Games Workshop, An Appreciation Thread

[feltmonkey]

Fortunately, they are great minis, and Bloodbowl is in my opinion GW's best game.

 

I got one of those big McFarlane Space Marines, so I guess I'm going to be painting one of those now.  The inspiration is Louise Sugden's astonishing Rainbow Warriors marine, which might be one of the iconic Warhammer miniatures of the last couple of years.  

 

Spoiler

 

[Captain Kelsten]

40 minutes ago, feltmonkey said:

Fortunately, they are great minis, and Bloodbowl is in my opinion GW's best game.

 

I got one of those big McFarlane Space Marines, so I guess I'm going to be painting one of those now.  The inspiration is Louise Sugden's astonishing Rainbow Warriors marine, which might be one of the iconic Warhammer miniatures of the last couple of years.  

 

  Hide contents

 

Well, the teams my mom happened to buy, completely at random, were so awesome looking I started looking into Bloodbowl and hey, the starter set is arriving tomorrow

 

 

The Fire Mountain Gut Busters. 

The Scarscrag Snivellers

[Nathan Wind]

I love Blood Bowl, it’s absolutely dripping with flavour. I was lucky enough to receive Dungeon Bowl for Christmas. Can’t wait to tuck into that!

[Captain Kelsten]

What’s dungeon bowl?!?

[Nathan Wind]

It’s exactly what it sounds like. Two teams do a dungeon crawl, try to find the ball in a chest, then do Blood Bowl. ‘cept in a dungeon instead of on a pitch. Genius. Always wanted to try it out back in the day but never did!

[JoeK]

Man, I need to pick up a Bloodbowl team - I've always loved them. I wanted to pick up the Nurgle one a while back on its original release but - as always - the cost of it put me off a little bit. May well have to indulge myself this year with one (that Ogre one looks superb!).

[Rikku]

I was very lucky enough to receive Be’lakor for Christmas! I don’t have a team in the making or anything, he’s just a fantastic model and I can’t wait to get stuck in to building him and painting him up as a display piece. The box art is rather drab so I’m just going to paint him up in a colour scheme I want - probably teals and purples.   He will be a work in progress for a long time but I’m excited. I really love painting wings and doing some lovely colour transitions and blending on them. 
 

I’m also always tempted by the Sylvaneth as well, I think it was GW in Edinburgh that had some gorgeously painted cherry blossom style dryads, maybe for my birthday I will treat myself to one of the larger models.  @Nathan Wind

I hope you understand the assignment. 

[Oracle]

I went to warhammer world and bought no models! I almost picked up Blood Bowl but thought better of paying full price.

[Davros sock drawer]

I reckon I still have enough unpainted minis to last me through 2023 and 2024. 
 

Two more down though:

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and this is an excellent video on how GW make their paint jobs “readable”, in particular relating to opaque base coats and targeted black lining. I struggled a bit with readability on the Orruk above, so I’m going to re-focus on that a bit. 
 

 

 

 

[Oracle]

Finished off the last two models for my knights army tonight. Still some bits to do on them but table top ready at least. 

[Oracle]

I traded a realm of battle for the beast snaggas ork army box - so I've going to get cracking on them shortly. They will make for some good reinforcements to my current army, especially with the arks of omen changes. Good bye AoC!!

[Davros sock drawer]

Practicing edge highlighting. It’s so fucking hard. The only way I’m achieving anything like the thin-ness and smoothness I want is going painfully slowly. How people paint armies of these like this for a living is beyond me.

 

[jaynay]

Talking of Blood Bowl I'm about half way through the Imperial Nobility. The ruffles almost KILLED me. So many mistakes, fixing, fixing fixes....

 

 

[Captain Kelsten]

they look amazing! Really love what you’ve done with them there. 
 

 

 

Ive been building but can’t prime anything as I only have a rattle can!

 

built the bogenhoff barons, the orcs and the fire mountain gut busters ogre team. 

[feltmonkey]

On 06/01/2023 at 17:08, Davros sock drawer said:

Practicing edge highlighting. It’s so fucking hard. The only way I’m achieving anything like the thin-ness and smoothness I want is going painfully slowly. How people paint armies of these like this for a living is beyond me.

 

 

Yeah, it's beyond me too. 😁

 

That looks great! 

[feltmonkey]

19 hours ago, jaynay said:

Talking of Blood Bowl I'm about half way through the Imperial Nobility. The ruffles almost KILLED me. So many mistakes, fixing, fixing fixes....

 

 

 

These are awesome!

[Davros sock drawer]

4 hours ago, feltmonkey said:

 

Yeah, it's beyond me too. 😁

 

That looks great! 

