Tutorial: How I Paint Vostroyan Firstborn

It is not exactly a hot topic at the moment, but I decided that writing up my Vostroyan Firstborn paint scheme would be a fun blog post for this weekend. I'd describe this scheme as "tabletop+". It is designed to be reasonably quick to do but produce a really nice quality result.

Those familiar with the Vostroyan range will notice that the example mini that I have picked has had a small conversion. The flamer nozzle has been sawn off and replaced with a melta nozzle. I used a small piece of pin to make it a bit tougher.

So here's the step by step guide. I use a mix of Vallejo, Army Painter, old and new GW paints. Where I've used anything else, I've listed the alternative in GW's current range. There are no prizes for guessing that I start from a black undercoat.

Basecoats

This scheme is based around a dark brown and a brassy metallic. The vast majority of the mini starts with one of these two colours, but there is an alternative metallic  to provide some contrast, and some other bits and pieces are picked out.

• Faceplate, armour, insignia, melta nozzle: GW Tin Tin Bitz / Warplock Bronze
• Coat, fur hat, rifle stock: GW Rhinox Hide
• Melta hardware, toecaps, melta hose: GW Leadbelcher and Abaddon Black mixed 1:1
• Melta insignia: Vallejo Heavy Warmgrey / GW Rakarth Flesh
• Base: Vallejo Neutral Grey and Black mixed 1:1 / GW Mechanicus Standard Grey

Red Greatcoat

Getting a really nice rich red is very important to the final look of these minis. My biggest criticism of my own painting is that too many minis end up dark and dingy, and the red areas brighten these models up no end.

I use a technique that starts with a drybrush but works up through to proper highlighting. The initial drybrush helps you get a natural gradient between the light and dark areas, which you then add paint on top off to make a nice strong red that doesn't appear drybrushed at all.

• Greatcoat: GW Khorne Red - Drybrush

Now the same colour is added with a wet brush to strengthen and richen the colour.

• Greatcoat: GW Khorne Red

Finally, a highlight red goes on to really make these parts of the mini stand out. Note that I use a red glaze as well which goes on in the Finishing Touches stage.

• Greatcoat: Vallejo Scarlet / GW Wazdakka Red

Fur

Again, this is really important to lighten the mini. A couple of really quick and easy dry produces gives a fur effect that looks spot on.

• Fur: GW Stormvermin Fur - Drybrush
• Fur: Vallejo Heavy Warmgrey / GW Rakarth Flesh - Drybrush

Metallics

Now the metallics are developed, and we are quickly getting towards the final look of the model. I use a mix of drybrush and proper highlights on different parts of the mini, whatever looks best in that particular area and gets the job done quickly.

• Faceplate, armour, insignia: Vallejo Gold / GW Balthasar Gold
• Melta hardware, toecaps, pipes etc: GW Runefang Steel
• Melta nozzle: Army Painter Strong Tone / GW Nuln Oil - wash
  
  

... and another level of highlights on some parts, mainly to brighten up the gold areas. I also brushed some gold over the melta tube just to provide a bit of variation.

• Faceplate, armour, insignia: GW Runefang
• Melta tube: Vallejo Gold / GW Balthasar Gold

Finishing Touches

Just a few bits and pieces and this Space-Russkie is ready for the table:

• Hat Insignia: Vallejo Heavy Warmgrey / GW Rakarth Flesh
• White Insignia (Hat and Melta) : GW Ogryn Flesh / Reikland Fleshshade
• Ammo Pouches: Vallejo Heavy Warmgrey / GW Rakarth Flesh - very light drybrush to pick out the edges
• Lenses: GW Castellan Green
• Lenses: GW Skarsnik Green 
• Lenses GW Waywatcher Green - Glaze
• Greatcoat: GW Bloodletter - Glaze

So there you have it - my way of doing Vostroyans. It occurs to me as I write this up that this particular scuplt wasn't a great choice for the tutorial because you can see his face! Perhaps I will post a mini-tutorial on Vostroyan faces and beards soon.

How to Paint Rogue Trader Ork Warpaint

The internet is full of orks at the moment with the new models and the codex release. As usual, I am bang on trend and have prepared a tutorial to help people recreate the warpaint that features on the box from the original Ork release in 1987 - nearly thirty years ago! Barely a day goes by without people asking me for this tutorial. Honest.

It's a pretty simple process really but I though that it was worth writing up.

There are no prizes for guessing that I work from a black undercoat. I block the eyes out a this stage using a foundation yellow so any mistakes can easily be tidied up.

Next the red areas get their base coat. I used GW Khorne Red which I actually prefer to its Vallejo equivalent. A liberal amount of black should be left in the recesses to recreate the Rogue Trader look. This probably easier to see in the next step when the white is introduced.

