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Post by Xantige on Jan 17, 2013 22:02:18 GMT
I haven't been overly active in the Hive due to college, and likewise, my painting has been sparse and the last time I played a game was probably back in July. The hobby on a whole has waned for me. It's hard to stay interested in something I can't spend more than an hour or two a week on, and usually in 15-30 minute painting increments. I've wanted to start a painting blog for a while now, but I never did because I didn't feel I was making enough progress to keep it active. Now I've changed my mind. Regardless of how active or unactive this blog is, it's currently the only way anyone is going to see my painting, and I've been feeling so alone in the hobby, I could use the input, discussion, praise, critique and the companionship. I'm hoping it'll make painting feel like less of an isolating, dead end road if there are at least a few people online who are looking at my stuff.  95% of my models are GW, most of them are nids, but this blog won't just feature my Tyranid army. I plan on posting any models I paint, whether thats my nids, my orks, a few reaper minis for dnd, or bargain finds, or the occational warmahorde model I buy. Consider yourself warned  . Now without further delay, here's what I just finished up yesterday. I've been working on these guys since July.  These are my Warriors. They've been magnetized in the arms. These guys were my second magnet job ever, the first being when I had to magnetize the rotors and bases of some Deffkoptas because they were broken off.  This is just a closer look at the gun arms. Sorry for the overlap that makes the harder to pick out, I took these pictures with my ipad.  Here they're all armed with Deathspitters and headed by my Prime. She's a bit hard to pick out from the rest, but she has longer, bladed shoulderpads and a protected sternum.  And finally, here are some pictures of the painted portion of my army. I apologize for the lighting, my room is terribly dark.   And this last one is just visually interesting in how it looks like a solid horde of minis. As you can see, my painted army is pretty pathetic  . It's roughly in the 750 point range but lacks any elites or heavy support or what not. I'm not entirely sure what models I'll paint next, on one hand I feel I need more hormagaunts (there's only 12 painted right now), but I do have 3 Hive guard that might round this army out a bit more. Although these days I rarely think about 40k in gaming terms. I've accepted that I'll probably never even be good enough to remember most of the rules, let alone win games. I prefer painting and casual gaming (although I don't win those either ). Also, I got myself a reaper mini to paint up as a dnd Dragonborn paladin for myself, but imageshack has just gone down, so I'll have to post those pictures at a later date. I hope what I've posted so far is good. Let me know what you guys think about the models and the pictures. if you feel the ipad does a decent job, I'll continue to use it, if not, I'll have to dig out my camera from the abyss... |
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Post by Evan Quinn on Jan 17, 2013 22:37:15 GMT
Looking good! Keep up the good work!
Evan~
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Post by swarm492 on Jan 17, 2013 23:46:40 GMT
As always beautiful work, keep building the swarm you will win a game soon enough.
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Post by Deadlink on Jan 18, 2013 1:51:10 GMT
My mum has three of those plastic container/drawer thingies.
Deadlink97~
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Post by Covalent on Jan 18, 2013 3:38:41 GMT
Oh a return of the golden horde! Looks great man!
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Post by Xantige on Jan 18, 2013 4:51:37 GMT
Thanks for the kind words folks! Imageshack seems to be working so here are the pictures of my DnD Dragonborn Paladin:    Interesting fact: The character tied to this model is actually a female dragonborn. But I couldn't find a female model that wasn't overly female, so I went with this one. As it also happens, everyone in my group hates the idea of dragonborn females having breasts, so it all worked out for the better. Now if only we all had time to actually hammer out the campaign and get it rolling... I'm currently working on painting 8 "Infestation Markers" because I needed a break from models as detailed and involved as the warriors. I thought it'd be a nice change of pace, and give me some nice objective markers to boot. I may submit a WIP picture tomorrow, or whenever I get the chance. Currently my homework has to be done in school, so I'm either in class, or sleeping at home, not a lot of time to take pictures and upload and what have you. I'm debating about basing the markers. I'ver heard that some people put them on 40mm bases. I'm not entirely sure if I want to spend money on GW bases (they're kind of expensive for something like this...). What do you guys think? |
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Post by FTGTEvan on Jan 18, 2013 12:33:20 GMT
Love the last picture of the assembled horde. Get that on a gaming table with scenery in the background and that will be an epic picture.
