Do Not Miss: January 2015

Welcome first month of 2015! Here is the best of the modelling webesphere so far:

Miniatures

• Jack by Martin Goumaz: Finally proper photos of this amazing version of Jack in the Plucker, to me, one of the best miniatures we enjoyed in 2014.


• Warlords and Flower Witch by Thomas David: More new miniatures, more incredible piece of art by the great Thomas David for Kingdom Death.


• Space Wolf by Flameon: First mini of the year painted by Flameon. I love the golden parts!


• Longbeards from Gimnir's Dwarf army: This unit is incredible. He is making an army to remember!


• Cicero by River: I love the painting of this eldar Wraithknight.


• Fire and Silk by James Wappel: Cool spiders and fire in wappel style.


• Le Petit Pride and Lust Controller by Remy Tremblay: Remy sculpts this two miniatures for "The Others". Quite interesting sculpts! Find Lust Controller here.


• The tomb city of Pseusennes by James Wappel: This type of things are probably what I love the most. Enjoy this marvel of an army painted completely by Mr. Wappel!


• Bye Bye Baby by Sang Eon Lee: Another marvel of a bust by this korean genius. Marilyn Monroe!


• Rawr by Scott Hockley: I really like the painting on this creepy Kingdom Death miniature by Scott Hockley.


• Espectro de Dunas Rojas by Tercio Creativo: Long time without seeing news from "A Capa y Espada"! This concept is very cool.

Articles and tutorials

• How to make simple labels for bases in Coloured Dust: We have talked about this many times, but it certainly never gets old. Very useful!


• The Beginning WIP by Alberto Winterland: Alberto continues on this article on how he made this diorama. (only in Spanish)


• Using feathers for your miniatures by Matt di Pietro: Very interesting guest article in Massive Voodoo.


• How to paint a face using airbrush: Interesting tutorial in the blog Coloured Dust.


• Painting Miniatures from A to Z by Ángel Giráldez: You will see this everywhere these days. Ángel just announced the release of his very limited book, a personal project, that promises to be very instructive. Order yours while you can!

WIP: Ellyrian Reavers Part 8

Previously on... WIP: Ellyrian Reavers

Let's work now on the golden parts. This time, I'm going to use Scale75 golden metallic paints, starting off from a basecoat of a dark brown, like Chocolate Brown or similar. This will be great for recesses and shadows because it will look like gold but matte.

On top of that matte brown, I will paint the darkest golden metal of the set. As you can see, I'm painting all the golden parts at the same time.

Hightlights on the golden parts are done with some lighter golden metallic paint.

This is how the golden parts look from another angle.

Final highligths are done with the lightest golden paint of the set. Some light spots can be painted with just Metallic Medium, or White Alchemy if you are using Scale75.

Same golds from other angles. Metallic areas are difficult to show in photographs.

Time for some darker areas, I use dark browns and also brown inks to gain intensity. It's important to be careful not to use too much ink or it will destroy the matte effect in the shadows. It should stay a little satin, but not too much.

View from the front.

That should be all on the metallic parts. Let's move on to the skin of the elves.

Here's how the skin looks without any paint on. It's funny to notice how the rest is painted, but the face and hands aren't. A lot of people like to start painting skin the first thing, I left it for last this time!

Base skin overall. Important to see how the eye wasn't completely covered. I left the recess with the grey of the priming coat so that it would serve to outline it.

First highlights with the next skintone, slightly paler.

Instead of highlighting more now, I will paint first shadows and then go back to the next lights. The order is not that important, and will help me control the contrast.

Painting the eyes makes a big difference. They are subtle but extremely important.

Some stronger and slightly red skin tones in shadow parts make the face alive, as well as the paint in the lips.

One part I haven't painted yet is the feathered helmet of the captain, which is heavily inspired by the Polish Hussars (just inspired, as the Polish had two lines of feathers).

I wasn't sure about the colour, but I tried the slightly violet red that I've been using for these elves in other occasions, and I think it looks good so I will just add some depth to it. First, a wash of violet ink, to get an intense violet tone in all the recesses.

Now I start hightlighting parts of the feathers with a slightly lighter red (mixed with Space Wolves Grey so it turns out to be a little pink, desaturated red).

I insist on the lighting, with even more Spave Wolves Grey.

Some final lights with a lot of Space Wolves Grey (still some red in it too).

I finally recover the colour by going over some of the lightest tones with the initial pink.

