Chromatic Stimulus

Speedy Crisis

2010-07-25T13:03:00.000+02:00

Heyho,

as far as I know most of the showcase-painters are not playing any tabletop game at all. Maybe I'm one of these lonely wolves who does! You probably inferred from my past postings about the mycetic spore that I'm a proud owner of a Tyranid army. My second army is an honorable force of the TAU empire.

In my two weeks of summer vacation I 'speedpainted' seven of my Crisis battlesuits. I bought those guys years ago on ebay. Already glued and ugly painted they vegetated as a memorial on the battlefield. Therefore I decided to strip the paint and re-arrange all legs and arms.

To strip the paint I used a mixture of denatured alcohol and sodium hydroxide. Both are rather cheap, easy to acquire and more or less safe to use in contrast to other alternatives like brake fluid. The sodium hydroxide is only solvable in the 5 % water part of the denaturated alcohol. Never ever solve the sodium hydroxide in pure water as this becomes a strong leach!

If you don't know what you are doing you are better to use products like airbrush cleaner from Revell to strip your plastic miniatures.

After the stripping I ripped all arms and legs from the miniatures. Sometimes an arm or leg was destroyed in this step which is always a problem if you buy already assembled miniatures in boring poses.

After the usual two-component priming (priming the kong-way) all crisis suits were pre-shaded with three shades of blue using my airbrush.

Then I added some tau'ish white markers on each suite, added some highlights with Shadow Grey and finished the weapons and suites with a plasma effect using only three colors (Catachan Green, Putrid Green, Skull White). No smoothing and no blending was done ... rather hard for a showcase-painter, but there is no other possibility to finish my army in an acceptable amount of time.

All crisis suites are equipped differently in most games of Warhammer 40.000, so I magnetized them as every other TAU player does.

I will never buy already assembled and painted miniatures from ebay again! In the end you don't save any money this way!

Regards,

Grumbler

Mycetic Spore - Part 2

2010-05-19T20:08:00.000+02:00

Heyho,

here is just a small update of the mycetic spore WIP. My new job drains all my power at the moment and there is not enough room for miniatures :-(.

Nevertheless I based the mycetic spore onto a self-made 5" round wooden base. I added some stuff found during a walk with my little daughter.

Regards,

Grumbler

Using Stewalin

2010-05-06T20:40:00.000+02:00

Hey folks,

long time no news from me as I have started a new job a few weeks ago. Nevertheless I would like to show you how to use a plaster-like material called Stewalin to build a background for your showbase.

First of all you need a plan! It doesn't matter if your plan looks like the sketch of a 3 year old child like mine :D.

Cut the plan along lines of possible elevations to copy the parts onto plastic card.

Cut the copied parts out of the plastic card. Keep in mind that the parts are the complements of the background details, so you add plastic card if you want a hole in your wall.

Put all parts into the assembled "curing box".

Mix Stewalin with the appropriate amount of water and fill the "curing box". Stewalin cures rather fast and has a very clean and flat finish in contrast to cheap plaster.

We get the following basic Stewalin wall for our showbase background.

Add some further details using your favorite carving tool. Combining a mechanical pencil with some hard wire emerged to be really handy.

The basic wall is finished and you can apply further details like a door or whatever you like. Wooden cappuccino sticks from Mc Donalds are the ultimate, inexhaustible and free of charge source for all your miniature projects involving wood ;-).

At the moment I'm not sure whether I will use this base for Maulg from Kraken or not, but here are some further WIP photos of the base.

Grumbler

Airbrush Safety

2010-03-24T20:11:00.000+01:00

Hey folks,

two weeks ago I had to paint about 1000 points of Warhammer 40k TAU miniatures in one week. I used my airbrush to get this huge amount of minis painted in such a small amount of time. Two problems emerged that week I want to share with you:

1. Never ever airbrush for several hours in your living room. As my TAU are blue the Enchanted Blue particles dispersed everywhere in my living room although I'm brushing with low pressure. Each square millimetre was covered with the airbrush fallout. It took me hours to clear the mess.

