Dante the Crusader

I've finally finished a model that I originally bought several years ago, back when I was planning a Daemonhunters army: a metal Crusader henchman.

I love this miniature (other than the strange helmet, that I filled in with greenstuff), but it has a problem that isn't obvious in the official photos. You see, it's a one-piece model. As a result the sword sort of merges into the body rather than sitting on top of it - they really should have cast the sword a separate piece in my opinion. I wasn't confidant in my ability to hide it with paint, so I sculpted a huge mass of purity seals behind the sword to hide the problem, and tried to balance it with a couple of seals on the other side, behind the shield. I don't think it looks too bad; it's almost certainly better than it would have looked if I hadn't done it.

GW crusaders (photo from www.games-workshop.com)

I've been painting a lot of very dark miniatures, so I wanted to go the other way with this guy and make him a bright as possible; as a crusader I wanted him to look pure and incorruptible, so I tried to use lots of "pure" colours like whites, silvers and golds.

I used the same method of painting white cloth that I used for Sean; a pure white base, then a shade made from a mix of badab black wash and 'hardcoat varnish, followed by a white drybrush and some "repair" work as needed. It still isn't amazing, but it actually got the job done here as I was happy with minimal shading to keep the model looking bright.

I built the gold up from the bronze, but it didn't come out as bright as I expected. I think next time I'll start with a bright yellow instead. The metal was also darker than I hoped. While brushing the paint on works well for giving metals texture, I think it might turn out brighter to build up a base of Mithril Silver in a more traditional way (lot of thin layers of thinned down paint), which is what I'll try next time.


The model was just crying out for some freehand, what with all that blank cloth, especially around the back. So I looked around for a simple edge trim pattern that I thought I could handle. I found it, but I had a problem. I wasn't confident in painting gold directly over white; I didn't want to have to paint a line more than once since I would probably just mess it up, but gold doesn't have good coverage so you normally want to paint it over another colour. Besides, I have great difficulty painting fine lines as I either end up with too much paint on the brush or it dries too quickly (yes I know I need a drying retarder or something).

So I tried something new. I bought some metallic ballpoint pens and tried drawing directly onto a painted and varnished surface. The results were encouraging, but in practice I found there were too many crevices where a pen couldn't reach. Luckily I found that if I scribbled a bit on a piece of plasticard, the gold ink would pool a little and I could pick some up with a brush and paint it on normally. What's more, it didn't dry quickly, making it much easier to paint with. So I painted the pattern as well as I could along the edge of his cloak, and added a Sentinels Eternal logo on the back.

Drawing directly on a varnished surface with a gold ball point pen.

Then I discovered the problem with the gold pen ink. It was designed to sink into porous surfaces and rubbed off the paint far too easily. Plus, if I tried to brush 'ardcoat varnish over it the varnish dissolved the ink a little and spread it a around a bit. Luckily I had decided to run a test on my test model before varnishing the crusader. Luckily a spray varnish (GW Purity Seal) did not have that problem.

Overall I like how he came out. I'm quite proud of the freehand; even though it's a bit messy it certainly adds a lot to the model. I've decided to call him Dante, after the title character from the EA game Dante's Inferno (who is of course named after the famous poet Dante Aleghieri, but let's not worry about that). It is a relief to have finally painted him.

An idea for weapon selection in console games

In an old post I talked about a small idea for console shooters: basically instead of the current system of reloading, where you can drop an almost-full magazine without losing any ammunition, you would tap the reload button to quickly drop the magazine and lose the ammunition (which could be picked up again manually later) and load a fresh one, or hold the button to remove the magazine and stow it before loading the new one - this would be much slower but you would keep the ammo. The idea is for use in games where ammo isn't plentiful and resource management is a bigger deal, obviously.

Well, I just finished Army of Two: Devil's Cartel, and one thing I really liked about that game was the weapon selection system. I had an idea for a slight tweak to the formula. The basic idea is that the player can carry a number of main weapons and a handgun. It would probably be two main weapons which would typically be long-guns that can be slung behind the player's back, while the handgun fits in a holster; that seems reasonably possible in real life (not necessarily practical, but possible). In a similar way to Rage, a single tap would quickly switch to the handgun and back while holding the button would open a weapon-wheel.

The twist is that when performing this quick-draw the player doesn't put away his primary weapon, instead he keeps carrying it in his off-hand while shooting the handgun one-handed. Because he doesn't need to hang up the primary weapon the draw can be extremely fast, but because he's firing the handgun one-handed he won't have as much control, meaning accuracy and rate-of-fire suffers. Of course he wouldn't be able to reload the pistol with both hands full, so hitting the reload button would holster the pistol and reload the primary. unless the character has some kind of rig that holds magazine up so that the handgun can be brought down onto them to reload, like Lara Croft sometimes uses - that could be an upgrade item you pick up later. When selecting the pistol using the weapon wheel, he holds in in both hands so he can fire and reload it normally of course.

