DIY Weathering Pigments - dirt cheap!

Weathering pigments are a great way to add, well....weathering, to your models - large or small. There's a plethora available from many manufacturers...and I've never bought a single one. "Why not?", I hear you cry...well, because I'm old enough to come from an ancient time before such things were really a thing, and I had to resort to other methods, and was taught this particular one by an expert modeller friend of mine who used to paint professionally for model companies, do a lot of military dioramas for model magazines, and who currently works for Forgeworld. His tip was simple and highly effective, as well as very cheap. I can pass it on in two words - chalk pastels.

Chalk pastels are available all over the place - from discount book stores to art supply shops and lots in between. You can buy a set of 25 to 48 of them for around £10 or less - and often much less. Don't get confused with oil pastels, however, or you'll get yourself in a real mess! here's a set I picked up from a local supermarket for about £4 or so.

So these square-profile blocks are very much like chalk - as the name suggests - but if you scrape the edge of one with a hobby knife, you get a fine pile of dust that you can apply exactly the same as a weathering powder. 

Use a damp brush and the pigment will dissolve in the same way two, meaning you can use them dry or wet to create stains or streaks - exactly like weathering pigments. I've used them to create everything from exhaust streaks to rust and oil stains. You can use white to create fading or colours to create tonal variations too - the advantage of a set of these pastels is you get a huge range of colours, so don't feel limited by the usual greys browns and black.

So these are great, but one of the pains of using them is scraping them each time you want to use them. Now, many of us can agree that Citadel paint pots suck at storing paints in - the design of them makes the paints dry out, the lids can be awkward and it's too easy to knock them over. I've transferred mine over to cheap dropper bottles, which makes them much easier to use. That leaves me with a lot of citadel paint pots. But wait - before carting these to the recycling, there's another use...holding my DIY weathering pigments. It turns out that a standard Citadel paint pot holds one full stick of chalk pastel...nice coincidence! Drying out isn't an issue for dry pigments, and the lids can be made less fiddly with a few hobby blade "adjustments" to them.

  

Now I'm not going to spend hours scraping chalk pastel sticks into powder, so I need another method...fortunately I have to look no further than my kitchen to my handy pestle and mortar.

 

Breaking the pastel into smaller pieces to work on helps here, thirds or quarters seem to be fine, and grind to a nice, fine powder. I do this on a sheet of paper so I can simply pour the resulting powder into the citadel pot after grinding. Tapping the pot on the table half way through helps the powder to settle if you're getting close to the top.

Using a stiff make-up brush also helps to dislodge the ground powder and get the last bits out

And that's it! A set of as many weathering pigments as you desire, for a fraction of the cost of "purpose made" commercial ones. Enjoy!

Painting Cthulhu Wars: Yellow Sign

It has to be said that over the past six months or so I've been pretty lax in the old painting side of the hobby - all for understandable reasons - house move, job change, new kitchen, decorating, DIY, birthdays and now holidays - but I've been lax nonetheless. I've not had my airbrush set up, my outdoor shed has been a mess and the loft room is likewise full of somewhat disorganised stuff.

So the past few weeks have seen a bit of a change in this. It started with a damn good clear out of the outside shed, which was used as a bit of a dumping ground for stuff from the old house we weren't sure what to do with or where to put. I got rid of a load of rubbish, reorganised what was left, put up shelves, drilled mounts into the walls for tools and cleared the bench. I installed my compressor, regulator and Tamiya paints, and now I have a decent place to both do some DIY stuff, and to spray my models.

Next was to sort out my modelling space. So again I cleared the area out, put up shelves and organised things. I went that extra step and extended this to the rest of the loft room, getting the kids to sort out the FIVE (yes, 5) containers full of cuddly toys down to one for storage, everything else was to be kept in their rooms or recycled...(car boot coming up!!). I put up all the old shelves I had from my unit, and organised our storage stuff, making it more accessible, creating a ton of room and even impressing my wife.