The first coats of white go on. In this picture it has had a couple of very thin coats of GW Ceramite white. It goes on a bit chalky, but that's not a problem because it will be tidied up later. With this step, the bits you don't paint are as important as the bits that you do. A really nice strong black line should be left in the recesses - the ears and jawline are particularly good examples.

It's a bit tricky to pick this up in the picture, but the next step is to build layers on top of the white and red sections. The white just gets a nice thin coat of GW Skull White (yes I still have the old one) to take the chalkiness out of the white give it a nice finish. The red gets a first highlight with a 1:1 mix of the base coat with a lighter red. I used Vallejo Scarlet but there are probably two or three reds in the current GW range which would do the job.

There's no point doing any more work on the white now... You can't really highlight up any further! A nice final highlight goes on the red. Pure Vallejo Scarlet was my choice.

The next step is the most difficult but also the most satisfying. With a very thin brush, and black line is added to the areas where the red and white meet. It adds to the black in the recesses to make the final look of the model really strong, and give it the Rogue Trader style that we are looking for.

This is the brush that I used for this step, and for all the freehand experiments that I'm doing at the moment. It is a Winsor Newton Series 7 Miniature 00 which Poot let me try out. I've been really impressed with it and told him that he's not having it back!

The finishing touches are some GW Bloodletter Glaze over the red areas, and a touch of wash in the eye sockets. This boy is ready for the Battle at the Farm!

This is the mini from the box that I was trying to reproduce. As you can see I made a mistake and picked up the wrong sculpt! Oh well... Finally, a couple of shots of my two warpainted Orks. Waaaaaaaggh!

Tutorial: Flocking a Games Table

I've called this a tutorial, but that's stretching it a bit seeing as we really didn't know what we were doing when we started this project! Anyway, this is how we went about flocking our table, and hopefully people will learn from the things that we did wrong as much as the things we did right.

We were loosely following this recipe which was posted on Warseer by Feren from Edinburgh League of Gamers: http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?232043-Making-a-40k-Table-Finally

Our aim was to do the table in a way that would complement these excellent hills which we got from the wargamestournaments eBay store. They put our unpainted table to shame so we set out to flock it in similar way.

The Table
We have an 8' by 4' table in the Wargarage which until now has been unpainted. It was high time that it had some colour and texture applied to it, but we decided against flocking the table itself and instead got four 2' by 4' sheets of MDF to lay on top. The texture would be applied to these boards.

Preparing the Boards
Before any flock went on the board, we wanted to add some texture and colour using sand and paint. The first step was to take the smooth surface off the MDF by giving one side of each board a quick going over with some sandpaper. When this step is done there should be a nice fluffy feel to it.

While we were doing this, we were baking the sand to make sure that it was nice and dry. We used builders sand that had been lying around outside for months, and found that the best way to dry it out was in disposable turkey baking trays at about 150 Celsius. About half an inch of sand in a tray would be dry in 15-20 minutes. For our 8' by 4' table, three trays of sand would have been plenty if we were being efficient, but in the end we prepared a fourth tray just to be safe.

Once we'd finished drying sand out it was time to apply it to the boards. We used a roller to apply PVA and water mixed at approximately 2:1 to the fluffy side of each board. Afterwards sand was liberally chucked on before being patted down and spread around by hand.

After some drying time we tipped the excess sand into our dust sheet and went off to play the X-Wing miniatures game for a couple of hours to let the whole thing dry out enough to be painted. Leaving them overnight to dry would probably be the best option if time allows. There were a few wet patches and areas where the paint rollers picked up sand on our boards, but we managed to patch these up well enough.

We had decided on a dark brown colour similar to Rhinox Hide in the GW range for the base. Because this was cut with water and PVA, a single 200ml tube of acrylic was plenty for the entire table. The one that we used wasn't particularly cheap, but it would probably be possible to shop around and get something equally good for these purposes without spending as much as we did.

The paint went on with the roller, and we found that a pva:water:paint ratio of approximately 5:3:1 worked about right. In a perfect world, the sand would be totally even and there would be no bare patches at all. On our boards, there were some areas with less sand or no sand at all which we just touched up with paint. We decided that there were so many layers of flock going on later that these wouldn't affect the final finish at all really.

Once this coat dry, the final preparation step was to drybrush each board with a lightened version of the base colour, just to highlight some of the sand texture.

Once this is done, the preparation stage in complete, and it is time to start mixing some flock.

The Flock
After doing some research we came up with the following flock mixture to use as the basis for the table. All of these are manufactured by Javis Countryside Scenics:

• 1 part Spring Mix
• 1 part Rough Mix
• 1 part Summer Mix
• 1 part Heath Green

Each bag was shoved into a biscuit tin and given a good mix. This is a particularly satisfying job!

Rather than having a uniform layer of flock on  the board, we wanted to leave some areas of the textured board showing at this stage. To do this we painted pure PVA on in patches then drybrushed it outwards so that further away from the centre of these patches, less and less flock would stick, creating a natural looking gradient.