2. The second day I brushed in my basement without adequate ventilation protected only with a low cost particle mask used during the swine influenza. I returned to my flat after 2h and recognized that I had a disordered field of vision induced by the mixture of water, pure alcohol and paint. Thankfully the disorder disappeared after 30 minutes but I felt unhealthy the whole evening and the next day.

Whatever type of hard guy you are, please protect your health and wear an adequate breathing mask. Airbrush and coat only in good ventilated rooms. I recommend to use a mask also for prime coating.

I learned from this and bought a mask from 3M.

Step-by-Step Hortak Black Crow

2010-03-19T12:15:00.013+01:00

Ok guys,

here we have a miniature I finished about a year ago. Obviously my painting skills have increased in the meantime as you can see if you compare it to my finished Falkar. Nevertheless this step-by-step maybe very helpful.

This project was about Hortak Black Crow from Andrea Miniatures. As usual the proportions and pose of this Andrea miniature is outstanding! I spent about 100 h in total on him.

I made several mistakes tinkering and painting him and hope that this tutorial will prevent you to make the same mistakes.

You will find the rather old Cool Mini or Not link here.

Ok let's start with the result!

Step-by-step

The facts:

Manufacturer: Andrea Miniatures
Size: 54 mm
Used colours: Games Workshop, Andrea Miniatures
Time spent: approx. 100 h (3 months)
Socket: Wood from hardware store
Water: 2 component water from Ziterdes (Noch), polystyrene board
Tree: Wire-frame + (low cost) putty
Vegetation: random plants
Snow: baking soda and baking powder

Step 1:
I wanted to paint the skin of Hortak using the Skin Painting Set of Andrea Miniatures. This became a venture as I'm usually using minor pigmented colours (GW). To have the ultimate thrill I decided to shade and highlight the skin with my airbrush. First mistake: I diluted the colour with pure alcohol. The paint had some kind of reaction with the pure alcohol transforming the paint into sludge. The applied paint dried very crumbly. Nowadays I dilute the paint with a mixture of water and pure alcohol and no reaction occures at all. In my opinion the alcohol is mandatory to make acrylic paint better usable in an airbrush.

Step 2:
The skin was acceptable for me so I began to strip the paint from the rest of the miniature using nitro thinner. I started to prime the hair and did first tests with NMM on the blades.

Step 3:
Hortak was supposed to wear a leather tunic and red cloth to create a warm-cold contrast between the leather/cloth and the NMM. The leather was primed with a mixture of Tallarn Flesh and Snakebite Leather. The leather was shaded with tints of brown. Here I used Midnight Blue as darkest color. Keep in mind that black is often improper as darkest shade. In the end I washed the leather with ultra-diluted purple.

Step 4:
To increase the cold-warm contrast, the outlining metal applications on the leather were also painted in NMM.

Step 5:
Hortak was supposed to stand on a frozen lake on a self-made base. I knew that a good friend of mine tinkers wonderful trees from wire, so he helped me to make my own tree for the base.

Step 6:
The bark of the tree was assembled from some kind of low cost putty. I applied small roots at the ends of the wire frame to get a more realistic tree.

Step 7:
The inclined ground of the lake was made from cork and a mixture of cat litter and bird sand. Use some small plants to give the ground a more realistic look.

Step 8:
The ground was painted in several tints of brown and green. Nature is chaotic so you also have to be chaotic applying the colours. I surrounded the base with plastic card to add the 2-component water.
Always consider the following

1. Apply the plastic card perfectly horizontal as we will overfill the plastic card.
2. Use plastic card with a minimum thickness or it will bend resulting in bended water.
3. Apply some coating to the plastic card or it will react with the 2-component water making the water dull.

Step 9:
Heat the 2-component water from Ziterdes for 20 minutes in 50°C warm water. Don't skip this step as it will be much easier to mix the water after this step.

Always wear some protective gloves!

Mix the components slowly or you will have many bubbles which are hard to remove in the water. Carefully fill the mix into your plastic card container avoid further bubbles and remove all remaining bubbles with a needle. You have about 15 minutes to fill the water and remove all bubbles so don't panic.
Due to the shrinkage and the surface tension of the 2k gel you often see this ugly elevation of the water at the borders. Just add enough water at the beginning so that you "overfill" the frame up to the maximum surface tension holding the water in place. Due to the shrinkage the water it will be flat at the end.

