Ggom

Very nice. The captain in particular reminds me of a scheme I saw from bohunminiaturepainter on instagram, although I think yours works better on the infantry than what I saw for the Dawnrider. Keen to see your progress! Also very fond of the hatching for the fabric and the magenta osl. Way better than the studio paintjob, which is kind of ... bland...

This ^ The vampire lord is awesome! Please go away. *covers eyes*

As someone who mostly paints but would like to play in the future, this is a big thing for me. I love painting different sculpts, and would prefer if the stronger lists in my army rewarded something besides 30 - 90 of the same kit. Also, massive props to @Kadeton for verbalizing an excellent theoretical framework for this discussion

Moving on to Melusai now! The undercoat of shadows is in, now to layer colors in. Decided to do a steel curaiss, and will probably do gold for the mask. I think brilliant red and purple will contrast nicely.

Very nice, definitely one of the best Leviadons I’ve seen! Super excited about the direction you take with this army!

This is pretty illustrative of the degree of subjectivity here. I don't actually see anything odd with that model. I think the proportions across 32mm heroic are all messed up anyway, and many people swap parts and kitbash and "true-scale" so the range of normalcy I expect is pretty wide. I love the witch elf aesthetic. It is totally not realistic and overly stylized. Head too big, body too narrow, hands are huge, etc. I don't know that I would convert a male witch elf specifically, or a heavy set witch elf just to prove a point, but I'd be cool with picking them up if they released a new sculpt and it looked cool.

Not Xarl? DIE AS WE LIVED BROTHER! IN MIDNIGHT CLAD. ahem, back to swords and magic.

Resin requires it for sure, otherwise primer won't stick. Plastic is fine without it. Hell it's the one thing I am always annoyed about in my Heresy hobby 🥲

Plastic doesn’t need to be washed, FYI. There’s no issue with release agents, so you can prime them once you cut them off the sprue.

Leather and steel done now. Just the pteruges or w/e they are called and the whip to paint, then this girl will be ready to seal and join the collection! Random thought of this evening’s session - trying a desaturated green as a replacement for a desaturated blue looks pretty cool and still reads as steel. I think I will use the green more often in the steel going forward. It also means that the leather and steel use the exact same colors, so it should harmonize more. Might try a reddish brown leather for the pteruges.... or maybe stick with the green leather hmmmmmm

I don’t think it’s possible to suck at a hobby unless you don’t derive enjoyment from it. Some people do what you do and call it collecting/investing. Years later your unopened boxes might have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in value 😍 Then you can make fun of all the fools who’ve painted their stuff and can’t even sell it for MSRP 😄😄😄 I’m only partly serious. For the above to work you probably need to be really strategic with your purchase choices and go for the rarer stuff that is likely to have nostalgia value. Even then, likely a good chunk of it will miss and end up as junk instead. But that’s part of the enjoyment too right? Like picking stocks

Massive headache this evening, I am suspicious I might be coming down with something. Decided to just do some gold nmm on an elf. Pretty laid back now that I've gotten so much practice on simple gold now Probably do the leather tomorrow...

Totally agree. Also a reason why I don't think I could make myself paint 40k space marines lol.

Black and yellow/orange go nicely together and give you very good contrast in terms of value range. Your yellow and orange will probably be high intensity, I would suggest not adding other saturated colors to avoid the christmas tree effect. Why not have the bark be black, or black mixed with purple or green? One thing I’ve started to think more about is how I want the models to look when set together. A “trap” I’ve found after painting several armies is that if you really focus on 2 or 3 colors and use them heavily, from a distance the army looks like a blob of those 2 or 3 colors. Some people seem to like that effect, but I’ve been seeing if it’s possible to break away from that since personally it makes things feel same-y. Something I like to think about is how to vary the amount of each theme on different units to create the impression of more variety, while using the same set of colors to create consistency. For instance, some of your larger models might have more of the heat effect to draw the eye to centerpiece models and features, whereas your smaller ones might have only spots of it (eg. Dryad eyes) with more of the cold desaturated ash effect. If you had a treelird for instance, you can explore going really heavily into the flaming weapons and eyes and he will stand out even more amongst the ashen dryads. Without an airbrush, I would suggest using black and white spray cans for the starting layers. It takes a bit if oractice, but can help alot with underpainting fire/osl effects. If you get the underlying shadows to a place you like, the rest is just glazing in colors (and/or drybrushing, especially for ash)

Happy with my progress these last 4 months. Here are 19 models fully painted, sealed and based! And a closer shot of the hag who leads the warband wielding a deathsword Stoked, at this rate I'll be able to play 500 pt games this summer if things are better on the pandemic front!

Start with a base of white, airbrush yellow through red through black around it, so that the crevices retain the lighter colors, and you get darker as you move up? You don’t need the airbrush but it’s probably faster to get a smooth transition, and its easy to get broad strokes of light down.

