Quick Snapshot, WIP KV-1

Remember the KV-1 that I posted earlier? It turned out to be one real fun tank to paint. So when Diablo 3 hasn't been occupying all my time (my life is 99% Diablo at the moment -.-) I've gotten around to painting it.

Trying on a slower technique of weathering instead of slapping on some pigments. Basically much higher contrast and with a lot of layering with oil washes/paints. For now I'm pretty pleased with how it's developing. Still have to muddy it up a little with pigments later on due to their amazing ability to look gritty.

The base colour is from AK-Interactives Soviet Green modulation pack. I'm sort of in love with it. Just the perfect mix of pigments with a slight hint of yellow. I added a filter of yellow ochre on top of it just to make it look more vivid.

Video of the month / Vallejo Music Awards

Most painting tutorials on YouTube are goddamn boring to watch. Some guy, talking out his nose, going on and on and on in and endless jabber of paint names until you stick a fork in your ears and write a post in his/her praise on DakkaDakka.

This one actually made me chuckle and learn a bunch of stuff at the same time. Well worth spending 25 minutes of your precious precious time watching it.

(Click it to go to youtube and watch it in glorious 1080p)

PX vs. Decals. 1 - 0

Victory!!!

Finally all the decals are on! Now it's just some more detailing to be done (the arm for the hatch, las-gun-arm and the engine on the back) and I can finally start on contrasts and weathering. Oh, I of course need to touch up the inside a bit since my masking wasn't too good.

One thing I noticed was that the decals is a bit thick-ish. Not as thick as the Games Workshop decals thankfully. But they have some silvering due to the thickness. Hopefully it'll all go away with a coat of varnish.

I'm more than pleased with the freaky-head. The helmet needs some more blending (the shadows are a bit harsh) but it really brightens up the entire suit and makes the head the focal point. Good stuff! :)

Quick WIP-snapshot...

The SAFS-suit has -a-ton- of decals to be applied! Thankfully they're going on without too much hassle. Five done, twenty more to go! -.-

It's a floating head!!!

I was mildly disturbed while painting the head for the pilot inside the MaK SAFS-suit. Something really weirded me out having that head floating on a pedestal. It got a little better now that I got paint on it. When all white it looked a little too ghostly/dead to me. :)

First time I've tried out everything I've been reading about the last month concerning oil painting, historical miniatures and the correct shades of khaki (don't get me started on that!).

Painting not-40K-stuff is way more subtle (and sometimes easier) than the style of grimdark. Unfortunately my oil-paints is still in transit, so I had to resort to using Reaper instead. Perhaps a good thing since I imagine using oils will be a messy business for a couple of sessions until I get a hang of it.

The SAFS-suit is getting along pretty nicely. Hopefully I can get some proper WIP-photos up during the weekend. :)

Sdkfz. 222 Part IV

Not much to it. A lot of mistakes, not so many happy ones, but at least I got it out of the paint booth and into the cabinet. You paint and you learn. :)

I tried to make it look like they tell you everything looks after a couple of weeks in the desert. More ore less the same colour as the sand. Without overdoing it. Meh, I guess I kinda achieved that goal.

What I missed (it pays to do your research!) is that apparently every German vehicle got painted "desert tan" once they left the staging area in Libya. I attribute that to the fact that I didn't touch the model for almost two weeks while contemplating a bath in Simple Green or just paint it and get it "out of the door".

It sounds like I'm really not pleased with how it turned out. I am. I learnt a lot on how to manipulate the pigments. And why they're the last step in the chain.

1/48 kits are sometimes really fiddly, but this one went together in a couple of hours. Painting doesn't have to take as long as it does with 1/35 kits. So it's more like painting a figure instead of the month long projects that building & painting a 1/35 kit easily turns into.

Learning has occured. Pigments dont hide your mistakes. I have painted something. Other kits demand my attention!

