradient effect from Brown to white as I did on the shield and Axe.

To wrap up, Gloss Varnished with Future one last time (I use it multiple times when I'm airbrushing. Helps to preserve the miniature from one session to the other) Matt coat and Voila!!!! done, done.
I was very happy with the result, and hopefully Andre was too.

 

 

*Special thanks to Andre Streem for the nice pictures, as my phone camera really suck!

Cheers
"Ultra"Marcos