If the primary weapon could reasonably be used one-handed - another pistol or perhaps even a small submachine gun - then quick-drawing the pistol would allow the user to dual-wield the two weapons. I think it would be reasonable to be able to reload while doing so (the animation could involve tucking one pistol under the arm while reloading the other, for example).


This probably all sounds quite complicated on paper, but I don't think it would be that complicated in use, and it would complement my older reloading idea. So why bother with all these complicated micro-management systems? Well, because they add depth to the basic shooter gameplay. They force you to make rapid tactical decisions on the fly: do you reload and risk getting shot or killed before you can return fire, or quick-draw a pistol to fight your way out of trouble but delay getting your primary weapon back up? Hopefully it would make the right game more engaging. At any rate I expect it would appeal to some gamers; unfortunately those are probably PC gamers.

Sean the Overzealous Cricket Player

The model is Dynamic Ray from Hasslefree Minis. I'm calling him Sean for no particular reason whatsoever.

My colour palette was based on some reference photos, so some of the colours were not quite what I might otherwise have chosen, but I really like how it turned out so no complaints.

This was my second attempt at black cloth; I used a black base, grey/white drybrushes then a mix of Badab Black and 'Ardcoat to shade. It came out a little better but next time I'll use a dark grey base rather than true black, which should look better. Not too happy about the white cloth either, but it looks good enough I guess.

The skin was the basic elf-flesh base followed by a mix of Gryphone Sepia and 'Ardcoat, then a pure sepia wash was applied in select areas (like inside the ears and between the arms) to further darken them. It looks good enough to me so I'm happy. The eyes were white with black dots but as usual the white disappeared after adding the sepia; still this is probably the best looking face I've ever managed, though that's largely down the to miniature itself having so much detail there (most models don't actually have eyebrows, for example; this one does).

I initially painted the hair in the same Elf Flesh as the skin, then drybrushed it white and glazed it yellow; I was trying to make the hair seem light and thin by using the same tones as the skin, but I decided it didn't have enough contrast. So I washed it with Devlan Mud, brushed it with more white then glazed yellow again, to get those darker areas. It's not perfect, but I think it's as good as I could have hoped for seeing as I haven't really tried to paint blonde hair before. I did make a mistake by trying to sand a little bit of the hair off the top before painting - it looked a little like a mohawk to me at the time, but I think it probably would have looked better if I hadn't as I created a solid ridge along the centre.

I mixed various browns with bleached bone until I found a colour I liked for the cricket bat. It's not obvious in the photos (or in real life for that matter), I painted on a subtle wood grain effect. It's hard to see, but I think the result looks very close to a real cricket bat so I'm very happy with it.

The watch doesn't look great as it lacks detail; in retrospect I think I could have added a bit more details with the paint (or possibly modelled some on) if I had thought things through better from the start. I think the tie and the belt came out quite nicely actually. I painted on a red name tag with white spots and a metal pocket clip; it's a bit flat up close but from the distance it adds a nice bit of detail.

Some bits do look a bit glossy; it's a problem I've been having lately, I'm not sure if I'm using too much Purity Seal or too little, or if I'm not quite using it right or something.


So yeah, overall I'm very happy with the model. I'm really starting to like the idea of more "recognisable" miniatures; though I do feel a little guilty about buying unlicensed ones - obviously if there were licensed models of the characters I want I would buy those.

Praying Paladin

This is Tiriel by Hasslefree Miniatures, sculpted by Kev White. I love the simple, no-nonsense character and pose of the model - totally fitting for a paladin.

While it was a quick and simple paint job, I was actually experimenting with skin and metal. I've found that brushing metal over black gives a very nice metal effect, but brushing it over white gives a slightly brighter final finish. So I tried to pre-shade the mini by priming it white, washing it black, and finally drybrushing white before brushing on Mithril Silver.

The result was subtle at best:

Mithril brushed over shaded basecoat.

So I ended up giving it another black wash then a Mithril drybrush:

Another wash and drybrush created better contrast.

I was hoping the armour would look brighter. Perhaps painting on Mithril in a more traditional fashion then using a wash and drybrush would give me a brighter overall tone? Actually, I once painted mithril over metallic primer and that came out quite bright, I might have to try that again.