Oh, and of course. The macro lense is unforgiving! :)

Review: Hobbyzone paint storage racks

I admit to having a case of "collect them all". It all began in the late 90's when my girlfriend bought me a Gameboy and the new game Pokemon for my birthday. Actually, I think it started way before then, but that was the first time I actually noticed it. I collected them all... 

So when it was time for buying new paints I got them all. When switching from Vallejo MC (good paints) to the Reaper Master Series I actually bought them all. I excuse myself a little since they're not stocked locally in Europe. So it was either getting them all and save some on postage or getting them triad by triad and having to pay quite a lot in postage. 

This made me end up with 200+ paint pots. That had to be sorted in some way or another due to the triad system. I do like the triads. When doing fast paintjobs it removes the "what color shades/highlights with what?"-step. But it's a pain when your paint pots are spread in a box and you spend 15 minutes trying to find one out of 200.

Earlier I bought some racks from Eslo Terrain (http://px40k.blogspot.se/2011/05/review-another-paint-storage.html) they were great once you got over the hurdle of assembling them. They were also a bit cumbersome to move around and although they were constructed really sturdy I felt they were kinda overbuilt.

That about that. About two weeks ago I stumbled upon the polish company Hobby Zone that had a bunch of racks avaliable. The construction was kinda slimline compared to the racks from Eslo. No need for glue. Best of all, they were really inexpensive! Order away!

A week later they were here, together with one of the work stations that I'll review later. Just give me time to use it for a while. :)

++ THE PAINT RACKS ++

The racks came in a "flat box". So you had to assemble them yourself. Not at all a hard thing to do. The three uprights slot into the bottom part (the part with a logo) and the shelves slides and locks, due to friction, onto the uprights. No need for glue! In the picture above you can see the sub-assemblies pretty clear.

The construction is made up of 4mm hardwood (MDF) that's CNC'd to fit your paint bottles.

Now, I said that there was no glue needed. At least not if you plan to have the shelves more or less stationary. I found while moving around the shelves that a bit of glue is needed due to the weight of the paint pots making the bottom section coming undone. Something that can be avoided if you carry it holding the bottom and apply slight pressure to the shelves. But, meh, a small blob of wood glue will take care of that. Don't add too much and you will be able to pack the shelf flat for storage (Why would you ever do that? The Hobby is your life!?)

All filled up they look like this! Holding a total of 54 (13, 14, 13, 14) dropper bottles neatly without any hassle. The staggered rows also makes for easy distinguishing of individual colors.

The Eslo racks held the bottles a little more securely due to recesses in the bottom plates. But I hardly found that to be of any use except for when the cats were on a rampage. Not that it mattered much since they use heavy furniture to stop on. Everything loose is just speedbumps.

Assembly was trouble free, as noted earlier.

There is of course racks made for bigger (36mm dia.) paint pots, like the ones offered from Games Workshop, P3 and others.


++ THE VERDICT ++

All in all a well designed product. A lot of value for your money, or at least a lot of percieved value for your money if you're a pedantic (like me) with your paint storage.

I could perhaps do without the logotype on the bottom of te racks. Just to make it even slimmer, but that's a small price to pay for what I consider to be the best non-DIY solution available on the market today.

Hobby Zone also has a range of organizers, dice towers and stuff. Go check them out.

Now I'm off to use/abuse the paint station. :)

Kits kits kits!

Quarter kits!

A week ago I was pretty drunk and in front of the computer with some money to burn... Alcohol, web shopping and money to burn is a bad combination! So I ended up shopping a bunch of stuff from quarter-kit.com

No regrets though! The Hobby Boss kits were €8 each (more on that in a sec) so an all tricked out M4A1 (76) W (barrel, crew, photo-etch etc.) ended up just as "expensive" as the Tamiya kit.

The KV-1 with all it's rivets and boxy appearance will be perfect to practice color modulation and stuff on. I will probably build it straight OOB with no modifications, although it apparently has a lot of inaccurate details like staggered roadwheels and such.