The Ziterdes water doesn't grow warm as typical 2k gel. Therefore you are not forced to apply the 2k water in layers which is a huge advantage in my opinion that justifies the price of the Ziterdes water.

Step 10:
The water became dull after 20 h curing due to some reaction of the plastic card and the resin.

Also my cat Dr. Jones thought that I buggered it up.

As always: Don't panic!

Sand the water with some sanding paper und seal it with hairspray or another gloss varnish. The water will be transparent after this step.

Step 11:
I added the polystyrene board to represent the frozen top of the lake. Due to inadequate thickness of my plastic card the water was bended :-(.

Step 12:
I painted the tree, added some snow using baking soda and baking powder (better use my other snow method) and glued everything on the base.

I hope that this step-by-step and especially my mistakes are helpful to the community!

Falkar finished

2010-03-04T16:45:00.009+01:00

Heureka,

last friday I managed to finish Falkar Wandering Sword from Andrea Miniatures. Having received several comments in the last days I would like to drop some words about Falkar.

Let's start with the facts:

Name: Falkar Wandering Sword
Manufacturer: Andrea Miniatures http://www.andrea-miniatures.com/
Material: all-tin
Parts: multipart model - torso, legs, (weird) base, arms, shield, cape, spear and crossbow
Size: 54 mm

Falkar is really massive and very heavy. The miniature is very well sculpted and perfectly casted. The dynamic pose and many details make him quite outstanding.

Nevertheless it often was a pain to paint him. You get tired due to the weight of the model very fast. Especially if you want to turn the model around if it comes to wet-in-wet blending. I learned the wet-in-wet technique at Goatmans workshop. Goatman turns the miniature and the brush faster than Lucky Luke.

I wanted to paint Falkar in a rather natural look. Therefore I mainly used desaturated colors. Adding a drop of grey or some washed with brown often does this job.

You will find a tutorial about my snow here and a tutorial about the self-made gras here.

The tree trunk is from a dried small bush. The tartan and the small armour plates are free-hand.

As usual you can vote for him at Cool Mini or Not.

Retrospectively the NMM of the crossbow and the sword are too clean and look more like comic style.

What I learned most painting this model is that it is all about global lightning and symphony. Often you lose yourself in details and concentrate on maximizing the dynamic range of a single blending. The conflict between focus and symphony (further reading: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future).

In my opinion two further masters (beside Goatman) regarding symphony are Ben Komets and Jarhead (Roman). I learned at their workshops that it is not about technique (although technique is important) but about symphony.

Focus to learn from your mistakes but create a symphony when you are painting.

Now here is my "symphony" - not as good as Ben and neither as Jarhead but does that matter - no because it's better than the Old Grumbler ;).

Grass from sisal

2010-03-03T14:19:00.002+01:00

Heyho,

today I want to present a small tip to make realistic looking grass. There is nothing wrong if you use professional products like grass from MiniNatur or others but self-made grass is just cooler :).

Here we go...

...get a string of sisal or hemp

and use some sort of brush to bring the string into form. I used a steel brush

Cut the sisal to a usable length. My pieces were about 5 cm long. Keep in mind that they should be longer than needed. You will be the hair stylist that cuts them to the needed length after you applied them to the base.

Use some cheap acrylic paints mainly in brown and green hues to paint the sisal.

I dried the grass inside my microwave oven. The grass becomes a little bit more rigid than the initial sisal. Which is great in my opinion because you can bend the grass in the needed direction (wind direction for example).

I added an image of my grass and the professional grass produced by MiniNatur for comparison.

Here you can see some tests

and the final application on the base of Falkar.

Grumbler

Snow from bulbs

2010-02-24T13:41:00.004+01:00

Hi everybody,

from time to time you see this great looking snow bases and wonder how they are done. There are many methods floating around the internet creating a lovely snow base and as many professional snow products.

Which method do I prefer?

First of all I have not tested any of the commercial products like the Andrea snow which seems to be great according to several friends of mine.

