Infinity: Señor Massacre WIP

Been working on this guy for a week or so now. Need to have him finished by the end of this month as he'll be a a raffle drawing prize for our first local Infinity tournament.

I decided (along with the help of a friend) to challenge myself and do this guy yellow rather than copy the studio art directly. I'm sort of kicking myself now, yellow is a freaking hard color to paint well!
Even though its been a test of my patience, I'm fairly pleased with how he's shaping up now.

let me know what you think.

First Tournament at gamers Asylum

Well, we had the very first Warmachine/Hordes  tournament at the Gamers Asylum.
Was a fairly tame tournament for a lot of the newer players with a 25 point limit and no reinforcements.
Up for grabs were the colossal coins but that didn't mean the Hordes players armies didn't arrive in force! I think it was split nearly 50/50 between the two systems. Surprisingly, Cryx, Cygnar, Skorne and Trollbloods were not represented, but we had Menoth and Khador coming out our ears! There were 16 people that showed, which was a great turn out for a new store!

First place went to a Menoth Harbinger player, second to Legion with Saeryn and third was an eKaya Circle list. Was a well run and fun tournament. 

Making Industrial silos

Wow! Already the 13th of August and I'm only two posts in for the month. Gotta love how time fly's when you're  having fun.......or just working like crazy!

I had a few requests to show how I did my industrial silos, so I thought I'd go ahead and write up a tutorial for them. 

 

 First step is to gather up your Materials. Here, I've scavenged parts from sprinklers, old printer parts, and random bits of PVC piping that I pick up from the Hardware store.

 I assemble everything with hot glue because it bonds extremely fast and strong. Ive also added part of a toy (yellow pipe)because I thought it looked cool and my son asked if I would use it on my next project.  :)

 Next, what you'll want to do is punch out a massive amount of rivets. I use Very thin plastic card and a 1/16th hole punch to make them. Apply them to the silo by stabbing each rivet with an exacto knife, and then dipping into a reservoir of superglue. Then you just hold the rivet to the desired spot for a few seconds and it should be stuck pretty securely.

 After you have applied a sufficient amount of rivets it will be time for the undercoating of rusty paint. any rust colored paint should do. I would advise against the real cheap stuff because the tape may peel it off in a later step. Paint big swathes of color in random spots all over the silo.

 Now that the rusty colored paint is applied, you'll want to attach randomly cut pieces of masking tape to the painted spots.  I lay out a long piece of Masking tape on my cutting mat and then use my exacto to hack it into odd shaped pieces. Try not to cut out square shapes if you can avoid it. Rounded and jagged pieces of tape will look more natural.
Make sure the tape only covers rust colored spots.

 You will need to buy a spray paint that specifically adheres to plastic or make sure to give it a proper priming first. The color of Spray that I liked for my silos did not have a plastic adherent type, so I just use my regular, white model primer before I apply the color. This will help avoid drips and having to use a ton of the colored spray.

 If you're stumped for a good color to pick, go have a look at a sewage treatment facility or construction site to get a good idea of what the real life stuff looks like. It could vary from an Aqua blueish colored to light tans, depending on whats inside.

 Now, once the paint is thoroughly dry, use a pair of tweezers or your exacto to pry up and gently peel off the tape to reveal the "rust underneath"

 Now comes the fun part. I add decals and printed placards to the silo to help with a sense of realism. The placards were just printed out from a "hazard sign" google search. I cut them out of the printer paper, dipped them in water and they stick very nice. The Decals came from various military model kits that I've collected over the years. Once they are dry (or mostly) give them a god shot of matte varnish so they don't come off in the weathering step.
I also jumped the gun here and started adding my dirty washes before I took the picture with just the decals.

For the final stage, I add washes of dark brown and the original rust color to the silo. make sure its nice and sloppy with drips and pooling all over the place. Once the washes are dry, I use a spare piece of blister foam to apply random scrapes and pocks to the entire surface. Just dip your foam in some of the (thicker) paint and dab most of it off on a paper towel. Then make quick, precise dabs randomly all over the place.
I added some some black MIG pigment to the tip of the pipe to show that it belched thick, black smoke at one time.
Seal with Matte varnish and you're done!
You could make quite a hoard of these things in an afternoon. Just keep your eye out for cool and unusual pieces of junk that could be used for similar projects.