I've been trying to come up with a paler, pinker skin tone than Elf Flesh to use with characters from colder climates - even Elf Flesh is a little tan. For a short while GW had a light pink "edge" paint, but they were not selling it when I went looking. Instead I picked up Changeling Pink, a GW drybrush paint of the same shade. I mixed this with white and a touch of Elf Flesh to come up with a pink skin tone:

Skin basecoated with custom pink mix.

While I was ultimately happy with the mixture's colour, I couldn't figure out how to shade it. I've been shading Elf Flesh with either Ogryn Flesh or Gryphone Sepia (lately mixed with a little 'Ardcoat to change how it spreads across the surface), but neither of those two complements the pink colour, nor do any of my other washes. I decided to try Ogryn Flesh, thinking that it's slightly redder colour would work better with pink than the slightly more yellow Gryphone Sepia. It was a catastrophe, the two did not work together and she just looked ill. In desperation I gave it a white drybrush to try to hide the pink, but that just made it worse; suddenly she looked like a reanimated corpse:

Undead paladin? That's just wrong.

In a last-ditched hail-Mary I glazed the skin with a couple of thin layers of Gryphone Sepia. This essentially killed the pink and white and I ended up with a more typical tanned skin tone:

Saved by the Sepia.

Her skin still looks kinda crappy, and the shading on the face is poor, but it's basically tolerable - especially since it's normally very hard to see her face because of her pose. Perhaps I should actually try to learn how to do proper shading and blending and stuff. Maybe someday.


Overall I'm not really happy with how she turned out. It looks a bit boring, being mostly just a single shade of metal, and of course the skin is rather poor. If I was to paint this figure again I would probably try to use some different colours for the armour, perhaps pick out some plates in gold or add some freehand decoration here and there. I've just been rushing too much; I'm just really tired of having all these great figures sitting around unpainted, and I want to get them done.

Nine for Mortal Men Doomed to Die

It took a long time, I finally got around to painting this guy. He's one of the GW Ringwraiths, from back when they were metal and GW sold them separately. The model came with the mounted version, which I have sitting around somewhere, but I don't really like that model so it'll probably never get painted.

He's basically a bit of a rush job. I considered replacing the bent sword with a better looking one, but decided to just use it as part of an "old and decayed" theme suggested by his rather ragged robes. I gave all the steel a mild rust effect by drybrushing boltgun over a brown basecoat, and tried to apply verdigris to the brass by painting/washing it with turquoise.

I experimented a lot to try to find a way of shading the robes, putting together various mixes of black washes or paints with varnishes and medium, to apply over a grey base with a white highlight. That failed, and it just ended up almost completely black, so I threw on a drybrush and gave up.

I had been looking for something to do with the bird figure, which had come as part of a pack, I settled on using it with this mini because of it's nomad-like robes and the suitability of the pose. I tried to paint it up as a falcon by applying a pattern of white dots over the brown base, though the bleached bone drybrush I used to highlight the feathers makes the dots less obvious. The eyes are painted red, but they are so small and surrounded by brown that they don't really stand out. I used quickshade to shade the feathers as my initial attempt to use devlan mud failed spectacularly - it darkened the spots so much that they were completely invisible, I ended up stripping the paint from the falcon and starting again.


While the falcon looks alright to me, I am very unhappy with the rest of the figure. He looks boring and messy, and the black robes really don't work well with my standard black bases. The only reason I don't strip the paint and start again is because I have so little time and so many figures that I want to paint, that I'd rather have a mediocre painted model than spend more time with no guarantee that it will turn out much better.

The Lady In Green

I've basically given up on the idea of ever having the time to invest in playing 40K properly. I haven't played since well before sixth edition came out, and it only seems to get harder to find time to devote to the hobby. The thing is, I've already sick of painting Space Marines. I'm not a fast painter, so painting large numbers of identical figures feels boring and pointless, even if I do occasionally like the look of small unit of matched models. I much prefer each model I paint to be unique and different. So now that I've given up on playing the game, I no longer feel the need to paint a matched army, meaning that I can finally start painting all the other minis I've picked up over time.

GW seems to have very few decent-looking female minis, in fact as far as I can tell not all that many miniature companies normally do, so when I saw this one it caught my eye. I really liked the relaxed pose and the fact that she's wearing actual practical clothes, plus it has a nice balance of detail and decoration - enough to make it interesting, not so much that it looks crowded or overdone.

