Farewell United Kingdom - Hello Gundam Plastics!

So here is my first post in 2018, and a lot has happened! I passed my PhD defence and am now officially Dr.Tom. I am also back in Canada and looking for work.

The last six months of my time in the UK were spent in the Welsh countryside with family. It was a lovely way to say goodbye, and it feels very much as though I've left some pieces of myself in the water and hills of England/Wales.

Coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Rock formation near my family's house. With cousin to boot!

My hobby during these six months was necessarily rather light as I was in the process of selling off a lot of excess and unpainted miniatures and hobby supplies. Most notably I had to part with my airbrush compressor and the 40k Orks that I hadn't started painting. But I've managed to keep all the figures I've painted and some of my best tools/paints so I'm looking forward to eventually establishing a small-scale hobby setup once I'm settled here in Canada.

However this did get me to do some thinking about what I could see myself doing with the hobby in the future. I decided I wanted to undertake something a bit more oriented towards individual projects rather than large-scale armies. To that end I started to look at busts and larger models without any sort of tabletop usage that would force me to approach them as a properly focused hobby project.

Eventually I remembered reading about Gunpla (short for "Gundam Plastics") and took a dive into researching it online. These are plastic figures depicting large bipedal combat suits at various scales. They originally started in the early 90's and were made by the Japanese company Bandai to tie-in with the Gundam anime series it produced. Since then it's become a huge industry and Bandai remains the largest producer of Gunpla figures. Good quick overviews of what Gunpla kits are can be found here and here

I eventually decided to dip my toe in the water and ordered a kit to see how I like it. I went with one produced by Kotobukiya, which is Bandai's biggest competition. Unlike Bandai, Kotobukiya has no anime series to accompany their figures, but this means they have some really cool original designs that look a lot more modern than the classic Gundam stuff.

The kit I went is called the "Ji-Dao". It's part of Kotobukiya's "Frame Arm" series of figures, which all come with a pre-built inner frame that you essentially add the armour components on top of. One thing to note is that Gunpla figures are all articulated, meaning you can move all the joints and pose them. Given that I had never built an articulated model kit before the apparent simplicity of the frame arms line appealed to me.

Promo shot of the Ji-Dao.

An example of the way you can pose it.

I'll go into detail profiling my experiences building the Ji-Dao, and more generally my pros/cons impressions of Gunpla at a later date. But as a quick bullet point summary this was my first time attempting the following:

• Building an articulated kit.
• Painting in components and then assembling a figure.
• Using Tamiya paints.

The components after a test assembly before I started painting.

I decided to give my airbrush one last hurrah before selling it off by trying to paint the kit. I went with the method typically used by Gunpla builders which is to paint the individual components and then assemble it. I don't doubt my process of doing so was rather sloppy but I learnt a lot! My colour scheme adhered pretty much exactly to the original scheme for the sake of simplicity. This was more about giving the build a try than trying to get super creative.

Undercoating the components before painting them.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to finish the build before I had to pack everything up and leave for home, but I did manage to get all of the base painting done with the airbrush before selling it, as well as doing some sponge weathering on the components.

I re-assembled the kit and packed it up, but took some pictures before I did:

Current state of the Ji-Dao.

Rearview

Natural Light!

It still needs to be panel-lined, which is where you trace the grooves in armour plating to help visually separate the components. Additionally I'd like to do some dirt streaking using some oil paints or weathering effects to make it look properly dirty and not just chipped. I really think these two elements will tie the kit together nicely.

Overall i'm pleased with the result of the test build but I confess I had some issues during painting that might discourage me from attempting it again until I have a proper setup in Canada. However the assembly was a blast so maybe i'll stick to unpainted Gunpla figures for the foreseeable future. I've been watching some of the anime series so I'm quite excited to try my hand with a Bandai kit!

Thanks for reading and look forward to more updates soon!

Painting Experiment: Orange/Yellow Orks Part 2

I'm planning to run a Warhammer 40k escalation campaign with a narrative focus next February. To that end I have to decide on a army to build and paint for it and, because i'm a masochist, I've elected to go for Orks rather than the using the Grey Knights I've already completed. While I love the Grey Knight models the fluff and character of the Ork army is vastly preferable to me. I love custom armies with a great backstory and a focus on having fun rather than winning games, and the Orks are all of these things to a tee!