Building the KV-1

While building the superstructure of the KV-1 it was clear why they only cost €8... there is flash everywhere. Nothing really fits as it should and there will be gaps to fill! So if you're an inexperienced modeller (like me) I wouldn't recommend it. Especially since Tamiya has a most likely better detailed and easier to build KV-1. But meh... it was only €8.

Now I gotta go cry because I only have super glue to eat for dinner since I burnt all my money on scale models! Ta-ta! ;)

ICM Sdkfz. 222 Part2

Meep meep! Ich bin ein staubiges Auto!

It's pigmenting time!!! My favorite part of modelling! Inhaling small particle dust and sneezing like a mad man.

I'm trying a different approach this time without using any fixer. For the first layers it's just distilled water, some flow-aid and pigments (African Earth, Rubbel Dust & Light Earth [4:1:1] from MIG) applied like a wash to the entire car.

I then use more of a traditional oil painting approach and move the pigments to where I want them with a moist/damp brush until I've removed all the tidemarks and gotten the streaking like I want it. This first application is more of a "getting the dust where I want it".

Picture was taken when considered myself done for today, but not done with the first application of pigments. There are still a lot of areas to touch up.

After that it's some sealing (which will eat up some of the pigments) to tone it down further. After that even more layers of pigments (mostly the underside that will get a slightly darker tone) and perhaps some rust & oil stains.

I guess the rust stains will be kept to a minimum. Unless the Libyan desert was really rainy in 1941. :)


--
Work has started on the SAFS as well. I painted up the interior while listening to the latest D6 Generation (the vanilla ice-cover was hilarious). Not much to see/photograph now since I've masked it all off in order to lay on the basecoats on the SAFS itself. Hopefully I have something to show next week.

Quick Review: Agama airbrush thinner

Agama Rozcienczalnijk!!!

More a tip for you airbrush-users out there than a proper review I guess... Anyhow! When I airbrush I usually mix my paints in the cup while adding thinner. Earlier I've been using some window cleaner that although it worked good it made me worry about all the solvent I inhaled. So I resorted to the "less toxic" acrylic mediums such as the one from Liquitex and the thinner from Vallejo. Both of those are a bit "milky" which in turn makes the color you mix much lighter than it really is. Once the thinner dries the milkyness disappears.

So when I ordered that Sdkfz 222 I got myself this Agama thinner as well. I think I read something about it on Armorama and thats why I got myself a bottle to replenish my almost empty bottle of Vallejo Thinner.

I have absolutely no idea what it contains. But it does wonders with the airbrush. Firstly it's transparent, so you can mix in the cup and directly see what colour you will be spraying. It also extends the colour and acts as a thinner. So if I want to spray really transparent layers I add a mix of 1:5 ratio paint to thinner. With the Vallejo & Liquitex thinners they usually extended the colour much much more, making transparent layers tricky.

Mixing a 1:1 ratio just makes the Vallejo Air much thinner but keeps the color more or less as opaque as it is straight from the bottle. My Model Air colors might be a bit old since they feel a bit thick, and I usually dont want to dial up the PSI to 30 just to be able to paint without sputtering.

It also seems to contain some sort of slow dri additive since the acrylics dont clog up as much as they did with the other thinners I've used (apart from the window cleaner). But it still evaporates quick enough to not create runs if you paint on too much.

So... highly recommended product. Especially if you live in the EU.

The only downside is the packaging. There is no spout on the bottle, so I have to use a pipette. I guess I'm spoiled by Reaper/Vallejo and their dropper bottles. :) It might be that the smaller bottles come with a spout on them.

I got mine from Jadar Hobby. A polish retailer. They send the stuff pretty quick. Or at least quicker than what we're used to when ordering stuff from our Friendly Online Gaming Stores.

Thats it. Back to chipping and stuff on the SdKfz 222!