What did you do today.

[The Other Dave]

Speaking of, here with her very-difficult-to-photograph pose is Aradia Madellan, Primaris Psyker:



(I really need to upgrade my phone and get a less potato-ey camera.) Turns out OSL with Contrasts is dead easy! A bit of white, some paint thinned down with quite a lot of contrast medium, and bang. Who knew the paints advertised as making it easy to bash out whole armies by slapping it right on would get me to try NMM and OSL?

[Konrad]

@TOD- pretty slick. These contrast paints do seem to do what they are advertised to do.

In "contrast" I spend the last couple days killing myself wet-blending and highlighting from a black primer base. Not doing black primer again unless I have a real, real good reason. (I wanted to get started and it was a cold, windy, rainy day. Next time, I'll just wait.) It does lend itself to a dank-dungeon-y sort of look, so it works for these guys.



And started on the Digga-dino-rider. Pretty happy with it overall. Still some blobby, under-defined details. The whole figure is about 3mm too big and I just could not get a post-apocaypltic/alien world vibe going. She does have your traditional Jungle Princess/Aztec-y Amazon thing going, which is not bad. I actually think I might try to make a 3rd version.

[Primarch]

@ToD - Nice looking psyker.
@Konrad - The dwarves are awesome. You've got the feral look down, but if you want to make your digga chicks look more post-apocalyptic, they need more high tech gear. Not that they know what it does, but as decorations, jewelry and body armour.

I also painted a couple of minis this week, some Afghan infantry for the 2nd Anglo-afghan War.

[me_in_japan]

@Dave, Konrad and Prim - awesome work, as usual, chaps. You're all bloody good at what you do. Dave has established himself as the contrast paint guru, Konrad far and away sculpts better than any of us (and has been making noticeable large improvements in his scultping recently. The stuff you're doing now has some excellent detail, not just in accessories, but musculature and suchlike), and Prim has the whole speedy batch painting thing down pat. Masters of yer arts, gentlemen.

As for me, I aint done no hobbying for so long I feel like I'm forgetting how to do it at all. I've just been magicking on the computer (and irl) and very occasionally watching a bit of telly. I don't really have the time or energy for much else right now, but I'm starting to feel the beginnings of a painty itch coming back to me, so we'll see where that goes...

Keep up the good work, all

[The Other Dave]

@mij You can do it! Imagine I'm posting that Shia LeBeouf video, or that one Japanese tennis teacher standing in the ocean exhorting people.

@Konrad and Prim, nice looking stuff as always! I dig the purple shading on those dwarves.

I'm still on fire (and again rapidly running out of miniatures) having finished up rogue trader Neyam Shai Murad this morning:


The silver/chrome NMM is a bit rough but it'll do for a first try - overall I'm very pleased. (That said, one thing with the drybrush-as-preshading I've been doing, especially coupled with contrasts, is the stark relief it throws on mould lines that aren't really obvious on bare plastic. The cultist firebrand had one too.) Just one more model from Escalation to go, the Crusader, and I'll be back to the warlord titan who's still sitting on the table, still sidelined by my sudden Contrast Fever.

[Primarch]

@M_i_J - Thanks.
@ToD - Thank you. The Rogue Trader looks good, though that mould line is very noticeable.

From me, here are some Ogres.

[The Other Dave]

Today's Dave Contrast Spam is Gotfret de Montbard, Crusader and my final model from Escalation:



He turned out a bit Menoth-y maybe but I didn't really feel my NMM chrome was up to the task so white it was. I actually wasn't too keen on him at first but (as usual!) painting him brought me right around. This'll be my final model for a little while too, as my backlog is pretty much annihilated except for titans, which go slowly. (Still, a cool 100 models before Golden Week is a pretty good pace for me.) Plus I need to get playing - there's a chaos lord to kill in the Blackstone Fortress! Again!

[Balloonacorn]

A bit of white, some paint thinned down with quite a lot of contrast medium, and bang.

What is contrast medium?

[Primarch]

A bit of white, some paint thinned down with quite a lot of contrast medium, and bang.

What is contrast medium?

A medium is a liquid used to thin down paint. You can just use water for most thinning, but medium tends to have a better consistency.
Paints usually have three components, Pigment (the colour), Binder (keeps the pigment on the surface) and Medium (helps the pigment and binder flow onto the surface). Adding more medium dilutes the other two parts. Adding contrast medium to normal paint would make the paint flow more like a contrast colour.
You can also get gloss and matte mediums (From Vallejo and other makers) that make the paint more glossy/matte as needed.

[The Other Dave]

Yup. Essentially if you want to make a paint more translucent while keeping its usual flow properties you’ll thin with medium (acrylic medium for acrylics, etc.) rather than water. It’s particularly important for contrasts because the flow properties are the whole point - thinning contrasts with water makes them act like an ordinary wash or filter. (And acrylic medium and contrast medium are different enough that you can’t really make an acrylic paint act more like a contrast by adding contrast medium unfortunately.)