Here's the finished product.

Khadoran Gun Carriage

This thing has been sitting as a WIP for and age now. I started pretty gung ho on it, but once I got into the grueling little details and such, I lost my will to paint at all. Which is really not a good thing seeing as this was a commission piece.  The actual assembly and conversion of the piece was done by the owner. the Warjacks replacing the horses was a really cool idea in my opinion, but it definitely made the painting take longer than it otherwise would have.
Well, its all finished up now and I can say that I'm happy with the results.
I wanted to go for a totally messy war-torn scene, where the battlefield has been churned into a snowy, muddy muck. 

Thanks for checking it out. Let me know what you think.

Memory lane: Reinholdt, Gobber Speculator

Here is one of the very first figs I finished when I first jumped into Warmachine, everybody's favorite cowardly Gobber, Reinholdt.
At that point in my painting career, I didn't see fit to ever highlight black because I always thought it made things look dusty and bland. Now its the other way around. 
I remember being pretty pleased with how different my Reinholdt looked form everybody else's. Now I look at that cotton candy blue skin and cant imagine what was going through my noggin!
Ah well, he still see's use in a number of my games. 

Dark Age: Cesspool

Well, I got pretty tired of proxying this guy while he sat half painted on my desk. So, I decided to sling some paint and get him finished up. I cant say I'm terribly impressed with how he turned out. He is such a strange sculpt, and very hard to paint properly. With that big coat on, he is all smooth and rounded without a lot of crisp detail. I wouldn't say the fig lacks coolness because of that, but it definitely made him more difficult paint. This wasn't helped by the fact that I picked an extremely nuetral, dark color to paint him in, so a lot of the highlights get lost, especially in the pictures.
But after all, he is for the table top and I think he will look just fine for that purpose.

Thanks for looking!

More Silos and a full day of games

Finished up a couple more silos since I was so pleased with the look of the first one. They were then used in a game of Dark Age and I think they really helped set a cool atmosphere for the board. I'm excited to get working on  few more factory style pieces so I can theme an entire board.
I'm going to have to make some that look suitably Cryxian to help tie in the whole set for our Warmahordes games. 

Also snapped a few pics of Yesterdays gaming goodness. For some reason the cosmos must have aligned just so, and a few of us got passes to go game for the ENTIRE day!
At noon, we started with a game of Warhammer Fantasy,  with some Warmachine and Hordes taking place as well.  Unfortunately , Warhammer games are few and far between these days as seems to be the case all over from what I see on the interwebs.
This was my first game of eighth, and really my first game since the very earliest days of 7th edition so we kept the game small(1500pts) 
I took an infantry heavy Dwarf army and was met on the field by a pretty standard High Elf army.
The game was really a lot of fun, and was surprisingly close until a rather volatile magic phase saw the demise of my entire block of Ironbreakers! The MVP for the game had to be my Gyrocopter. He buzzed around, harassing and steaming Elves with reckless abandon. 2nd turn saw him blasting a 14 man unit of Swordmasters, killing most of them , and then watching them panic off the field, which I must say I was very glad for as I really did not want to see them in combat.
By the end of the game, I had a Demon slayer and Gyrocopter left to his bolt thrower. Lion chariot, and very heavily depleted unit of Spearmen who held that blasted level 4 Mage.

After the Warhammer was at an end we had a planned Super Dungeon Explore Demo to jump right into. I only got pics from the very outset of the game because we all became so engrossed after that, that I totally spaced taking any more pics of the action.
We had the max number of heroes playing in the demo, so the game took quite some time. It was also slowed a bit by having a bunch of headstrong nerds arguing amongst themselves the whole time on the best course of action for every round.
If you have not had the opportunity to try this game out I would highly recommend you try to get involved in a demo. The demo we played  was a blast and the game in general is simple enough that my 6 year old could understand it but engaging enough to keep an entire game store full of grown men hanging on every dice roll.
Props to my Buddy Grim for running a great demo and weathering a hail of verbal abuse throughout.

After the SDE demo we all ran for grub and then finished the day off with our usual, monthly paint night which had a great turnout this month. What an awesome day!
 May have to make it a quarterly tradition..........