skya

Not only are these his army level piece, you should watch how fast he paints them. *mutters something incoherent*

Heh, what is it about this mini that begs for those wings? I've got one in progress were I did the same thing with the wings as well as swapping my own homemade energy weapon thingy on to her. I do at this point wish I'd left that arm off untill after I'd painted it the way you did though.

Bah, all you can see of me in that picture is the tip of my hat and my Dr. Pepper. And I do believe Baasen is right and that was Friday I probably looked like I was about to fall over. I never really did do the whole star struck thing though, people are people and much easier to relate to that way even when they are gods at what they do.

Oh great, even better !! I take it you enjoy using them Skya ? and if so do you have a couple of "must have" colours from this part of the Metallic range ?? Does anyone have any more tips for these paints & solvent ? like will it dissolve certain brushes etc ( and does it make nice cocktails ? ) ( thanks in advance for your patience with goldenskeleton's 101 questions. ) Four colors I use the most: Gold, Silver, Copper and White Gold. The last makes a decent slightly aged looking silver when washed with smoke. I have yet to find a *good* way to get the stuff out of brushes unfortunatly, so I dont recommend using your high quality brushes on it till you've experimanted with some cleaners.

For the alcohols I use Isopropyl Alcohol 91% which I'm fairly certain is just another name for rubbing alcohol. I dont know that I'd highlight the gold up with silver. Having tried it, it ends up looking rather odd. I have a theory for doing thin layers of the gold over white to do highlights tthat I have yet to try. However it's *so* reflective that you really dont need to highlight it if you put the shadows in the places.

My standard mix tends to be Vallejo Pale Sand, shaded down to Iraqui Sand shaded down to Camoe Black Brown.

This is going to be very cool. I love Iron Kingdoms... I am so looking forward to the world books.

The Vallejo alcohol based metallics are *very* smooth and *very* shiney. However they do not take well to dull coat, it well, dulls them; and washes tend to pool badly on them specifically because of how smooth they are. Carefully applied thin layers can work to create smooth shading effects, but it's a lot more work than you'd really expect. I do recommend the Tamiya smoke if you decide to try them and GW's Chestnut ink works well on the copper and some of the gold colors.

I didnt pick one up, but I did paint one while there. I dont know about the size ratio of the wings, but they didnt seem to have nearly that much curve to them... It does however, have a lot more majesty to it than the shot on the site indicates, It sweeps well. I also highly recommend pinning that little sprue that they give you into the base, as otherwise it will topple out of the slot from it's own weight. I layered a whole lot of brown stuff on the base of the one I painted to get it to stay.

Geez, even the armadillo hitting the undercarrige didnt make *that* much noise. awww, poor little armadillo, they're so cute with their little nose, talons and armour plating. still wanted to see the kitties though gwwaahhh Awww, Poor Baasen.... think of it as incentive to make the next one.

What, a dead Armadillo wasn't enough for ye? Geez, even the armadillo hitting the undercarrige didnt make *that* much noise.

Honestly, this is a mini not a painting. Some of the principles apply, but a lot of them dont as I have learned the hard way. I tend to only shade with with greys if I want something to look very etherial or flat, or if I'm specifically making the color a grey. (Even then I usually choose a warm grey or a cool grey.) For one thing, if you're shading up from a true neutral color (and there are not many those) you dont have the vibrancy of a warm or a cool pallete. Generally I tend to pick a warm shade and a warm highlight or a cool shade and a cool highlight. If you want your colors to look rich, but you still want a reasonably neutral shadow color you might want to stick with dark browns. If you decide to work on creating shades by mixing complimentary colors (which I've honestly never tried on minis) I would recommend picking up a book called Blue and Yellow Dont Make Green by Michael Wilcox. It's one of the best color mixing books I've ever read and should help you keep your colors from getting muddy when you mix them, or show you how to make them the right tone of muddy if that's what you're going for. Actually, even if you arent mixing shade colors I recommend this book. It'll give you a better understanding of the difference between pigments and light when it comes to color.

Ok, I found a really amusing IMMPS picture that Rich took a year or two ago. I'm the one in the front with the hat working on illustration stuff and that's Sue and Anne in the back working on minis. And here's one of the better pictures I have of me. i.e I'm not squinting, my eyes are all the way open and I dont look like a zombie.

Hmm the colors look good, but it looks like you're highlighting up your vermillion with white. Looks a bit flat. You might try warm tone to highlight it with instead.

I'm supposed to believe that? Friday felt directionless honestly. (Though that could have been lack of sleep talking. ) It would have been great to be able to spend the evenings at Reaper instead of needing to head off to get food and then needing to arrange which room we were ending up at once we wandered back to the hotel just to spend more time painting. The light in the hotel wasnt as good and it was rather packed in the room.

Heh, given that one of our painting crowd's favorite past times is see who can make Adam blush hardest... I didnt think I was *that* bad this weekend. This weekend was however absolutely awesome. I think the best part was hanging out in Jester's room till 2am painting and BSing. It was great getting a feel for who the people on here really are. Oh yeah and Jester took one look at the red I was cursing at and handed me the exact color I needed to make it actually work. Other highlights included: - painting a bald eagle for Al, god that eagle fig rocks - getting exactly the bits I needed to convert up a Dragon Ogre drake for my husband - meeting Bob and Julie and getting to sit and oogle while I tried futilely to convert an eagle rider. Very enjoyable convesation was had - watching the change in Jester over the weekend - listening to the tearing apart of a "color theory" article in harbringer magazine - watching Flynn "get" nmm, holy cow! You're gonna go win yourself some serious awards now right?? - drooling over Talin's art for 3 hours... and getting to finally see the sketch for my DYOM. I now know why you get 25 of them when you win, so you can give them to all your friends going "ooo I want one" I gotta agree with Kelcore and Lord Baasen though, next time we fly.

Oooo... Wemics would be cool.

You know it's really scary when the smilies do the wave....

Well ignoring the fact that they're just plain *good*... One of the things about most of the Reaper painters is that they tend to use a more natural looking pallette. neutral colors such as greys and browns added to colors to make them look more like something you'd see in real life. For specific colors I highly recommend Valleyo's Camoe Black Brown and Reaper's Walnut for use as shading colors.

That's a good thought. No idea how I'd pack it all though.... Even ignoring the redicuous quantities of extra clan wars stuff I have, there's an entire table covered in mini's I may or may not get around to painting.

*cackles evilly*

I intend to pick up a number of dragon tails and lower bodies as well as demonic/succubi wings. Oh yeah and multiples of whatever sprue those cool little backpacks are on. There are also a number of warlord piece I'm picking up just because.

I must admit, I like the fact that painting with the IMMPS forces me to keep my painting materials portable. Though I'm going to have to get a slightly larger box soon as I've run out of room to add more paints. You should see Paintminion's box, it's a massive thing....

Another option is to pull out a peachy flesh tone and use that as your transition color.

Always loved Elfquest, I bet those would be fun minis to paint. Unfortunately, I dont have money to spend on minis right now.