The grand upshot of this is that I have been able to start painting properly again. I've primed god-knows-how-many Firestorm ships and Planetfall vehicles, sprayed a load of Terrans and Dindrenzi, and am half way through the base coating of Oscar's Aquans.

Now whilst i love airbrushing, it's rare you can finish a model this way, and most of my figures are pure handpainted. I'd been inspired by some awesome Cthulhu Wars minis I'd seen on line, and whilst I wasn't going to achieve that level of excellence, trying to achieve it would certainly stretch my skills and help me get better. So I started on my Yellow Sign minis for Cthulhu Wars with a Byakhee, which is still work in progress and I don't have any pics yet - I'll get some when I'm back off holiday and it's done.

What I do have pictures of are the undead and the King in Yellow. I wanted to keep them low-key in terms of faction colouring, the KiY being the obviously "yellow" mini, but the undead I was going to stick to a dirty bandage bone colour, it being yellow only nominally. As I'd already primed them white, this was a pretty simple process. First, I based each of them in a bone/light khaki stone mix.

I wasn't too careful about this colour, and I mixed more than one batch to vary the shade - I didn't want the six minis to look identical. Next stage was to mix a flesh colour to paint the oozing, mutated flesh, and again I used different base shades on the six figures.

So far so good, and after painting the tongue a darker, pinker shade a wash with Army Painter Soft Tone to bring our the detail without darkening the model too much was next.

Next was painting the original colour on the bandages and the pinker flesh on the high spots of those areas, followed by highlighting and detail (mainly the bandage edges and teeth). 

I'm pretty happy with the way it came out - it looks suitably disgusting and more tentacley than your typical undead - which is exactly as it should be!

The King in yellow was a much bigger job, and is mostly complete, but still needs further work on the base and a few touches. Technique was similar to the undead, but with a lot more shades. I also wanted a dirty and blood-flecked finish on the yellow garments. I'm not 100% with it, but it's OK for now - I wanted the King to look gaunt with almost bloodless skin, whilst the more living flesh colour of the tentacles draws the eye and gives more of a feeling of life there...at least I hope it does! Painting Yellow is always a pain in the arse, but it didn't come out too horrible here (unless you think otherwise!)

Next on the list is Hastur - he's one of the largest minis in the game (i.e. he's HUGE!), but he also needs more work than any other mini too, having numerous gaps and seam lines, so before any painting could start on him, I needed to get all this sorted, or he'd look too toy-like when done. So out with the Green Stuff again, and wet-blending those seams!

Here's Hastur base airbrushed

I actually cheated here, because I've already painted the eyes and masked them before spraying....next step is to remove the masking...

Around the eyes needs tidying, but that's fine as I need to add the redder rims to them anyway...

So there it is, the first forays back into painting, and the first monsters I've tackled from the Cthulhu Wars set. They paint up nicely, and I think painted minis are really going to enhance the gaming experience.

Feedback, suggestions, comments and ideas always welcome - would love to hear from you all!

Magnetising Spartan's minis

As well as getting a storage solution for my Planetfall minis involving magnetic sheets, I've been having more magnet fun with magnetising both my Reinforcement Box ships for Firestorm Armada, and my outstanding Planetfall resin too. This is due to a lot of the modularity and flexibility of the models, and also my liking for models that can be adjusted on the field (like not gluing turrets on tanks etc).

So I wanted to give a little bit of an insight into how I do this - it's standard stuff, but might help you if you've not done this before or worked with resin much. Now Spartan do help here by having some recesses and centre marks on several of the components, but others don't (like the drop-cast Shield generator and AA turrets for the Terran Alliance  Planetfall forces). Drop-casting, if you don't know, is where the mould has an open face which is the bottom of the piece - this makes the mould simpler and lower cost, but obviously you get no detail on it. The Infantry stands are good examples, and of course no-one cares if your infantry base doesn't have detail on the bottom!