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Post by Xantige on Jan 19, 2013 8:06:35 GMT
Love the last picture of the assembled horde. Get that on a gaming table with scenery in the background and that will be an epic picture. It would be! If I'm ever at the club on a slow day, and a table is out and decorated up already, I might just do that. Funnily enough, the minis in the shot haven't been moved from the shots above. But the angle makes them look densely packed. |
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Post by Hive Carnithrope on Jan 19, 2013 12:16:07 GMT
Very nice Bling Nids as always Xan.  And that dragon actually looks really cool in gold! I wasn't sure at first, but looking back, it definitely suits it. ;D |
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Post by nighthawk76320 on Jan 21, 2013 8:51:03 GMT
Am I dreaming or these or blue and gold?
This... is... OH WHY NOT this is cool
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Post by Xantige on Jan 21, 2013 23:19:49 GMT
Very nice Bling Nids as always Xan. And that dragon actually looks really cool in gold! I wasn't sure at first, but looking back, it definitely suits it. ;D I was going to go with yellow at first, and attempt a non-metalic gold look, but one of my friends in the campaign pushed me to paint it in real gold, in part because of my nids, and I'm quite happy with the results too, thank you Am I dreaming or these or blue and gold? This... is... OH WHY NOT this is cool I don't think I fully understood that, but thanks! Things are starting to settle into a routine with college. Sadly it's a harsh one. I'm taking colour theory this semester, and it involves spending my whole weekend from dawn until dusk, and many of my afternoons, in school painting in my classroom to ensure that the paints match whatever I'm trying to match, so I'm not home often. When I am home, I'm cramming in readings and drafting sketches and writing rationales and such. All this work with paint has dulled my desire to paint 40k models, but it hasn't killed it utterly, since in class 99% of the time is spent mixing, and just 1% using the paint. I mention this because it sort of impacts something that's been on my mind for a long time now, on and off: My orks. Some of you may have seen my Orks already, but for those that haven't, here are a few old pictures I took in the summer outside.       That's a lot of images. Sorry, but I don't have any good pictures of the army as a whole that's clear enough to show details. But as you might notice, compared to my nids, my orks are rather... bland. I've seen red and black orks before, and I really hate having a colour scheme that's so common, especially when it gets confused for an Evil Sunz colour scheme. Back when I painted these models, I didn't plan on having an Ork army, I just painted the orks I had from AoBR to compliment my Marines, so I went with a red and varied their skin colours. I also made their bases dark to match my marines. But then I fell in love with the orks and got my hands on some more orks from AoBR, and now I find myself not overly happy with how dull and bland my orks are. Thing is, I'm not sure how to change them so they're Orky, yet original. I've thought of doing everything, from just changing the base colour to a sandy tone, to just adding on dags and checks, to utterly stripping and restarting. But no idea I come up with seems to stick or work. If any of you guys have ideas, please send them my way. If you have pictures, or know of galleries full of unique ork colour schemes, please send them my way! Anyways, for whatever reason, all this colour theory work has had me stewing over my orks in my free time, and so, last night and this morning, when I found a little bit of freetime, I decided to try something on a painted ork that I'm almost 100% sure I'll change on my army anyways: The base. Here's a quick picture I took of two of my orks, one with a lighter base than the other. Please tell me which one you guys think works best, and why. And if you have any other base ideas, send them my way, and if you know what colours work best to make a nice looking sandy base, let me know, because I don't have many browns and cream colours and I feel the light base I tried feels unnatural an slightly sickening.  And last but not least, here's a WIP picture of the Infestation markers I'm working on.  The red tray throws the colours a bit off, but I hope you guys get the general idea. The tips will be gold, and I might do a bit of gold edging on the black, like the carapace of my nids. |
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Post by swarmy on Jan 22, 2013 0:14:52 GMT
2 hoard armies!? Ambitious. Kudos Xantige. Having an entire ork army at that level of quality will be a thing to behold |
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Post by Xantige on Jan 22, 2013 1:09:20 GMT
