Ferox

No-one's sent you to any tutorials yet, so I will: http://www.reapermini.com/TheCraft/12 http://www.destroyerminis.com/eyes.php http://forums.brushthralls.com/index.php?showtopic=5056 http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=504052 http://massivevoodoo.blogspot.com/2010/05/tutorial-painting-eyes.html Hope one of 'em helps.

That sounds... amazing, really. You wouldn't happen to have an approximate recipe on hand, would you?

Wow, congrats!

Why I bought it: Another tool/toy in the box, mostly. A fair number of the folks on the Privateer painting forum refer to P3 Matte ("Mixing"?) Medium a lot, and Ghool specifically recommended the Liquitex stuff over P3 in this thread (and brings up medium as a dilutant in the associated tutorial). I'm thinking more "Hey, neat; what does this do?" than "I have this problem, and expect someone to tell me how to solve it with matte medium". Paints: Reaper Master Series, of course.

I've finally put brush to pewter again last night, and took the opportunity to play with a new toy -- Liquitex matte medium. It certainly makes paint behave... differently. I'm not quite sure what to think, other than that I'll do better if I know what to look for than I will by just flailing around. I've tried it undiluted, a little, but mostly in combination with my gunk mix -- roughly 20:1:1 water:flow improver:drying retarder. I mixed up a small batch of 2:1 medium:gunk, which seems to be working pretty well as a dilutant for layering. Washes and basecoats mixed with the medium (or the 2:1 mix) seem to take longer to dry, but thin layers thinned with the 2:1 mix don't stay wet for noticeably longer than those thinned with plain ol' gunk. Not sure if this is good or bad. I'm expecting to find that paint thinned with matte medium "stays put" better than otherwise. I was hoping that this'd help me lay down smoother basecoats of Linen White (which has been annoying me lately), but so far I haven't hit on the perfect ratio. The Linen White mix I left on my wet palette soaked up a bunch of water overnight. Any advice is appreciated.

I first came across this idea in an impressive tutorial by automaton.

This. I grabbed your image and saved it for future study. Much appreciated!

Let's see if I can actually get something painted this month.

I dunno about the Uniform Brown, white, and green on the wall. Maybe try to take the stonework a bit further in the greenish ochre direction to tie in with the leaves by analogous rather than complementary colours? Take the leaves more towards a yellow-green to match the static grass? Or go the other way and shade the wall aggressively with dark blues to tie in with the Musketeer's tabard, and take the grass more towards the leaves' blue-green? Two sources of dissonance for me are the different hues between the capstones (orange-brown) and the kerb-stones (green-brown), and between the leaves (blue-green) and the grass (yellow-green). I like Heisler's idea of terracotta stone-work; unifying the capstones and kerb-stones might make the contrast on the greenery "interesting" rather than "another jarring element", especially with something red to set them off.

Frickin' glorious!

Outstanding!

Well, there you go. Paint to your tastes, not mine.

Great job! It was exciting to watch your skills progress through the WIP. Looks like there are a few speckles on the green, particularly on the back and below his left arm. Is that the sealer? I'm still not a big fan of the red and blue at the top of the staff. It seems disconnected from the rest of the figure, at least to me. That said: outstanding job; you should be (justly) proud.

This. I use candle wax (real cutting oil would probably work better), and the difference is like night and day. If you're using a larger bit and find it slipping in the chuck, you could also try drilling a pilot hole with a smaller bit first. It doesn't take much more time (except for changing bits -- drill all of your pilot holes first, then follow up), and since you're moving less metal with each bit it goes much more smoothly.

"Non-toxic paints": The poison is in the dose. That said, I'm still gonna stay away from cadmium pigments. (Is RMS Flow Improver as toxic as, say, Liquitex flow release? I use that stuff all the time.) Two-brush blending: Let me see if I understand this. Simply put, you lay down the shadow (say) colour, then with a clean wet brush, pull some of the pigment through the blend? As opposed to the way I do glazing, which is to load a brush with the shadow colour, lay the brush on the surface on the "other side" of the blend, and drag most of the pigment across into the shadow. In my mental model, glazing works with very thin paints, so that there's very little pigment deposited at the initial point of contact and most of it gets dragged along (via tension in the medium) with the brush. Two-brush blending, then, would work with thicker paints, as long as there's enough mass to the medium to keep most of the pigment where you first put it and not drag it all along with the brush? Your tutorial implies that you use more matte medium than water to thin your paint for two-brush blending. Also, is there a Reaper equivalent to matte medium? 09215 Anti-Shine Additive is listed as "matte additive" on the thumbnail, but doesn't sound quite right. I can't find P3 matte medium around here for the life of me.

I'm getting nowhere -- but now there's a Scythean on my workbench that's begging for some conversion work. *sigh*

I agree with Psyber -- the head's getting a bit lost. I don't know that exaggerating the eyes is the best way to compensate, though: bringing up the highlights on the head in general seems like a better way forward to me. Maybe it's the lighting, but I'm also concerned that you've painted a beautiful dark blue dragon rather than a black one. This stands out most to me in the second pic you posted, so if you fiddled with the colour balance for that one it's likely an artifact of photo editing rather than the actual paint. My issue isn't the brightness or even the blue-ness of the highlights, but the fact that they cover so much of each scale.

4x Tenacity in front, Blood Lure and Glider (Neph BT animus) in back. Tough to fit Incubi into a 25pt list, but their models are one reason why I got into Legion in the first place.

In the vein of these guys, I've painted some more Hordes spell tokens: While the previous tokens are pretty abstract, I'm sure I can find a good use for zombie hands rising from the barren earth and a raven-ish thing perched on a blasted stump even when I'm not playing WarmaHordes.

If you're going for a faded/weathered look, desaturating the highlight ought to work well. Snow Shadow as a first highlight, maybe, and then either Ghost White or (less blue) Leather White at the top?

Yellow? I like.

When it comes to painting greys, whites, or other colours that tend to get chalky, Ghool's method of starting with the highlights has been working well for me. I've also had some luck with adding drying retarder to my thinning mix, and with mixing chromatic greys from pigments that are less likely to get chalky in the first place (medium blue and brown), but if you're going up to white it's hard to get away with the latter all the time.

Fantastic job on the newer pieces -- the carnosaur's skin in particular is great. I'd like to see more colour on the dracolich -- more of a tan colour for the bone, maybe, or pale blues to suggest moonlight. You don't have a lot of variety of materials on the 'lich -- mostly just bone -- so there's no obvious natural variation in hue. You can get some of it back by mixing a chromatic grey from complementary mid-tones, then shading with one and highighting with the other. Examples are here and here.

Good stuff. You've nailed the armour, and the axe-head is none too shabby either.

Excellent work! One minor quibble: The gems on the staff look just a little bit off to me in colour selection. I like the blue crystal, but the combination of the red gems and blue crystal is far enough away from the colours on the rest of the figure that it looks out of place. Bringing the red gems closer to orange would help tie them in with the hair and belt pouch, which would in turn make the blue crystal stand out even more. Nonetheless, I think you nailed it.