Thanks. I honestly don’t know how you do it. It’s physically very tiring as much as anything else, hunched over with the magnifying goggles on. I ended up rushing the second leg and it now looks a bit pants. It really does seem to be something you have to do incredibly slowly, which must be quite challenging if you’re working to a deadline. 
 

Pissed it down all weekend here so I ditched the edge highlight practice and painted this guy from start to finish (besides having primed it last year). Pretty pleased with the face and the dial thing on his backpack:

 

 

 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

On 08/01/2023 at 14:56, jaynay said:

Talking of Blood Bowl I'm about half way through the Imperial Nobility. The ruffles almost KILLED me. So many mistakes, fixing, fixing fixes....

 

 

 

Only just had a chance to look at these on a big PC monitor and they're really good. Nice crisp highlights and really consistent.

[jaynay]

17 minutes ago, Davros sock drawer said:

 

Only just had a chance to look at these on a big PC monitor and they're really good. Nice crisp highlights and really consistent.

 

Thanks! I'm working on the Ogre right now with my fancy new magnifying light which has been a bit of a revelation. First time I looked at one of my models under it I went EEESH! Finding it replicates the sort of flaws you see in pictures but in realtime. Did you say you had magnifying glasses? How are they? 

[Davros sock drawer]

22 minutes ago, jaynay said:

 

Thanks! I'm working on the Ogre right now with my fancy new magnifying light which has been a bit of a revelation. First time I looked at one of my models under it I went EEESH! Finding it replicates the sort of flaws you see in pictures but in realtime. Did you say you had magnifying glasses? How are they? 

I can’t paint at all without them. Maybe base coating or washing in large amounts. Certainly no details. 
 

Put it this way, this is a Space Marine head I painted in 2021 without the magnifying glasses (and then chucked in a box because it’s rubbish):

 

 

And this is the exact same head (not finished) after stripping and re-painting with the glasses:

 

 

I was basically guessing where the target was before I used magnification. If I ever did a decent face, it was kind of a fluke. Now I can pretty much do a decent job each time. 

[Pelekophoros]

1 hour ago, Davros sock drawer said:

I can’t paint at all without them. Maybe base coating or washing in large amounts. Certainly no details. 
 

Put it this way, this is a Space Marine head I painted in 2021 without the magnifying glasses (and then chucked in a box because it’s rubbish):

 

 

And this is the exact same head (not finished) after stripping and re-painting with the glasses:

 

 

I was basically guessing where the target was before I used magnification. If I ever did a decent face, it was kind of a fluke. Now I can pretty much do a decent job each time. 

 

What glasses are you using?

 

That little Kharadon Overlord(?) Is wonderful. 

[jaynay]

2 hours ago, Davros sock drawer said:

I can’t paint at all without them. Maybe base coating or washing in large amounts. Certainly no details. 
 

Put it this way, this is a Space Marine head I painted in 2021 without the magnifying glasses (and then chucked in a box because it’s rubbish):

 

 

And this is the exact same head (not finished) after stripping and re-painting with the glasses:

 

 

I was basically guessing where the target was before I used magnification. If I ever did a decent face, it was kind of a fluke. Now I can pretty much do a decent job each time. 

Wow that's an advert for the glasses! Just had a look on amazon and they're surprisingly cheap so just ordered a pair. The magnifying light is good but a bit awkward for more than a few mins at a time. Can just use it as a light if the glasses are better. 

 

I mostly paint orcs and goblins and have been finding human faces far less forgiving to paint. We're so attuned to the subtly of a human face, tiny details make a huge difference to how it reads - like the pupil on your second one. 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

1 hour ago, Pelekophoros said:

 

What glasses are you using?

 

That little Kharadon Overlord(?) Is wonderful. 

Just these cheapos:

 

Head Magnifier,LED Magnifying Glasses with 1X to 3.5X Zoom Hands Free,Head Mounted Lighted Magnifying Glasses with 5 Lens for Reading, Jewellery Loupe, Watch and Electronic Repair https://amzn.eu/d/0ii125O

 

And thank you. I guess he must be a Kharadron but it’s the dwarf guy from Cursed City. 

 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

55 minutes ago, jaynay said:

Wow that's an advert for the glasses! Just had a look on amazon and they're surprisingly cheap so just ordered a pair. The magnifying light is good but a bit awkward for more than a few mins at a time. Can just use it as a light if the glasses are better. 

 

I mostly paint orcs and goblins and have been finding human faces far less forgiving to paint. We're so attuned to the subtly of a human face, tiny details make a huge difference to how it reads - like the pupil on your second one. 

 

Yeah, there’s a very specific knack to human faces and the eyes in particular, but the main thing for me is to establish a dark outline. If you don’t get that then the white of the eyeball will always bleed into the flesh of the face. So counterintuitively you need to black out the eye completely, and then paint a little horizontal line, using a gentle swiping motion, to form the eyeball, retaining the dark outline. Once you have that you can always cut in more flesh tone around the dark outline (which I still need to do with the example I posted above).