Today’s update is mostly a ramble, with no pictures 😜 Been plodding away for a few weeks, finishing the melusai, 90% of the khinerai number 5 and 90% of a slaughter queen. I’ve been hopping around abit hobby wise, and haven’t completed much else... though I got a hankering to paint faces so finished just the faces for 2 more sisters. Painting tiny faces just gets more and more fun with practice! I have been struggling with airbrush lately - there’s a bunch of faff to set it up/tear it down and clean it, and I always end up fighting it for white (which is a big component of the underpainting for my DoK before the hair brush steps.) White, unlike other colors, seems really prone to speckling, possibly because of the size of the particles being larger. After my last frustrating session last week I think I need to reduce how much I pull back the trigger, keep the paint thinner, and do super thin coats. I’ve occasionally had nice sessions in the past when all the factors came together for a creamy finish, and the trouble is I have trouble reproducing that confluence of factors since I airbrush very irregularly. Must remember that for white I want just a whisper of paint flow, at least with my current dilution and psi.

Alas if we were getting new models in the near future it would have come with the BR Morathi book or Shadow and Pain. I think the Ironscale, WHU band and shadowstalkers are meant to be our thing for awhile... I think we just had our time in the sun. That being said, our model range is quite broad now compared to other factions with new plastics, dp I’m not moaning. 😄

Actually, if you look at Heresy, FW (unlike GW) often writes rules for models they never make, or only intend to make in the future. Before the Heresy was an officially supported game, people were kitbashing the old armor marks. When Heresy came out (and even today) there was no community expectation that everyone start using the new sculpts. In fact, there are a ton of units in the Heresy that have dedicated rules and story but no official representation. What I would anticipate is that, if the initial sales take off, FW will start releasing rules and story faster than models (a la Heresy) and people will be encouraged to kitbash/use existing models. Then they will release their own sculpts, and people will buy them anyway, because they will generally look amazing. Certainly, some people still play with their rogue trader era tanks and speeders in Heresy, and it is often a point of great pride 😊 It doesn’t stop FW from making sales because their official new sculpts are really good. The target audience for FW is also typically more niche/boutique/modelling oriented, so if the quality of the sculpt is the main factor. (disclaimer - this is just my opinion as an avid Horus Heresy guy who participates in that community)

For resin models, one thing you will observe over time is “shrinkage” of models. This is most obvious when you have large multipart models (eg. Large resin tank) - some of the pieces will just appear slightly too big or slightly too small. From what I have gleaned, this happens because resin moulds have pretty short lifespans, and FW will create new moulds using existing “masters.” However, over time, as you get to latter generations of the moulds, the size difference becomes appreciable. This is, apparently, what leads to the frustrating scenarios where your spartan door is too big for the frame, or some wall section is too long, etc. This is sometimes confused with warping of the resin, which also happens, although warping is easily solved by heating the resin, adjusting the warped part, and cooling it back down. Regarding computer assisted design, or CAD - in previous years GW and FW sculpted the traditional way (greenstuff, milliput) to create the master sculpts. It is unlikely they would have files for those masters, and the existence of moulds would be based on what gets created from the master sculpt(s.) More recently years, I hear they have switched over to CAD sculpting - this has advantages and drawbacks as well. Obviously they have the files stored digitally, so things are likely easier to organize and catalogue. I imagine it allows them to do really clever things with optimizing the sprue layout as well, aligning mould lines with natural edges on the model, etc. Some slight drawbacks here (IMO) might be more stylistic, and may not be related to the technology. Personally, I dislike some of the new CAD sculpts - see for instance the Heresy Night Lords jump pack praetor (CAD) vs the original Heresy Night Lords raptors (hand sculpted.) The older sculpts had much finer details around cloth, thin lines, filigree, etc. CAD seems to make everything “chunkier.” I may be mistaken, and this might just be a change in overall art direction or new sculptors. I will also second @Overread - mould lines seem to get worse with the age of the sculpt. This appears to be true with resin as well. Getting a FW kit on release is often much nicer than getting a FW kit 5 years later. I speak from personal experience with some godawful mould lines on my marines hahaha. That being said, resin is easy to work with once you get the hang of it, its very malleable with heat, and I’d say alot of people give it a bad rep without having spent time learning how to work with it.

Isn’t it crazy that OVER A YEAR has passed sonce the original announcement for this? It feels like just a few months ago. COVID life has really compressed the year for me... Per the original announcement we still be 2 years away from release though. The anticipation is... guuuuuuhhhhhhh *incoherent groaning intensifies*

Damnit, looks like I’m in on the OldWorld too. Those sobs know which buttons to press...

This year, I started painting Daughters of Khaine, and finished 9 witch elves, 3 sisters of slaughter, 1 melusai and 4 khinerai in 5 months. I intend to keep the pace and finish a small playable force by next June by finishing: 1 more witch elf 7 more sisters of slaughter 1 more khinerai 5 melusai Morgwaeth and remaining blade coven models. Then I will work on my 2 Cauldrons and hopefully finish them and another 10 witch elves by end of 2021! Stoked.

The slaanesh models are gorgeous. I’m absolutely not getting them (I have enough fiddly little murder queens already) but I am excited to see these in the wild!!!

Some progress on the Melusai. My conclusion is that painting scales seems like too much effort and I'll have to stick with the other kids for the bulk of the army.