We found that this was also a really good opportunity to cover up any mistakes that have been made in the preparation of the board. Any patchy areas can be given the most PVA and be completely covered with flock to hide all the mistakes!

At this stage, all of our boards had flock patterns that came out a bit different, but that didn't matter too much because the next job is to lay the boards out next to each other and to add flock to give the whole table a coherent look. The edges of the boards need particular attention.

This part was really good fun but we did make a bit of a mess of our brush. Luckily we'd been pretty sensible and used the cheapest, nastiest brush that we could find.

Now the the final look of the table is starting to take shape. One possible improvement could be at the edges of each board. We've used flock to make one board bend into another, which means that there are fairly regular bands across the table. With a little bit more planning, this could be improved, but it will not be a problem when the table has terrain on it.

All that was left to do now was seal the board with some more PVA, this time watered down and sprayed through a handheld spray gun. The one we used was similar to the ones you get kitchen cleaning sprays in, but a bit more heavy duty to cope with the thickness of the mixture. We ended up using a water:pva ratio of approximately 4:1. 

We found that the mixture tends to drip out of the spray mechanism quite a bit. You can see this on the board in the right hand side of the picture above. It is worth using something to catch the drips so that patches of flock don't get ruined.

This was a good few hours work but certainly worth doing. Having a properly presented table is going to make our games look much better, and will hopefully encourage people to field fully painted armies a bit more often!

Unusually, it was Warhammer Fantasy Battle Cat who came to help me take the pictures today. The Wargarage is in her garden and she often comes in to see what's going on when I am in there on my own, but tends to steer clear if there are more people waving rule books around and shouting etc.

Tutorial: Necromunda Orlock Scheme #2 - 2001 Style

I am about half way through painting the entire set of original sculpt Orlocks, and my paint scheme for these is here. A couple of the newer 2001 sculpts made it onto my painting table as well. Although I much prefer the earlier models, I thought that coming up with a paint scheme that would emulate the Games Workshop scheme for the new style Orlocks would be a worthwhile exercise, so here it is.

Here's the comparison with the official scheme. Not bad even if I do say so myself! I've made a couple of changes - I really don't like the sunglasses on the GW model and I have used a basing scheme that matches with the rest of my Orlock gang.

First, the base colours go on over a black undercoat. I use a mix of Vallejo, old and new GW paints. Where I've used anything else, I've listed the alternative in GW's current range.

• Jacket and Boots: Vallejo Black / GW Abaddon Black
• Denim: Vallejo Heavy Blue / GW Macragge Blue
• Grenades: GW Waagh Flesh
• Metal: Vallejo Gungrey / GW Leadbelcher
• Weapon Casings: GW Castellan Green
• Leather, Hair: GW Mournfang Brown
• Flesh: GW Tallarn Flesh / GW Cadian Fleshtone
• Bandana: GW Mechrite Red / GW Wazdakka Red
• Base: Vallejo Neutral Grey / GW Mechanicus Standard Grey

A round of washes goes on next, starting to give the mini some depth. I also started the basing, using some PVA to stick sand onto the base.

• Metal, Grenades: GW Badab Black / GW Nuln Oil
• Flesh: GW Ogryn Flesh / GW Reikland Fleshshade
• Leather, Hair, Bandana: GW Devlan Mud / GW Agrax Earthshade

This scheme follows a pretty standard approach - base, wash, the re-touch with base colour. Most of the mini gets its first set of highlights using the base colours, so I've not re-listed them all - they are same as in the first step. There are two exceptions - the leather and denim get a drybrush highlight with a different colour.

• Denim: Drybrush GW Space Wolf Grey / GW Fenrisian Grey
• Leather: Drybrush Vallejo Heay Warmgrey / GW Rakarth Flesh

Only a couple more steps are left. Another set of highlights goes on using lighter colours, either pre-mixed or by adding some white / bone to the base colour. The leather, denim and base get another wash.

• Base and Leather: GW Badab Black / GW Nuln Oil
• Denim: GW Asurmen Blue / GW Drakenhof Nightshade
• Flesh: GW Kislev Flesh
• Leather / Hair: GW Mournfang Brown mixed with bone
• Metal: GW Runefang Steel
• Weapon Casing and Grenades: GW Ogryn Camo
• Bandana: Vallejo Crimson / GW Evil Sunz Scarlet

Finally, some finishing touches, including some gloss varnish on the metal lenses... The idea was to create a mirror shade effect but I am not that convinced. Worth a try though.

• Base: Drybrush Vallejo Heavywarmgrey
• Bandana: Glaze GW Bloodletter
• Lenses: Varnish GW Hardcoat

This chap is ready for the underhive! I have glued him up with two pistols to represent a model in my gang who rolled the Gunslinger ability. Two autopistols at short range can be deadly.