After the (relatively) successful experiment with orange skin I spent a lot of time agonizing over a color scheme to accompany it. I settled on a bright turquoise produced by Scale 75 and tested it on my original model here.

Turquoise is exactly opposite bright orange on the color wheel and compliments it very nicely. So I quickly moved to get some actual 40k orks to test the scheme on. Thankfully a mate of surgical fame had a partially-used pack of stormboyz he gave me to test my scheme on.

Initially things went great and I loved the way they looked with my orange skin.

The grot inside this rocket is probably my single favorite miniature of all time. I'm dead serious.

However after this it got a little complicated. 40k Orks have tons of different components slapped all over theme, especially these stormboyz figures, and it was tough trying to decide where the turquoise needed to be. I eventually added a secondary color and did the majority of their armor in black as its an absolutely neutral tone, and actually compliments the turquoise and orange quite nicely.

My plan now was to paint turquoise on the clothing and black on the armor with just a few small turquoise accents here and there. But unfortunately even this simple arrangement ended up looking a little too garish given how bright the turquoise i'd chosen was.

The jumpsuits are too much in that color.

To this end I decided to use a burnt umber over a good portion of the clothing to tone things down, and it ended up looking alright. This guy (exempting the red on the rocket) is probably the best indicator of where i'll go with things. Burnt umber clothing, black armor, and turquoise accents here and there in both areas.

Naturally I did some sponge weathering on their armor to give them that properly battered orky look. The black looks lovely with a bit of metallic sponged over it. I also liked the idea of them slapping turquoise paint over the black, which I managed to convey a bit with this guy's eye. I'm going to experiment with adding this sort of "handpainted" turquoise to the armor some more I think.

Unfortunately I messed up the bases after experimenting with different washes on each one. I'm going with a desert theme to accompany the orange/yellow skin tone since they are fungus after all! I'll be getting some new pigments to use on them and further dirty them up. I may also chose a different turquoise color that's slightly less in-your-face about things in order to tone down the palette a bit and make the orange stand out more.

Working with these guys definitely  hammered home how important it is to test your colour-scheme out on some miniatures before starting to paint your force properly. These guys haven't been washed or highlighted yet, or had their details picked out, but even going this far has given be a great understanding of what to do with my chosen scheme. Next up, an Ork battleforce! (And painting a GK librarian when I get bored of assembling things)

Thanks for looking guys!

Completed Project: Grey Knights Terminator Squad

So at long last I have finished my unit of Grey Knight terminators after about a month and a half of fiddling around with them at a very casual pace. I was definitely slowed down by using so many unfamiliar techniques but I'm quite pleased with the finished result! Here they are as a unit:

Some quick thoughts on the painting aspects that were new for me here and that I didn't cover previously. Firstly, oil washes. I was deeply impressed by the effect that oils gave and they were wonderful to work with. After gloss varnishing the models I washed the cream armor with a straightforward mix of burnt umber thinned with low odor mineral spirits. I immediately noticed that the oil wash pooled in the recesses far more neatly and the finish over larger patches of of the model was extremely smooth and there was no "blotchiness" or tidemarks that usually accompany an acrylic wash over a large section of mini.

This is after the oil wash dried. The lighting is poor but it gives you a rough idea of how natural it looks.

Furthermore, because the oil wash takes so long to dry (about twelve hours to be completely dry) you can push it around as much as you like and wash off sections with straight white spirit, which I did to make sure not to darken the models too much. You can even do this after its totally dry as well! The control you have over the wash is unparalleled and combined with what is already a smooth coloring the result is strong yet subtle. I have simply never experienced such a realistic-looking wash.

I will absolutely be returning to work with oils in the future, especially considering that its relatively quick to move into and out of them, a coat of gloss varnish, apply the oils, and once its try a coat of matt, and your done!

The final new technique I experimented with was the use of resin bases. I decided to keep it very simple and ensure the bases were relatively dark in order to draw the eye to the cream armor, and by extension how mangled it is! This follows from roomie Byron's excellent tutorial on basing either for contrast (as in this instance) and cohesion. I decided to use a few simple drybrush layers on the stone and some burnt umber pigments from Vallejo to keep the "dirtiness" consistent with whats on the terminator's armor. The resin bases from micro arts studios were a dream to work with and the texture is exquisite!

