Some miniatures for Song of Blades and Heroes (Frostgrave undead and construct)

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks!

The stuff on page 65 is with a black undercoat, but it's very similar. I'll try to post a white-undercoat version either tonight or tomorrow.

I did see somewhere in here that you undercoat white, wash with agrax/dark wash, dry brush white and then apply washes/glazes. Do you just thin your desired colour with water and paint it on and highlight?

Yes, that's basically it. I used to do a lot of thinning with medium rather than water, but since adopting a wet palette a few months back, I've tended to use water. The wet palette (a flat, water-soaked sponge in an ice-cream tub with greaseproof paper over it) keeps the wash at a consistent level of wetness, so there's less need for medium to get an even covering.

The general process is this:

• White undercoat (spray or paint).
• Agrax Earthshade wash (sometimes Nuln Oil for very sombre figures).
• Drybrush with Vallejo White - much smoother and less gritty than the Citadel equivalent, I find.
• Tint with thin washes of watered-down paint. I always start with metallics, on the basis that they're the most difficult to fix if they get onto other colours. I generally leave the skin until last.
• Highlight where needed - often using thinned-down Witch Elf Flesh (or whatever it's called) regardless of the base colour. If need be, I'll add successive highlights of this. I often find that clothes and equipment don't need any highlights if the initial wash was thin enough. Sometimes that holds true for skin, but less often.
• Glaze each area with an appropriate GW wash (generally thinned), to reduce the harshness of the dry brushing and enhance the colours. I might not do this to the skin, depending on how it looks, as I sometimes use a slightly thicker wash of a relatively opaque paint like Witch Elf or Kislev Flesh, in which case I might have all the depth I want with the faint shadows from the initial Agrax wash. And ditto for other areas. But usually a thin sepia or brown glaze helps to tie things together.  
• Add details - eyes, teeth, emblems, etc.

I sometimes do other things, like black-lining after metallics but before colours - especially for smaller-scale figures.

For maximum speed, I'd take care to use very thin washes for the initial colours, then wash everything except the skin in brown or sepia. And I'd only apply highlights to the skin, to make it stand out more. That's basically what I've been doing with these 15mm goblins.

For wolf fur, incidentally, I more or less leave it as it looks after the initial white drybrush, but add some thin brown and black patterns down the spine and on the cheeks and legs. So if I ever paint up a warg-only army, it will be very quick indeed!

[Hobgoblin]

One more thing: when using red, I have a tendency not to thin it quite enough. The technique works best when it's really quite thin - so that the painted areas look pink rather than red. And then the final wash does the rest: either a crimson GW wash or their violet followed by their yellow (so that the dry brushed highlights are red-orange rather than white).

[Leadpocalypse]

That's ace, thanks ever so much for taking the time to write it up. I like the idea of using pastel type Elf flesh as a highlight and washing again. I'm gonna try this out with a few heroquest minis I have lying about. I'll let you know how I get on, it does seem like a quick method and the style is something I really like the look of.

[Hobgoblin]

No problem at all! I'll try to do some genuine WIP shots, but here's a mock-up from some of the (lamentably, hundreds!) of figures I've got lying around partially painted.

[Hobgoblin]

And here's an orc in various stages of wippery - from Agrax wash with white drybrush to first highlights in Witch Elf flesh (and a few wee glazes/washes around the eyes and nose). I'll finish him off tomorrow.

One unusual step with this guy was the use of thinned Witch Elf to reduce the severity of the shading on the flesh. At the same time as I was adding highlights, I let a bit of thinned paint run into the shaded areas to lighten them a bit and reduce the contrasts. This is the first time I've done a 28mm orc with the yellow skin tone I've been using on my 10s and 15s, and the yellow paint doesn't have the opacity of Witch Elf Flesh (which I used as the initial colour tint for my "fish-white" cave goblins earlier in this thread (one of whom has the same face as this guy). So it needed a bit of remedial work to stop it looking too crude.

[Hobgoblin]

The first few details (teeth and eyes whitened in):

[Jagannath]

Lovely job - thanks for putting another step by step up. I love your painting - it's the plat opposite of mine ( I start from black, leave blacklining everywhere and highlight up) but it's so good - seems like it's fairly quick too? You really seem to crank excellent minis out. Lovely as always.

AA goblins are great too - where the castings ok? I've had some castings off AA that make me not want to order any others....

[Hobgoblin]

Thanks, Jagannath! Yes, it's pretty quick - a fairly sloppy process with tidying up later.

I ordered the AA goblins a year or so ago; I'd say that the castings are generally fine, though some had a fair bit of flash. None were actually miscast, though.

I've just added another couple of stages to this chap - red and then yellow on the eyes and some touch-ups elsewhere, plus green and brown on the base.

[Hobgoblin]

And I'll call him done for now (will have a look at him in daylight to see if anything needs fixing).

[Hobgoblin]

And a beastman to keep him company.

[jambo1]

That beastman is a cracking figure, really good looking baddie!!

[Hobgoblin]

Cheers! Yes, that first range of Kev Adams beastmen is terrific: there are some of these dog-goat chaps, as well as goatmen and boarmen. I have another four kicking around - two boarmen, a boatman and another dog-goat. The sixth, a goatman, broke years ago and survives only in his head, which was transplanted onto a Grenadier orc (right-hand side of the central base) by my teenage self.

I have this guy earmarked as a beserker/brute for Battlesworn. Some Goodwin chaos warriors will act as tanks or tank/brute combos, I've got a sorcerer to lead them, and I'll probably use skaven or other less imposing beastmen sa the obligatory fighters.

I'm still swithering over whether to give the orc's eyes pupils. The current red/yellow glow effect means that he fits in with my cave goblins. I'll leave him for now and see how the rest turn out. I think Fangor Gripe (the cyclops orc from the same range) may have the casting vote as to whether his kin get pupils or not.

[Hobgoblin]

Three weeks to go until the big D&D game: here's a Pendraken manticore. Ostensibly 10mm, it's perfect for 15mm, I think: the size of a large lion compared with a 15/18mm human.

[Hobgoblin]

No cavern-crawling RPG session would be complete without a certain ethical dilemma: what to do with goblin children?

After a rummage in the bits box, I now have two bases of nasty little goblin imps. They're Mantic orclings - perfectly sized for 15mm goblin imps. I envisage these engaging in a lot of taunting and rock-dropping and screeching before squirming away into cracks in the nooks of the caves.

They'll also work well as swarms for Battlesworn.

[Hobgoblin]

And some very quickly painted dead trees: I'm envisaging an encounter with skeletons that takes place on a battlefield that was above ground long ago ...

"Scatter terrain" pieces like these will be used to give a bit of flavour to specific caverns.