Sharyn, Female Wizard by Julie Guthrie, from reapermini.com

So here it is, my first painted female miniature (the Seraphim doesn't count, I only helped with that one):

She didn't quite turn out the way I had planned. I wanted her to have a "forest" colour scheme, so I tried to stick with greens, yellows and browns, but they all came out a lot brighter than I had originally intended, I guess it came out less "forest" and more "rainforest". Incidentally, this is the first time I've looked up the miniature on the reaper website, and I've just realised that my colour scheme is surprisingly similar to one of the painted versions on the website. Pure coincidence I assure you; perhaps the nature of the mini just suggests certain colours?

From reapermini.com; painted by Leopardpixie

I decided to paint the feathers in a bright blue so they would stand out; I was hoping it would help the mini to "pop", although I was afraid they would look out of place and ruin the colour scheme. However, the other colours came out so bright that the feathers blend in a lot more than I expected them to; I have mixed feelings about that, but it's certainly better than if they stood out too much.

Her face isn't great, but I was lucky it came out as well as it did; I don't have particularly steady or precise hands, those eyes are more a result of divine intervention than skill, and I didn't have the courage to experiment much with the lips so once they looked passable I moved on.

I'm not a huge fan of opaque "crystals" at the best of times, and while I could have tried to replace the stone in her staff with something clear, I decided I wanted the piece to look more organic, so I cut it off and tried to re-sculpt the top of the staff with greenstuff. The results were not amazing, but I think it came out OK.

I tried to use a milliput wash to smooth the mini a little (mainly the coat), it worked out OK but I've since discovered that liquid greenstuff is much easier to use. There's just one thing to remember: while liquid greenstuff dries very quickly, just because it's dry doesn't mean it's set. If you try to sandpaper liquid greenstuff before it's properly set you'll end up pulling bits off the surface instead of sanding it down. Leave it a few hours at least and it should be fine. Also, it shrinks a bit when it dries, so I often apply a second coat before I start sanding.

There were a couple of other fixes involved: while moving her to the GW base I accidentally broke her foot off. Luckily it was an easy fix. Looking at it now, I've realised that she's not centred properly on the base, I think this was because I was pinning her to a base that already had a magnet installed in the center, so I couldn't put her feet as centrally as I would have liked. I also used a few drops of superglue to fill a gap in a strand of hair; for something small like that superglue is actually probably the easiest option.

You can see the re-sculpted staff and the break in her hair (lower right of the face).

I was experimenting with skill-free ways of shading cloth and skin. I've noticed in the past that Army Painter quickshade can work very well to shade organic surfaces like flesh and bone, the main problem being the colour. I tried using 'Ardcoat (gloss varnish) mixed with GW washes to replicate the effect, and found it actually works quite well (for a skill-free method that is).

I believe the coat was basecoated in Warpstone Glow, then drybrushed in camo green (I think) then white. After that I shaded her coat with about a 1:1 ratio of 'Ardcoat to Thraka Green wash. The results were decent, but not really dark enough; mixing in the varnish obviously lightens the mixture somewhat. I might need to experiment with a regular wash on top to further shade the recesses, or possibly allowing washes to dry a bit to intensify the colour before mixing in the varnish. In this case as I had initially drybrushed up to pure white and the shade didn't colour it enough, so I added a green glaze on top just to help bring that back down.

For the skin I worked up a solid coat of elf flesh then shaded it with a 1:1 mix of Gryphone Sepia to 'Ardcoat. The effects are quite subtle since her skin is quite flat and smooth; I find the mixure works better for defining musculature on male models I tested it with. Still, it seemed to work as she did seem to look flatter before I applied it. I might need to experiment with letting washes dry out a little before I add the varnish, in order to strengthen the colour.

Before the face was shaded.

Her tabbard took more work than I expected; I started off painting it camo green but a single green wash darkened it so much it blended in too much with the coat. So I worked it up to yellow - which took a lot more work than I expected, Sunburst Yellow does not have good coverage - then washed it again, the result isn't as smooth as I would have liked but I basically got sick of it and decided to leave well enough alone.

I started by painting the lips in Blood Red, but she looked like a clown, so I painted over them with Scab Red. Next time I'll try to mix red and flesh tones to get something that looks more natural. I had a lot of trouble finding a nice shade for her hair; I wanted a sort of reddish chestnut colour but couldn't seem to find it, so I settled for what I think is a carroty orange. I washed it with Baal Red, but in retrospect that wasn't dark enough and the results are too flat; I should have used something darker like Ogryn Flesh or maybe even Devlan Mud.

I have decided to call her Gwennyth. It's just the first thing that came to my head when I was searching for a name, and as it sounded somewhat "Arthurian" I decide to go for it. I can't say that I'm completely happy with the final piece, but I guess she looks OK and I am glad just to have actually finished a model for the first time in a while. Plus; we learn from our mistakes, and I made so many mistakes with her that I must have learned something, right?