Yes I am Still Working On the Elves

I know I have been a bit absent in posts lately but I have continued to work on my High Elves. So per the suggestion of Teflon I have tried a elf in gold. I am not sure how I feel about it. The color is definitly warmer and seems to fit the red a bit better, but I am not sure I like it more. I haven't finished the shield yet maybe that will help the overall effect. I am also not completely happy with how my gold turned out. For my first attempt I don't think it is horrible. My next try I think will have more red in the dark parts of the gold. Please let me know what you think.

Painting however has taken up very little of the time I have spent on modeling lately. I have been trying to assemble enough elves to field a decent size army so I can begin playing and learning. This of course involves a ton of cutting, filing, glueing, basing, priming, and adding magnets/metal bits. All of these things turn out to be very time consuming, I am however making progress. As you can see I currently have 20 archers, 20 spearman, 5 silver helms, a war machine, 2 mages, a noble, and 15 swordsmen assembled and primed. There is still alot to go but that is far more then I had a week ago.

I have also created what I think to be a very neat case. I used a plastic tube, like I see many people do. However I made a few improvement. I have added a cookie tray that connects to magnets on the bottom of the bin. This keeps it from sliding around in the bin but allows me to safely place it inside without fear of it moving violently. Additionally I have magnitized all my models to their movement trays or added magnets to the individual models. Additionally I added magnets to the bottom of the movement trays. All of this allows me to attach the completed units to the metal cookie tray, securing them in place. This seems to work pretty well but takes a pretty good amount of effort to setup. If I end up needing more space its only a $6 cookie tray and $4 bin away.

Thats it for now I will let you know how i progress and don't forget to tell me what you think of the gold spearman.

Descent Minis

Below is two of the first four Descent miniatures I've painted. Descent is a multiplayer dungeon crawl game that plays very similar to the out of print Warhammer: Quest. The game comes with 70 models, 20 of which are unique character models; the rest are monsters. There is nothing fancy about their sculpts, they are made of flexible plastic and they are about half the size of the chess pieces I've been working on. Nevertheless, I find it challenging to attempt to paint each of them quickly (~2hrs) and as close to their description art as possible. The two below have OSL that makes them particularly challenging (glowing sword on first and lantern on second).

I have no idea why all the nice collage pictures I make with Corel Photo Paint get uploaded in the negative colors but it is very frustrating. The images open fine in a jpg viewer but seem to get corrupted during the upload to the blog site. Therefore, I've also added the unmolested images below.

Pawn - Old and New

The last of the White Pawns (five) were completed two weeks ago. Three of the eight pawns were actually painted seven years ago when I initially started the chess set and was just learning the Non-Metallic Metal (NMM) technique. The above picture shows one of the original pawns on the left, with a newly painted pawn in the same pose on the right. I tried to keep the reds and whites as similar as possible so they wouldn't clash on the chess board. Nevertheless, its obvious there are differences. The red from the old pawn was shaded with washes rather than a deliberate application of dark red in the recesses, as with the new pawn. This new technique takes longer but makes a cleaner look. The ab muscles on each mini illustrate this difference the best. The whites are actually quite similar even though I used Foundation paint for the brown and dark yellow shading. This is one of the rare instances where my new technique is actually quicker than my old (even though all thanks go to new paint technology and not my skill). The NMM gold and steel are where the models differ the most. The old style has too little contrast and way too much orange in the gold. The steel also lacks the high contrast (e.g. very dark gray/black in the areas the do not reflect toward your eye) and does not put the bright highlights in the appropriate glint points on the sword. I may go back and repaint the metals on the old ones to match.
The second werewolf (Black Castle) model is on the painting stand. Unfortunately, I've been distracted by the desire to paint the minis that come with the dungeon crawl board game Descent. Therefore, he has been sitting there for two weeks with nothing more than black primer. I have no idea when I'll get around to working on him.