My internet! It's broke!

Home connection has been gone for 3 days now, so no new pics, since I'm not going to mess with those from work. I'm down to all touch-up and detail work, except for the heroes, who will probably take me most of tomorrow to finish. It'll be down to the wire, but only with regard to quality of the artwork. Everything will be painted, but there may be some blotchiness.

On Monday I got a chance to field test the army! I may have a chance to not go 0-5! There were a couple of points during the game where things could ahve swung my way with a little bit of luck. Not even insanely unlikely luck, but just some ordinary slightly-above-average luck could have done it. Of course, I was playing a fairly balanced list which should not at all be indicative of what I'll face in the GT. Maybe as I sink lower and lower into the loser's bracket, I'll find some kindred souls with other gimmicky or silly armies...

Probably won't post again before the tourney, but there will definitely be pics after this is all done with.

A new hope

Hey! It looks like I can do fast & nasty if I really put my mind to it. The models have a lot to do with it - the 7th ed. spiders are very forgiving and have lots of well-defined ridges and texture that lets me blow right through the painting. Probably 5 minutes for the spider (post-wash) and 10 for the gobbo (post green wash on skin). With any luck I'll get all the spiders done today plus the savage orcs and trolls.

5...

And, returning to a recurrent theme - I cannot seem to paint fast. 8 hours and counting just wokring on the wolfsquig riders. Still a good bt of touch-up and highlights to apply, but I just have to move on. I've got "centerpiece" models I haven't even put a basecoat on yet. Urghh. This was supposed to be fun, right?

Cool shield design anyway, right?

Interesting job ahead

So, I had some extra watered chestnut ink from working on the spiders today, and decided to get a better idea of what I'll be dealing with on the trollsquigs. Man, that's some busy skin texture. I originally had a smooth putty surface meeting the rough gravel of the body, and decided to add some wrinkles to the smooth part and smooth bits to the rough part... I think I've got convincing wrinkles on the troll above, but the other two it doesn't blend as well and looks more like boils or some other sort of growth on the skin. Since these are supposed to be river trollsquigs, I wonder if I should try to paint it as pondscum/seaweed. Again, this could be a huge time-sink with my deadline looming, but rather than fiddle with the modelling, I'm inclined to work with what I've got.

6...

Well, after the doll-hair fiasco, I did still manager to get in a couple hours of painting and finished up the "squig herders" that I had base coated earlier in the week. Four of them are the old two man teams that used to be on cav bases, but end up taking almost three gobbo bases. Luckily, I checked this out early in the process and repositioned a couple of the squigs so that each appears to have almost wandered completely of of his base. It makes them all fit, though.

51% done.

A questionable idea pursued in lieu of progress

The title pretty much says it all. Feeling better because of the impending 3 day weekend, I decided that my giant spider REALLY would look cool with some tarantula-ish hair. It probably would, but synthetic curly doll hair isn't the way to get there.

7...

One week to go.

Hey, two comments so far, both apparently from completely random strangers who read random blogs for kicks. And only one pornographic one! Nice to see such support from my gaming group.

Current status: 43% finished. Looks like I'll be taking off from work on Memorial Day after all.

Check out the scratch built squig hoppers. Not the best sculpting - basically take a rock and add legs and teeth. It works better on the squiglings since they are so small that you can't see the flaws. Plus, these were the last things I sculpted, and was starting to feel the time crush.

















I did the goblins much differently from my normal style. Besides being much more fast and nasty, I forwent my olive drab skin tone and white eyes, and instead went with scorpion green highlights and the GW standard yellow eyes and red pupils. I managed the high contrast that I was looking for, though I do hope people look more at the funny models instead of looking at the technical skill behind the paint job...





















OK, gotta fix the border on those fingers before I go to bed... I'll resist the temptation to touch up and retake the pic...

11 days to go

I really can' t decide whether or not my feeling of impending doom is justified or not. Still plenty of time, in theory, but I also was extremely underproductive this weekend. Saturday I mostly goofed off and so had to spend 10 hours today making up for lost time. My hand is one big cramp.

In any conversation regarding the slowest painters of all time, surely my name must be thrown into the mix somewhere. Friday was a couple of hours of base coating the squig mounts, Saturday I drybrushed a little, so Sunday was nothing but the detail work. Still not done. They are close, and should be final by tomorrow, but that's still pretty far behind where I thought I'd be by now.

On the bright side, if we count these as done, that gives me 33 out of 100 complete. Maybe I'll end up with a presentable army after all...

2 weeks to go

And so the clock keeps ticking down... I'll be staining all the teeth and finishing up the bases for everything at once, but otherwise these guys are done. Not bad, not great, but acceptable in the time span allotted. All 12 squigs for the herd are now painted, so that's almost 20% of my 66 model army! Unfortunately, 32 of the models are mounted, and there are some big ol' critters with a lot of real estate to get painted yet to go. More realistically, I'm at 10% done now.

This weekend, I'm gettin' squiggly.

Day 23 or so

Oh yeah, I can talk a good game. Yup. 3 hours painting. Yield: 6 squigs.

Damn, and they aren't even as detailed as I'd like... they're not bad, and certainly better than my lousy photo skills can do credit to, but still not super detailed. My own fault I guess for deciding to have a slightly different shade on each squig. I think for the wolfsquigs and boarsquigs, I'm going to have to go assembly line if I want to have any hope of a fully painted army.

Just a little work today. Looks like all it takes to offset the light shades of the ballast is some static grass. Not that I really need the ballast, since I used spackling for most of the bases. Anyway, I think the basing color scheme is set.

I'm going to get away from my normal painting style, mostly because one model at a time and 1-2 hours per infantryman just won't cut it. Besides, I tend to use very subdued naturalistic shading that looks really nice from 8 inches away, but very murky at 4 feet. I've won a few painting contests, but regularly score in the middle range for painting scores at tourneys. So, for both fast painting and high contrast/attention grabbing effect, here's what I'm going with:














I suppose the situation could still be classified as dire, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic about the coming weekend. Don't we have some sort of holiday coming up, too? Labor Day or Memorial Day or some such?

Day 19

Still haven't gotten serious about painting, but I'm close. Doesn't help that my Blazing Orange is dried out and the red ink has that weird effect when ink goes bad where it wicks to the top of every surface rather than hitting the crevices... Looks like I can't replace these for a couple more days; lame-assed Compleat Strategist closes at 7 every day except for Wednesday. They'll probably be out of the paint I need anyway.

Anyway, here's the solution to yeterday's dilemma:

2/3 eye and 1/3 lid seems to work really well, and I think I can do this pretty consistently on all but a few of the models.


I did mess with some colors for the bases... I really wanted to use the "ballast" I've had sitting around for years, but it may be too close to the squig color to give me the effect I want. Check out what I mean below.. Oh, and don't worry, that's a fast and nasty paint job on the squiglings just to get an idea what I'm working with. I didn't post any squigling pics before, basically because they are just rocks with eyes and legs.

Hmm. The pics are awfully small, but it's late and I'm lazy.

Day 18

Good/bad use of the weekend time. I put in somthing like 10 hours finishing up all of the modelling, but as a result, didn't much feel like painting on Sunday. I did get the stuff primed, and messed around with some color palates and such.

I could probably use some feedback on one item: how to paint the eyeballs. I can either go for lidded, or just a big eyeball sitting on top of the head. The former (lid) has a little more realistic look, and gets me around the fact that both my orc on wyvern and goblin on cave squig are resting their boots on the back of the mount's eyeballs. On the other hand, the big uncovered eyeball just looks cooler, never mind the realism. Extra shading might help the lidded look, but I didn't model an any eyelids, so the painted on look is going to look kinda fake on close inspection...

So tell me, is it just me, or is the lidless look so much better that I should just ignore the realism?

Pretty soon, I'm gonna have to start some sort of countdown. 2 weekends to go - I wonder if that is time enough, or if I'll need to take a sick day or two from work...

Day 14 or so

Busy weekend, and not nearly enough of it was devoted to squigs. So, still no primer, but I did get all of the O&G riders trimmed and ready to prime. I still need to do touch-up and smoothing on the various squigs, but that's not nearly as much fun as the first stages, so I worked on the big stuff instead.
The wyvernsquig is the closest to done. The spots and horns on the back make it look like more than just a blob, but it still needs to be smoothed out.
The great cave squig looks awfully clamlike from the front, but I'm hoping to flesh out with some texture on the skin.
The giant squiggiant is big - check it out next to a regular squig. Rolls of fat are very hard to make look good, and I'm thinking that my attempts may end up looking more like ridges than fat, but again, at least it'll provide texture. Note the prehensile tongue. Since giants are prone to picking up things at inopportune times, I decided this one would need some way to do so...
The trollsquigs don't look nearly as funny with noses and lips. Something's not quite clicking here; maybe I just need bigger noses.

This weekend finally I will neither be working or travelling out of town, so there should be much that I can do. The new hopeful timeline: get everything modelled by the end of Saturday, prime and begin painting on Sunday. That still leaves 2 1/2 weeks for painting...

No more in-process photos for a while. I might post when the big guys get all the way modelled, but otherwise, I'm holding off until I've at least got basecoat plus inks on.

Changed the blog to allow annonymous comments, but still can't figure out how to make links pop up in a new screen rather than taking the user directly there. Too much to do...

Day 9

Well, I didn't slack yesterday; my camera batteries died on me. Really, though, two plus hours of putting spots on the wolfsquigs wasn't that photo-worthy in any case. Still, that bit is done now and I'm pretty much down to smoothing the green stuff, basing and priming. Given my time frame, I'm hoping to get these to a rough sort of evenness, and figure that the painting scheme will have to cover a lot of the flaws.

Much like the wolves, I decided that the boarsquigs had to lose the tails. I was pretty tempted to add big ol' ass-cheeks, but instead opted for a smooth continuation of the general ball shape.

The boar squigs are nearing completion as well, with only one lacking a full face, because I decided that one needed a tongue. I might need to go back and adapt a couple of wolves as well.

I also added lips to most of the models. It seems to add some character, and occasionally gave me a jowly look as well.

Tomorrow it's down to trimming the mold lines off the spiders and all of the various riders, and I hope to throw together a fast conversion of a Gorkamorka scrap prospector into a savage shaman. His unenviable task will be to use his mighty leadership 7 to keep the trollsquigs in line... Anyway, probably no new pics for a while until I make some progress on building the three big models.