All that is missing is that metallic part that holds all the feathers over the helmet.

Seems like we are really close to the end, let's see a quick pic of all the Reavers together!

Continue to WIP: Ellyrian Reavers Part 9

Clinic Modelista Almería 2015

February will be witness to a very interesting initiative in my country. The first "Clinic de Modelismo" in Almería (a southern province of Spain, in the Mediterranean coast). It will happen between the days February 5-7. And you might be asking yourselves... what is that about? Is it a contest? Is it an expo? Let's see...

To those of you who do not speak Spanish, it is a pity because the whole thing will be in this language. However, if you happen to be around Almería on those dates, it might be worth dropping by the event!

I sincerely think that it is a "Do Not Miss" opportunity to see some of the best of our hobby all reunited in the same place imparting masterclasses on different subjects at a more than interesting price. I personally will not be able to make it this year because I will be traveling again to South Africa for work (yeah, I know, seems like I never stop flying) but if this even has a second edition, it will be a big must.

Awaiting impatiently what people attending have to say about it!

Finishing up the Phoenix Guard scheme

So I kept doing colour scheme experiments on the Phoenix Guard I was painting during the holidays, and it seems that I have got the feeling I was looking for.

Here's some pretty bad pictures of it, but you can get a rough idea of how the scheme will look.

I think it suits much better my purposes than the previous one:

Wonders of colour theory, the red is made mainly with Fucsia (Scale Color) but it looks much more red because of the colours surrounding it. I think it works well, and solves the fact that I wanted them to stand out as elite warriors of my army. Also, I might change the gems from red to a very cold and bright blue (ice blue/light turquoise) to contrast with the cape, but still undecided.

What do you think?

All that is left now for the Guard to be complete would be painting some freehands on the cape. I am thinking of doing some elven patterns in NMM gold (like the gold on the armour, but in NMM). I'm still unsure about what to do, I tried doing the flames of Asuryan (GW codex) but I do not like them that much. Probably something more elegant/royal?

While I decide (all help will be much appreciated!), I have started the work on the rest of the guards, and I had a breakthrough on my serial painting technique that I will share with you very soon. :) I'm very excited about it! It is speeding up quite much the weapon batch painting. I will prepare the whole WIP article where I will tell you all about it very soon, so stay tuned. Also, pictures of the Ultramarines that went to GD 2014 are underway, and the Ellyrian Reavers too!

Best 2014 modelling blog in Spanish by Fanhammer

Continuing with the good start of the year, I just found out that Volomir's Blog (and in particular, its Spanish version "El Blog de Volomir") has been awarded best modelling blog in the recent annual edition of "Premios Fanhammer", organized by the wargaming community Fanhammer.

Last year we also had a nomination for best modelling blog but we didn't get the first place. This year it seems we hit jackpot! Of course, this is all thanks to you guys who are always behind the screen reading this humble space of the web. THANK YOU ALL!

In this link you can check the complete list of categories and winners.

The question I have now is: what about the already traditional WAMP awards? Are there none this year? The last two years were very interesting with the competition with the Massive Voodoos! haha :)

Watching The Fellowship of the Ring with a live orchestra

It has been a lovely start of the year so far. Just yesterday, we had the chance of witnessing the amazing show that is watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in all its glory, with the music being performed live by a complete orchestra with choirs and everything.

I am a huge fan of movie soundtracks, and Lord of the Rings is both one of my favourite movies and soundtracks of all time. It had been quite some time since the last time I saw the movie, and I found that I still know most of the dialogues by heart, as well as the music of course. :)

This was no casual experience for me. The show was absolutely amazing and it touched me deeply. I always wanted to see this since they started doing it not long after the first screening of the movies more than 10 years ago, but I could not make it to the different opportunities I had. I am SO HAPPY I did not miss it this time. Live music made the movie a thousand times better, if that could be even possible.

To be fair, I cried many times during this show. Call me sentimental, but this movie was huge for me, and live music just gets to your heart. I hope my companions weren't bothered by my constant sobbing! (They did shed some tears even if they don't want to admit it!)

Here you have a recording that I found in youtube of a very very similar show in Sacramento. Of course, camera recording can't even get close to the experience, but you can get the idea...

Also, this helped to make up for the horrible taste that was left after the screening of the last movie of The Hobbit, which was bad to an epic proportion in my opinion. I would watch the original Lord of the Rings a hundred times instead. I'm so looking forward to repeating this experience with live music. Can't wait for it to happen again!