Journeyman Painting Log 6

An unpainted Reinholdt circa December 2011.

I'll get to the actual painting in a minute.  Quite a while ago I upped the storage for my little blog here, shelling out actual money for your virtual entertainment.  I've always thought that if I dug into the Picasa album that serves as the image host for Blogger and cleared out all the pics I uploaded but decided against, multiple copies when the upload went wonky (which happens far too often), and resized all the old pictures I could probably fit everything in the standard amount of storage.  Just now I've been digging around in that Picasa album looking for pictures of my recently painted models.  I don't think I'll be clearing the underbrush any time soon.  The amount of pictures up there is staggering.  Considering how many are for battle reports, and therefore are identical except for small details, the huge amount of work I was expecting looks like it'll be less the size of the moon and more the size of the universe.  None of this matters to you the reader, but sometimes it's nice to see behind the curtain.  On with the show.

I'm after his lucky charms.

Two good days of painting produced three mercs (Sylys, Gorman, Reinholdt) and a Destroyer base.  Yesterday I sat down to do quick basecoats and washes on Sylys an Gorman to prepare for actual painting today.  Reinholdt didn't get primed until yesterday afternoon so he missed out on the preparty.  He caught up real quick though, thanks in part to his massive coat.  Normally I try and wash everything at once to cut down on waiting for things to dry (which is probably a bad approach now that I think about it), but talking with (one of) my local PG(s) last night gave me a new idea to try out that I'll cover in a minute.  Looking at Reinholdt now I see that I missed his teeth (and the lens of his spyglass), but that's a quick fix and not enough to stop him from getting the stamp of approval.

Gonna get his black oil on.

For some reason I never really play Gorman.  I get that he's really good and deserves his place as a Mercenary All Star, but I never have figured out how to use him and he always dies a messy death before doing anything.  Since he doesn't see much table time he doesn't really feature on the painting queue either.  My resolve to do different things with Khador, and his huge coat, means that he was a prime candidate for the brushes.  I took a reasonable amount of time on the coat as I don't do black well, especially big flowy cloak-esque black coats.  I stuck to my usual approach (read: far too subtle) and built up from black, mixing in a bit more grey with each new layer.  The results are better than expected, though for a change the picture looks worse than the mini does.  I don't think I'll use the same technique when I get around to doing my Ravenwing, but it worked well here.

Really like the fist, though the gems could be better.

Saved the best for last this time.  That PG inspired technique I mentioned?  It's basically double washing.  Normally I'll basecoat, wash, reestablish the base, then highlight to taste.  The new approach, which I used for everything that isn't red or grey on Sylys, goes like this: base, wash, "highlight" with base, wash again, optional legitimate highlight to finish.  The theory, which makes a lot of good sense, is that by adding the middle "highlight" and wash you're enhancing the shading (via the double wash) while keeping the brights bright (via "highlight") and getting a nice transition between layers/shades without a ton of effort.  The effect gets a little lost on all the browns, and I already like VGC Leather Brown with the Army Painter Devlan Mud replacement that you can see on Reinholdt, but it looks real nice on the green cape/skirt combo.

Unpainted Sylys from my first tournament.

About that new approach to Khador.  I've played a couple games with pSorscha so far as step one.  The initial forays weren't so good, but I made a change to the list that I think will help out (and I may have a battle report of it in the works) and it's just a filler list anyway as games this week were "suggested" at 25 points.  Next week is 35, which is the first level that I really like the look of the list at.  In addition to the odd point level I was also fighting without two significant pieces, namely Reinholdt and Sylys.  This whole crazy approach started a few weeks back when one of my locals told me he was making a list for me that featured a spell-slinging Sorscha.  I always wanted to play her that way, but FOC 6 with two juicy spells costing 4, plus the desire to Wind Rush every turn, meant she didn't play that game too well.  With Reinholdt's Lucky Charm and Sylys' Arcane Secrets combining to form Voltron (aka 4 dice dropping the two lowest) suddenly a spell-slinging Sorscha is more viable.  In a fit of serendipity I also found a thread on the Khador boards on this exact topic that mirrored my thinking and pointed to some new directions as well.  I hope to get Kell Bailoch painted before next week's games, and maybe eEryiss and Harlan Versch as well, so I can test out a more or less fully operational battle station.