I tested baking soda and baking powder but none of the two produced satisfying results.

At last I tried the "snow from bulbs" method.

You need a bulb (obviously). Only use this good old bulbs having a glow filament as the new bulbs like energy-saving bulbs or neon tubes contain toxic substances.

and something to crush the bulb

Put on your safety equipment, like protection goggles and some protective gloves. Then crush your bulb until you have smooth glass powder.

Due to the shiny look of the glass, you get the perfect snow for your miniatures.

Freaky Laser Line

2010-02-18T16:33:00.004+01:00

Hi everybody,

did you ever wanted to possess a freaky, laser-based 3D model scanner? Me too!

What about a self-made 3D laser scanner?

During my research about laser scanners I found this promising laser project:

http://www.david-laserscanner.com/

All you need is some sort of gadget that produces a laser line and a web cam. For me the laser line from my hardware store tool set was sufficient. I found my old Logitech Quick Cam Pro 4000 (640px x 480px) in my basement.

I printed the calibration sheet from their website and was instantaneously able to measure 3D data of one of my miniatures. As you can see the results are promising but not usable at the moment.

If you are interested to fiddle with your webcam and lasers than you are invited to try this yourself!

Mycetic Spore - Part 1

2010-02-16T21:01:00.004+01:00

Hi everybody,

today I got a package filled with 10 Sororoca fruits. I hope to build some of the new tyranid mycetic spores from those fruits. Unfortunately they are not as big as I thought, but some putty and base building should solve this problem.

Here you see the overall picture of all fruits

and a detailed comparison between a Carnifex and one of the bigger Sororoca fruits

Hopefully we will see some slimy mycetic spores from me in the future!

Mixing Citadel Colors

2010-02-13T22:44:00.004+01:00

Hey guys,

I have been working hard on the topic "how should Games Workshop colors be mixed". There are a lot of tutorials about this on the internet regarding color harmonics or complementary colors. The question remains what you should do with a color wheel and your tiny Citadel pot. Everyone knows that the colors look different if they are dry. Many of you have a dot of dry color on the pot to estimate the hue of the dried color.

But where the hell does the color lie on the color wheel?

Here comes my project into play:

What's the goal?
Arrange the typical Games Workshop colors on a color wheel that is independent from an observer and independent from a printer and/or monitor.

What has to be done?
1. Apply the Games Workshop colors to a test chart.
2. Illuminate the chart with normed light.
3. Measure the reflectance spectrum of each probe.
4. Convert the spectrum to a suitable color space with equidistant perceivable color distances.

What I have done:
I applied my Games Workshop colors in 5 layers to a test chart. The brush was cleaned with extreme caution after the application of each color.

After that, each color was measured at five points with an Eye One spectro-photometer.

After that I transformed the measured reflectance spectra to the Lab color space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space).

From the two dimensional representation of the green-red axis and the blue-yellow axis we can conclude the mixing behavior of the colors. The line between two colors represents the mixing line. If the line crosses the center of the color wheel, than we have two complementary colors. I.e. 33 Scorpion Green and 26 Liche Purple or 24 Ice blue and 18 Fiery Orange. The distance from the center of the color wheel represents the chromaticity of a color.

In addition to that I produced a chart which incorporates the luminance. Connecting two colors in the diagram shows you whether the mixture will get lighter or darker.
For 33 Scorpion Green and 26 Liche Purple the mixture will get darker. The luminance of 24 Ice blue and 18 Fiery Orange will be roughly the same.

Obviously the colors should be arranged in a 3D space (L-axis, a*-axis and b*-axis) but such a diagram would be hardly usable at all.

You will find my good quality pdf charts here:

Color wheel

Lightness diagram

Grumbler

Gentleman start your engines

2009-09-20T15:02:00.000+02:00

Oh noooo,

he made a blog! Indeed this is Grumblers first blog about the universe of miniature painting. Instead of posting my work to the several forums I participated over the years and which are almost entirely written in german, I wanted to share my thoughts and work in english (although my english is horrible). Just because I was so often disappointed about all those forums and tutorials written in other languages than english.

Grumbler