Back To Painting

One step, but one very large step.

The gap between today and my last painting session is shameful, so we won't dwell on it.  Today I tackled the big hurdle in the second half of my (first) ETL vow: first armor highlights.  This is the single biggest area of controlled painting for the so-called Greenwing Dark Angels.  Base coating (as an aside, I need to either find a standard or invent one for base coat [basecoat] as I want to make it one word but grammar checkers complain when I do) is quick and easy since I don't have to be neat with it.  Since I switched to shading by targeted wash I don't have to re-establish the base coat anymore which was previously the biggest hurdle.  The second armor highlights are tiny edge highlights.  All other colors cover much less area and thus don't take as long.

The requisite individual shot.

That first armor highlight is a killer because it's both an edge highlight and a general highlight.  It requires both the control of edging and the mental processing power of figuring out what takes direct light and therefore needs to be brighter.  You can't slap it around like a base coat or you'll wreck the shading.  It covers a significant part of the armor, so you also need mental fortitude to plow through a unit while keeping quality high.  It's a bit daunting before you start since you know it's going to be a slog, but once you're done then the rest is almost coasting.  No colors are done yet, many aren't even started, but the majority of the work is done.  Next session (which will hopefully be sooner than later) will see the armor finished and there should be decent progress on another color.  Perhaps colors (plural) if things go well.  In marginally related news I varnished the first half of my vow some time last week.  Unfortunately I forgot to put them back in my case and didn't check before heading out to game with EV this past Tuesday, so I had to proxy the squad.  Fortunately I still had a unit of Death Company in the case that did the job.  The actual squad still isn't in my case (it still needs static grass and more varnish) so we'll see if I remember them for gaming next week.

Plastic pSorscha

On the Warmahordes front, this year's Journeyman league will be starting up in about a month.  If we were following last year's model I'd be getting ready to start painting as we got a month worth of painting before games started.  We aren't quite doing that though.  Instead there was a surprise: everything painted this year counts for Journeyman purposes, provided you can show before and after shots.  This would be good news...if I had painted any Warmahordes stuff this year.  Looking through my backlog (backblog?) shows that there's lots of Dust and DA, but no Khador or Legion.  The silver lining here is that I have a lot of Khador assembled, primed, and waiting for painting, so the table is pretty well set for when I get started on them.  I'll finish up the (first) ETL vow before starting on Warmahordes, but when I do the plan is Kayazy and Demo Corps first before starting on my backlog of casters (mostly eVlad) and jacks (Beast 09, plus the still to be assembled Drago and Conquest).  Before any of the I took some boring shots of painting table squatters since they were within reach while doing the DA pics.

Gormann.

I'd really love to be able to put two pics side by side, but Blogger doesn't want to make it easy for me and I'm not dipping into the dirty world of HTML to make it happen.