Bases as they appear in natural light.

Bases under fluorescent light that shows more detail.

The last thing I want to show is my attempt to hand-blend an intense blue into the eyes and nemesis force weapons. The eyes came out nicely but the swords were much more of a challenge. However with enough glaze medium and time I was able to bang out something reasonable. The final edge higlight of white along the edge of the blade was rather messy, but a blue ink glaze tied everything together nicely. I know the quality would have been far better and the process easier had I just used my airbrush to do it, which I did for the force hammer, but I wanted to set a challenge for myself as blending has always felt rather elusive to me, like something only pros do. The fact I can even blend like this though, (poor as it is) is a sign of just how far I’ve come, as this stuff seemed downright impossible to me even six or eight months ago.

The best of my hand blends.

The blend produced by the airbrush.

Anyways thanks for reading guys! Here's a few more pictures in different light. Looking forward to my next project!

The squad under natural light.

Single model under natural light.

Single model under fluorescent light.

Big Update IV: Grey Knights – Fall 2015

My final post to bring my blog up to date is in-progress shots of some Grey Knights I’ve been working on. With fantasy changing so significantly and the new AoS miniatures not really speaking to me I decided to paint up a very small 40k force as a painting project. To emphasize the “very small” aspect of that point I chose Grey Knights and prepared a little 500 point list made of six terminators, a terminator librarian, and a dreadnought.

This project largely came about as the result of probably the most significant hobby purchase I have ever made, both financially and in terms of its impact on said hobby.

Shiny and expensive.

The Grey Knights are my project to accompany this, and I have purposefully chosen a variety of techniques that I have never attempted before in order to really push my limits. These being:

• Airbrush base layers and basic zenithal highlighting
• Sponge weathering
• Oil washes
• Resin bases

So far I’ve only gotten around to two of four, but the terminators are progressing nicely! I chose a color scheme based on pre-heresy Death Guard as I wanted a nice set of colors to showcase the heavy weathering I planned to do. I borrowed extensively from this excellent tutorial on painting Death Guard.  I dislike how perfectly “Mary Sue” the Grey Knights are in the fluff and I loved the idea of really dirtying them up a bunch.

My airbrushing for these guys was fairly straightforward as I didn’t want to get too flashy to start. I used a grey spraycan to prime, then airbrushed layer of doombull brown everywhere as a basecoat. From here I did a very extensive airbrushed zenithal layer of Vallejo Air Aged White, to the point that it *almost* totally eclipsed the doombull, but there was still a hint of depth. Finally I used a more restrained airbrushed zenithal/spot highlight of Vallejo Air Dead White.

From here I did some sponge weathering using Vallejo “Extra Opaque” Heavy Charcoal, which was an absolute blast and my first time using this technique. I know I went rather overboard here but this was always my intention with these particular units, I wanted them to look absolutely covered in chips and battle damage. The last stage of prepping the white before the oil wash was to do some shading using watered down Army Painter Soft Tone ink in the recesses to provide a little extra depth once they get an oil wash.

After painting all the metal components and the gold script on the armor in black my plans for the green were frustrated somewhat. I had intended to use a Tamiya “Black Green” which is a gorgeous shade, but didn’t realize that Tamiya paints were formulated specifically for airbrush use, and it did not want to brush on nicely. The picture above is after two coats and you can see the coverage is terrible. I had to switch and go over this with GW Castellan Green, which came out nicely.

Here we have them as they are presently. The green looks a lot smoother, the metals have been painted, everything is has been washed for a bit of depth. The last thing I need to do before the oil wash is highlight the green and maybe some basic highlights on the metals. Once that’s done I’m gonna varnish everything and prep for my first ever oil wash! Then its just some glowing blue eyes and weapons and they’re good to go!

After the six terminators are finished I’ll be painting up one of the new plastic terminator librarians using the same methods described above. My last bit of Grey Knights will be the dreadnought seen above, which will involve lots of lovely airbrushing and be my first ever painted vehicle!

I will make a second update once my terminators are finished to showcase the final result and let you know how the oil wash and resin bases go. In the meantime i'm already thinking of a different 40k army to do 500 points with, perhaps something to act as the Grey Knight's allies?

Thanks for reading!

-Tom