 

Then of course there’s the pupils. Main thing here is really to examine the sculpt and see how much eye you truly have available to paint. Some minis will have hardly any space so all you can really do is shade the socket.

 

For this guy I basically just painted a little black vertical line as his eyes are pretty squinty. Just connecting the line to the top and bottom of the black outline is enough to give the illusion of pupils, but for some sculpts (especially female faces) there’s a larger eyeball and you can round the pupil out a bit.
 

 

I’m saying all this, but clearly you already know how to paint faces as there are loads of really well painted ones in your blood bowl team! 

[jaynay]

13 hours ago, Davros sock drawer said:

Yeah, there’s a very specific knack to human faces and the eyes in particular, but the main thing for me is to establish a dark outline. If you don’t get that then the white of the eyeball will always bleed into the flesh of the face. So counterintuitively you need to black out the eye completely, and then paint a little horizontal line, using a gentle swiping motion, to form the eyeball, retaining the dark outline. Once you have that you can always cut in more flesh tone around the dark outline (which I still need to do with the example I posted above).

 

Then of course there’s the pupils. Main thing here is really to examine the sculpt and see how much eye you truly have available to paint. Some minis will have hardly any space so all you can really do is shade the socket.

 

For this guy I basically just painted a little black vertical line as his eyes are pretty squinty. Just connecting the line to the top and bottom of the black outline is enough to give the illusion of pupils, but for some sculpts (especially female faces) there’s a larger eyeball and you can round the pupil out a bit.
 

 

I’m saying all this, but clearly you already know how to paint faces as there are loads of really well painted ones in your blood bowl team! 

 

Thanks, Youtube pointed me in the direction of the same technique though I need some practice, you've nailed it! I'm undecided if I prefer the black eye socket + tidy up then two white dots for the pupils technique vs black eye socket, white the eye then a black dot or line for the pupil. I guess it's contextual. 

 

It was eyes that prompted the magnifying light as like you I was just hoping and praying but now I feel like I have some control. Though it also revealed some shocking mistakes I didn't notice with the naked eye but were glaring when I did. 

 

 

[Davros sock drawer]

1 hour ago, jaynay said:

 

Thanks, Youtube pointed me in the direction of the same technique though I need some practice, you've nailed it! I'm undecided if I prefer the black eye socket + tidy up then two white dots for the pupils technique vs black eye socket, white the eye then a black dot or line for the pupil. I guess it's contextual. 

 

It was eyes that prompted the magnifying light as like you I was just hoping and praying but now I feel like I have some control. Though it also revealed some shocking mistakes I didn't notice with the naked eye but were glaring when I did. 

 

 

 

I've never managed to do white dots either side of the pupil. For some reason I really struggle with getting white paint to flow off my brush in a way that can generate a clean white dot. Or at least not a white dot small enough to use for an eye. I've got a space marine head I'm halfway through painting where I've managed a white reflection in one eye, but I just can't do it with the other. Either nothing leaves the brush, or everything does!

 

Photos reveal mistakes a lot as well, although I actually use that as a tool to spot them. If I played the games then I wouldn't worry about this sort of thing, but I'm in it for the painting and photography.

 

[jaynay]

1 hour ago, Davros sock drawer said:

 

I've never managed to do white dots either side of the pupil. For some reason I really struggle with getting white paint to flow off my brush in a way that can generate a clean white dot. Or at least not a white dot small enough to use for an eye. I've got a space marine head I'm halfway through painting where I've managed a white reflection in one eye, but I just can't do it with the other. Either nothing leaves the brush, or everything does!

 

 

The only advice I have here is non-citadel whites are SO much better. I use 90% citadel as that's what I bought when I restarted but I was so frustrated with the whites and shiny blacks I tried vallejo white and black and finding both much better than Abaddon Black & the various gloopy, chalky citadel ones. 

[Davros sock drawer]

30 minutes ago, jaynay said:

 

The only advice I have here is non-citadel whites are SO much better. I use 90% citadel as that's what I bought when I restarted but I was so frustrated with the whites and shiny blacks I tried vallejo white and black and finding both much better than Abaddon Black & the various gloopy, chalky citadel ones. 

 

Yes, I really should get some Vallejo paints. I have some of their gun metal airbrush paint (bought in error) and it's wonderful just as a replacement for Leadbelcher.

[ChewMagma]

I find a lot of the Vallejo metallics are much better than citadels. Hammered Copper is a particular favourite.

[Davros sock drawer]

I’ve popped some in the ol’ Amazon basket for pay day.

 

Meanwhile, more edge highlighting practice: