The 25mm Warrior

Before we get into it here they are finished and complete!

First off I am very, very pleased with how these guys turned out. These are quite possibly the best minis I've ever painted!

To finish off the Guardsmen above all that was left to do was anti-shine, base and decal the mini. When using anti-shine to dull up the super shiny Army Painter dip only a few rules need to be followed...

First: Less is more.
Never put a bunch of anti-shine on the mini. YOU WILL CLOUD IT UP!!! Trust me... I know. A few short controlled bursts is all that's needed. If after the anti-shine drys and you notice there are spots where some significant shine is left over then apply some more but only a little each time. I'm serious about this! This stage is critical! If done wrong your mini WILL look like crap. Now in order to make sure we don't have crappy minis were lead right into the second rule...

Second: The Hand Waving method
Ok now I want you to do something. Raise the hand you use spray with and act like your waving goodbye. Are you waving goodbye yet? Good. Now imagine your holding your spray can in your hand as your waving. Now do that exact same motion when applying the anti-shine. If done in conjunction with short controlled bursts you'll be safeguarding yourself from applying too much of it and screwing up your expensive miniature.

Once the mini is good and dry it's time to base.

This is super easy and follows the same easy to paint and get on the table method we've been doing this whole tutorial. Paint the base Graveyard Earth. Then take good 'ol white glue and coat the top of the base. Then dip it into some modeling sand. Once that dries put some more white glue on top and pat static grass on top of the glue. That's it. Some people like to get all crazy painting bases, adding crap to it and such. That's cool and all but we're aiming for speed here. Besides I've never understood the whole painting bases thing. The modeling sand and static grass already has natural highlights and shades to it, saving you the time and trouble.


As far as decals go I used the whole Micro Set, Micro Sol thing that Miks Minis turned me on to. This was a first for me since I've never used the stuff. It's alright. Better than just using water. I was a bit disappointed that the shine on the decal wasn't dulled by the solution. The decals look far better than the job I did on my Blood Angels . I guess I was expecting it to look like it was apart of the paint job itself. Maybe the dip is screwing with it.

So there you have it. A big thanks to Col. Corbane for the comment that inspired me to do this. I hope that when it come to the Imperial Guard I obeyed his orders to do it quick and fast while doing it well!

Drop me some comments to let me know what ya think or have any tips to add to this yourself.

Thanks for reading mates!

So I shelled out some dough for a game mat to go with my city terrain. I was going to buy the Games Workshop modular game table but I was dissuaded by the whole having to make it myself. What if I screwed it up? Painting is trial and error and dropping a few hundred bucks to broaden my painting skills (which are pretty non-existent) seemed like a huge gamble.

Better to leave it to the professionals.

The Textured City Game Mat from theterrainguy.com is just what the gamer ordered.

Everything about this mat is friggin great. The mat itself appears to be made from a very flexible piece of canvas. The mat is shipped rolled up with a piece of plastic pipping in the middle. It unrolls flat so there are none of those annoying creases that you get with a lot of other game mats.

The actual playing field is very well painted with what feels like a thin rubberized coating that adds to the flexibility of the product. The rubbery texture just serves to make the mat look all the more like the ground of a ruined city.

Now this is probably something that any experienced modeler could do. However if your like me with little to no experience in making terrain (let alone a whole game mat) this kind if thing is awesome for around $70.00 bucks(or maybe it was $80.00... can't remember). The only complaint I had was it took a little bit for the product to arrive at my doorstep but when I opened it up and saw what a great job theterrainguy did with it all was forgiven.

Not much more to say other than it's a good mat that looks like how it is presented on the site and shows that a lot of love and care went into making it. The sturdy construction and ease of storage makes this a convenient game mat that is going to see a lot of battles.

It's clear that with game mats from www.theterrainguy.com you can't really go wrong.

Time for my Guardsmen to take the plunge!

Now dipping is self explanatory however there are a few hints to doing it...

First make sure you have some mean grip pliers. It comes in handy when you start to ring out the excess. Make sure you have an iron grip on them too. There is still a Tyranid somewhere outside that flew off the pliers a long time ago. Also...

BEWARE OF DOUBLE DIPPING!!!

Dipping the mini once will give it all the coverage it needs. It seems that once it have been dipped and re-dipped (like accidentally dropping the poor mini in the Quick Shade) it darkens the color significantly. Now if your looking for a darker brown or some kind of middle between The Army Painters tones of shade then more power to ya. However it is a real bummer once you have been doing this to an entire squad and you double dip the last one and he looks different from the rest now (not that I'm speaking from experience or anything :).


Now after you got em all dipped and have ringed em out (your arm should be hurting at this point. If it's not your doing something wrong!) let em sit for about five minutes. After that its time to clean em up a bit.

The Army Painter website tells us to use a brush to soak up the excess that will pool up in the crevices. However the dip ruins paint brushes and the only way to fix em is to have some Turpentine handy (it breaks up the Quick Shade). I found that a tooth pick works just as well. Just gently roll the tooth pick across any area where there is too much dip and it will stick onto the pick. NEVER EVER USE A Q-TIP!!!. The tiny fibers will get stuck onto the mini and your mini will look like he has a hair problem.

That's pretty much it for dipping pointers. Tune in next time for some Anti-Shine Magic!

Cheers!

Can you paint by the numbers?

Great! Then The Army Painter is going to be no problem for you!

It's not hard to see what I've done here. Just a simple base coating job. I stayed pretty faithful to the classic Cadian color scheme...

Catachan Green for armor plating and lasgun.

Boltgun Metal for the metal parts of the lasgun.

Skull White for the eagles.

Chaos Black for the boots and knife.

Elf Flesh for, umm... flesh

Pretty simple and straight forward. However if your gonna follow this guide expect the Catachan Green to be a bit of a bother. It took a couple of coats to get it to look even and smooth. Actually it slowed me down quite a bit which was a little discouraging. I was hoping for a fast paint job. Given the small color pallet and The Army Painter primer I used in part one I was a bit shocked at how long the five man team took. Maybe it's the primer or the paint (or just that I paint slow now cuz of my injuries). Never the less it ruined my hopes for a fast paint job.

Since the paint was forcing me to slow down I decided to do a highlight job as well. Now I know the whole deal with "Extreme Highlighting." Problem is I can't paint a straight line to save my life. I do what I call "Drybrush Highlighting.



The picture doesn't do it justice (I suck at taking pictures. Where's my wife when I need her). Still the highlights on the minis were done first by doing a drybrush of Camo Green on the edges. Do this a few time to build up the color. Finish it off with a light drybrush of Bleached Bone over the Camo Green work you just did. Don't sweat it if you spill over the drybrush onto the flat pieces of the model. I ended up doing the whole model with the Bleached Bone drybrush. It looked pretty good. A better example of drybrush highlightging can be seen on this BattleMech I was screwing around with awhile back.



The highlights were done strictly by just drybrushing the whole model with Bleached Bone. It made the edges look sharp and saved me a ton of time trying to paint lines on my mini. It also softened the color which was nice because the purple was way to dark.

It's strange that a sloppy technique like drybrushing ends up making straight highlights on the miniature.

Go figure.

Tune in next time for some dipping action!

Cheers mates!

Now if you have no clue what I'm talking about go check out our fearless leaders blog post What Should I Post About.

I'ts cool I can wait... really go check it yo! I need to put some Rush on anyway.

Back? Right on.

This post really hit home for me. The opening sentence is what did it, "When you decided to start your blog, did you think about it then or were you just hoping it would come to you later on once you got started?"

Rons post may have been some commentary about how to get rid of bloggers block, finding your own voice, etc but it struck a different cord with me. It made me sit back and think about where I've been and where I'm going blogwise. Now this blog is about wargaming and 40k in particular. Because of this Rons post made me stop and look at where my hobby has been and gone to in the time I've been doing it.

I've mentioned before that I'm in pain a lot. The pain stems from injuries I received in the Military and pain glazes over everything I do... including my wargaming. As a matter of fact for a long time I would shy away from it. Pain got the best of me and I gave into it. It became easy to do too. I had lost my job anyway, had to sell my miniatures to make ends meet. Even before that though my buddy would call up, wanting to game, wanting to hang out...

I just made up some excuse.

Here I'll give you an example. Imagine your sitting in a comfortable Lazyboy chair. Your paint tray rests in your lap and a fresh Command Squad from your army lays about it. You start to go to work. Maybe you'll paint, or put some models together or clean em or whatever. The all of a sudden your back hurts. A slight ache that begins to spread down your arm so you stop for a sec, raise you head to see whats on the TV. You go back to it then all of a sudden your foot writhes in pain. You leg jerks from it knocking paints pots around. You take some pain killers and a hour later the edge is gone but now your vision is blurry (damn side effects). Now you can't see what your doing so you get up to get a drink and fall over from the pressure on your foot because you have to walk on your scars from a surgery that was supposed to fix all this mess...

I'm so sore right now from putting model buildings together in a Lazyboy chair. It doesn't help that I lean heavy on a cane with my right hand to walk. I'm right handed thus the arm and back problems when I do this stuff. Not to mention moving around a game table...ugg.

Geeze I'm jacked up from putting models together?

See why I love The Army Painter so much?

This blog has become much more than a wargame hobby journal to me. It is a chronicle of my fight with pain and an ever growing struggle to not let it take anything else away from me. My injuries have consummed too much from me and I'm hellbent to not let it take my beloved hobby as well. Gaming maybe painful for me now but I struggle on, in spite of it. I never would have thought I would grunt, cuss, stiffen and be overcome with pain because of my hobby but thats the hand I was dealt.

and that's what I post about now.

Thanks Ron.

Rome may not have been built in a day but I razed this bad boy in in about 48 hours...


Man I got my work cut out for me...

My back is killing me.

I bit the bullet and ordered a Ruined Sector, craters and twelve city barricades. At first I was a bit miffed. The Ruined Sector showed up in a box... the shipping box. All the was in there was a bunch of loose sprues. The pretty package that the GW website had displayed wasn't there, just a Fed Ex box with a bunch of stuff in it. I can picture the employee looking at my order and saying something like this...

"Hey Mac... we got another order for a Ruined Imperial Sector again."

"Oh man, you serious? We're all out."

"Well, we do have a bunch of loose sprues laying about. Why don't you go gather a bunch up and throw em in a Fed Ex box. No one needs the exact packaging anyway."

"Um ok."

If I'm gonnna shell out ninety bucks for something, it better come in the package on the site. Not to mention I've seen this item in my local game store IN A PACKAGE! WITH THE PICTURE ON IT AND STUFF! SO I KNOW IT COMES IN A PACKAGE!

I'm not really mad... it just threw me off and made me feel GW didn't really care.

The models on the other hand are awesome! The kits are fully customizable and you can make whatever you want out of em. As per usual I got a grip of bits left over too (which is always a plus).

Some IG boys in the middle of being base coated for part 2 of my Army Painter Cadian tutorial.




Even as I type this I'm pretty racked. Back is stiff, arm is sore. I guess there really is no avoiding it, I'm jacked up and my hobby will always hurt from now on. Maybe I should just cool it, pace myself only I've never been that way. You have to do things in spite of the pain, fight it as you go along. Now when I paint, model, whatever, there is a lot more going on than gluing and dipping.

Man, why can't this crap come painted :(

"Whatever you do, don't choose a complicated scheme like me, you'll be painting them for years. Dip and drybrush are the key my friend." -Col. Corbane

Dip and drybrush are my M.O. yo!

I guess the Colonel doesn't know me very well yet:)

For those of you that have been following my blog for a bit you know I hate painting, love playing! Painting gets in the way of me having fun! I bought 40K to play it, not spend a ton of time painting and then maybe in a few years I'll get around to a decent looking game. NO! I want to play damnit!

And I want my force to look decent.

The Army Painter is a Godsend. You still spend some time painting but it cuts about 80% of the time out. With a force like Guardsmen it really is convenient.

I've always digged Cadians. The uniforms, vehicles, models, I mean there really isn't a whole lot not to like with the Imperial Guard range, look and feel. Even the original color of the uniforms is awesome. The dark green meshed with a dark khaki or desert yellow is stunning on a force the size of a Guard army. The uniform reminds me of old WWII color schemes U.S. soldiers used to wear.

Never the less the paint scheme is hard to pull off. I tried it a bit and could never get the models to look even close to how GW had em. It would always look either too dark or too light. In either case the figure came out looking like a failed attempt to emulate the Cadians homeworld color.

Thats when fate intervened...


I had a bit of experience using The Army Painter Primers before but this time I needed something that would be spot on for that tricky Khaki/desert yellow looking fatigues that Cadians are known for. I looked at pic after pic, comparing it to the GW paint line trying to see what would work. GW says to use their Desert yellow paint but if you know anything about how The Army Painter works the last stage of Quick Shading will darken whatever color I decide to go with.

So I took a gamble. The uniform appeared to took like a dark bone color. I went back to The Army Painter website and compared their Skeletons with pic of the Cadians from Gamesworkshop.

Sure enough I think I found a close match for what I wanted.

At least I hope I did or I was out 30 bucks (ahhh the trial and error process of painting).


As you can see the coverage is very nice and it didn't take much of the primer to get complete coverage of the mini. Heed my advice though...

WHEN USING ARMY PAINTER PRIMERS USE SHORT CONTROLLED BURSTS!!!

A steady spray is too much in using this stuff and can quickly cake on the paint on the miniature, covering up detail. The heavy pigmented primer is a little tricky to get used to but as you can see the coverage is awesome. Even the cans top is pretty spot on to what the color will look like on your figure.




So for this tutorial I'll be painting five Guardsmen.

I hope this little tutorial/journal will show you just how easy it is to use this product and get your force on to the tabletop quickly (and looking fantastic to boot!)

Tune in next time for some basecoating action!

Cheers!