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Hi all, It has been a really busy year for me, between moving across the country, starting a new job, finding a place to live, getting married, major surgery for the missus, and evacuating/rebuilding after a major hurricane. Unfortunately, this has left little time for painting- and it’s been driving me nuts! After the wedding a few weeks back, we finally had some time to take a step back and breathe. The wife poked me and said “why don’t you start painting again?” The first thing I picked up was this squad of half-finished Ritterlich Republic cougars I had been working on last winter before the move. They had been painted and inked, but not assembled, highlighted or jeweled. I’ve been working on them a few hours at a time over the past few weeks, and finally had a big chunk of the day yesterday where I could sit down and power through them… here they are! I still need to do the bases, but I couldn’t do that last night as the glue was still drying. They will also get a matte varnish coat, but I'd like to get your C&C on a few things before then. As I have mentioned before, this is from the CAV kickstarter; one of the things I wanted to do with the kickstarter CAVs was to explore a different painting technique for each army. For the Ritter, this was edging. As time went on, I started to become a bit fatigued at the sheer amount of edging required. This caused me to slowly rotate from display quality (for me at least) to more tabletop quality. But hey, a painted mini is always better than an unpainted one, and easing up a bit on the quality allowed me to finish them quickly. I am also trying to incorporate more blending in the canopies, as well as some OSL effects. As you can see, I am still practicing. I expect I will get better with time (at least I hope I do)! As always, C & C are very welcome. I am trying to get better and I can’t do that without critique. Any comments about how to improve the jeweling or OSL in particular would be most appreciated. If anyone wants the paints or techniques used, I can provide that information too.

Hi everyone! It's been a while since I have posted something, but here we go! I have decided to take a break from my terrans and try something new. There were several new techniques I had been wanting to try, including camouflage, washes, and edging. I also wanted more practice with OSL and jeweling now that I had purchased some Matte medium. I had been going back and forth about how I wanted to paint my ritterlich force, when I came across this wonderfully painted starship fleet over at triple zero painting: https://triplezeropainting.com/category/spaceship-miniatures/brigade-models/oness/ I was blown away by this paint scheme and had wanted to do some camo for awhile, but nothing I had seen so far in the CAV realm really stuck with me. This was my answer! I started out by airbrushing my force with Reaper Breonne Blue. I let it dry and applied the sticky tack as explained in the article, then airbrushed with Ashen Blue. Note: If you do this, you need to be very careful to make sure the sticky tack is flush against the model, or the top color will bleed underneath. I had to do a lot of cleaning up, but this is how it turned out: To get the crevasses nice and dark, I applied a wash of 1:1 navy blue/black, with some water and matte medium to thin it out. This was my first time applying a wash and I think it came out pretty well (though the photo is crap) Next came the highlighting. I don't have a photo of just this phase for the cougar, but here are some Tiamat legs which were my test piece: Highlights were achieved by mixing each blue with Reaper Misty Grey in a 1:1 ratio, with some matte medium to thin it out once again (that stuff is fantastic!) I realized almost immediately that I had made a terrible mistake in terms of time commitment... there were so many edges. However, I think the final product came out pretty darn cool. I am really proud of this one! C and C welcome! I would like to go over the jewling one more time, and if anyone has any recommendations for a good spray matte sealer I am all ears. Going forward I will be doing these in a more assembly line fashion than one at a time, but I needed a test piece first :)

I finally have six fighting CAV armies - some more fight-y than others. Some have enough models with enough variety to meet diverse challenges, and some are just barely legal if you squint right. Case in point? Here's my newly painted Ritterlich army! Notice a complete lack of infantry, aircraft, fighting vehicles, transports, and for that matter, primary squads.* But recon and artillery? Got that *covered*! Anyway, here's a glimpse of my boys in blue. They won't see much growth until next year when CAV KS II gets here, but they will see play because, hey, rhinos right? * As-is, I could only build two legal attack squads, both of which revolve around a rhino and a cataphract with either a recon model or a fire support model to get it up to a full squad of 4. Truth be told, I'm honestly thinking I'll re-purpose some of these cougars as Cougar IIs - something between a Cougar and a Jaguar, just for the sake of variety.

Hi all, this is my first post on this forum and I wanted to share my progress on the CAV bones early bird rewards. So here they are: #1 Tiamat: #2 Cougar One is reposed in a more static stance. #3 Assassin #4 Razor #5 Specter #6 Wight One is also reposed (I'm not a bit fan of the running stance for those ones). #7 Halberd (in a quick and dirty speed painted camo) ************************* I also stumbled accross the templates to build a Hercules Dropship in foam core, and I knew that I had to make it. (It was a fun project with my daughter). Here it is fully assembled: And then with details added and a lot of airbrushing: I think it looks quite cool and makes a nice backdrop for my CAV: Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.