2 hoard armies!? Ambitious. Kudos Xantige. Having an entire ork army at that level of quality will be a thing to behold Well, it happened by accident. I just wanted to paint all my AoBR models before I moved on to my nids, and so I did a bit of research on orks, and I found out a bit about their fluff and fell in love with the idea. I think in terms of fluff, I much prefer the orks, we gel well, but I just love the look of the nid models more. At the time everyone was willing to sell their Ork AobR models for cheap, so I bought 2 more sets, bringing me up to 3 now. I don't know how much money I'll put into my orks, since it's not a cheap hobby and I'm not sure if 40k is the perfect game for me (it's too long for my current schedule, and transporting so many models to the club without a car is horrendous) but I plan on painting what I have and fielding them. It might turn out that orks are my favorite gaming army and my nids are my favorite painting army. Who knows. But now that I love the orks, I want mine to be as special as my nids. Part of it is that I don't want to be a one trick pony, which is to say, someone who just stumbled accidentally onto a unique colour scheme and can't do it again. But I must admit, it's hard to make orks look how I like my models (vivid, exotic, and clean) and still look orky (green, dull, dirty, rusty). It's also hard to not get tempted into just painting them turquiose, black and gold like I did my marines and nids . I just love those colours. |
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Post by Xantige on Jan 24, 2013 9:37:33 GMT
I'm typing this post from my iPad. I've never tried this before so please excuse any weird auto edits or what have you. It's also super late here and I should be asleep, so I may come on and edit this post with more info, but until then, I have some more progress to show you guys! I don't have time to give you guys the whole story, but yesterday was a terrible day for me. I was at school for 13 hours and I only got about 3 hours of work done on a colour chart that might take 40-60 hours of work to do. I came home feeling defeated and frustrated and doomed, so I fed all that back burning anger into some before bed painting. I stayed up later than I intended, but I needed the "me time." The first thing I nearly finished were my objective markers. I say "nearly finished" because they need to be sprayed with a finish, but it's been -20 C and blizzarding with lots of wind, so they're sitting in my tray until decent weather rolls in.  After that, I pulled out my test sprue and tried out some simple skin tone ideas I had for my orks... No luck. I was thinking of maybe creating an army of pale orks, with only the slightest hint of green, but I couldn't get good results with any of the Gw glazes or washes, so it's back to the drawing board there. Sigh. After that, I didn't want to end the night on another frustrated note, so I grabbed a model I've been meaning to paint for over a year... My first 40k gift from a friend that showed me what real friends are about... My pyrovore!  She's not quite finished, and no, I didn't get that much done in one night. I got a base coat of hawk turquoise and a wash of asurmen blue on her before I retired for the night. But today I found bits of time to work on her over my reading breaks. She's the only thing that's keeping me in good spirits despite today being another unproductive day due to life happening. I know people hate the pyrovore, but these girls will always have a special place in my heart for the kindness my friend showed me. We call this my party cannon, my "gauntling gun" it was to be my tervigon proxy before the model for the tervigon came out. And without meaning to, I made pyrovore a cornerstone of Hive Fleet Scarabus's fluff due to its need for minerals and metals that pyrovore are needed to melt down. Anyways, I'm rambling. I hope you guys enjoy the progress. I didn't think I'd be updating this often. If anyone is interested, I could post a list of nid models I have painted, and the ones I have yet to paint. I could do the same with my orks, and my other misc models if anyone is interested in those either, but I probably won't unless you lot are interested. Goodnight Hive! |
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Post by swarm492 on Jan 24, 2013 13:01:01 GMT
We all need some me time now and again, the pyrovore looks great so far, and makes me excited to see your scheme on even larger bugs. Keep up the good work.
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. It's roughly in the 750 point range but lacks any elites or heavy support or what not. I'm not entirely sure what models I'll paint next, on one hand I feel I need more hormagaunts (there's only 12 painted right now), but I do have 3 Hive guard that might round this army out a bit more. Although these days I rarely think about 40k in gaming terms. I've accepted that I'll probably never even be good enough to remember most of the rules, let alone win games. I prefer painting and casual gaming (although I don't win those either 