So, the first thing is to buy some appropriate magnets. I bought a bunch of 2x1mm and 3x2mm magnets (diameter x depth), the former for the Reinforcement ships, the second for the Planetfall stuff. In retrospect, I think the 3x2 are better in general since they have a much stronger bond, even though the reinforcement ships have 2mm recesses. 1mm increase in diameter doesn't sound much, but it's more than double the surface area - and that's important;

I'm starting here with Planetfall minis, and the Terran Ground Attack Aerial Helix vehicle, because it's awesome and a great example. The first step here is to drill a hole for your chosen magnet (and for PF I use 3mms exclusively) into the hull of the aircraft in the centre of where the Huscarl will fit. You can then add superglue and push the magnet home. You can see this below - though I only do one to start with, then when I have one Huscarl complete I can use it to do all the others and get the same polarity on each. The picture depicts all in place after I've done this.

Now, when you've one magnet in place, the trick on the Huscarl is - because it's a drop-cast piece - how do you know where to drill? I've used the same technique multiple times, and it works well. You put a blob of paint on the magnet - I usually use red since it's obvious and high contrast on the plae resin.

Next you press down the piece you're joining in position - you want to do this as accurately as possible on the first try - if you adjust you'll smudge the paint and will need to re-start.

When you take it off, it'll have the paint transferred to it in the correct position

This allows you to then drill out this hole

Now before you put a magnet in, remember I talked about getting the correct polarity? This is obviously vital, and not that easy to do by itself. fortunately, you can make the magnets work for you. First, you put the second magnet (the one that will end up in your joined piece) onto the parent magnet in the body of whatever you're joining to, like so.

Then you put your freshly drilled item on top...

...and push down to squeeze the magnet into the hole. You don't need to do this fully, as you can pull it off and push it down firmly using a flat (and preferably non-magnetic) surface - I use the handle of my scalpel, since it's non-ferrous. This also stops any superglue transferring onto the other magnet (if you've been brave enough to superglue it!)

When you're confident there's no active superglue on any of the surfaces, you can try them out

You can then use a magnet on your Huscarl to insert your other magnets into the main body, ensuring they all have the same polarity, so you don't need specific Huscarls in any given position.

So now I have my support all ready to drop its Huscarls in the field, and then proceed on empty...

I did the same thing for my Command Helix

...and also my Relthoza

All using the same process and same 3mm magnets - as you can see they're pretty strong and it works well.

The Firestorm Armada reinforcement boxes are a little different, already having 2mm holes, so I went with the smaller magnets for ease here. This is fine for the smaller elements, and works OK for the Terran ships for example, where there are multiple contact points. In principle it's exactly as above, but made easier since there's no alignment, red paint and drilling!

This doesn't work so well for the Directorate Escort carrier. In hindsight I'd have preferred to use 3mm magnets for these. The holes are a bit too deep for the 1mm magnets, so I ended up gluing two in, which stand slightly proud to ensure contact with the one that's slightly recessed in the other side

This is still a bit unsatisfactory, as the top part tends to move a bit and isn't held on very strongly. Conversely the 2mm magnets are absolutely fine for the turrets, 3mm magnets would be overkill for them.

Going back to Planetfall minis, some of them have holes way too big for an appropriate magnet - good examples being the Sorylian Command bathtub and the Veydreth skimmer tank body weapon mounts. In both of these cases I used 3mm magnets , but prior to placement I put a sausage of Green Stuff around the magnet, or plugged the hole with Green Stuff (depending on the mini and how big the void was). I then superglued this in to ensure it wouldn't dislodge when the Green Stuff was fully set (Green Stuff is NOT an adhesive, despite many people trying to use it for this, it's not cut out for the job!). Unfortunately I lost the photos before painting, but I scraped the Sorylian one to show it more clearly - you can still tell on the Veydreth but its less obvious

All in all, Spartan's minis are generally pretty easy to magnetise (the Overseer Gate being a notable exception), but some of the holes are too big, some of them too small and others just aren't there at all. It would be nice if Spartan designed in the correct size of hole in advance and made recommendations, hell they could even sell kits to do this, which would make it really easy for people...in fact that's a good idea, perhaps I'll start selling those myself!

Hope it's been helpful - as always, feedback, comments and requests are all very welcome!