Jake's (DroidWorkshop) WIPs

[droidworkshop]

@Hairster: that's definitely what I'd like to try with this one, I've seen some great dwarf skin examples that I'm going to try my best to replicate! It seems dilution is the key, I think I've just got to make sure I don't overload the brush to keep it from pooling

@EndlessAnagrams: he's a really characterful sculpt isn't he? When I was looking for what to work on next, I couldn't resist giving him a go

About to head over to my painting desk for the evening to move that dwarf along

As an aside, the zombie is now up for rating in the gallery if people would be so kind: http://www.coolminiornot.com/419094

 

[droidworkshop]

Quick update as I've had a busy day (despite being on holiday from work)

Added further highlights to the face (perhaps covered too much of previous layers highlights?). He looks like he may have borrowed some makeup and caked it on!

View attachment 61326

Also started a basecoat and overall wash of the beard and hair. I did this because I was concerned about the contrast with the dwarf skin.

View attachment 61327


I tried taking this picture with the camera in manual mode, and unfortunately I've made it a little blurry, but it'll have to do for now as I need to go to bed.

Cheers for looking folks

 

[Chaotic Creations]

That dwarf is looking pretty cool...

 

[Torn blue sky]

Funny story, I rediscovered this exact mini the other day along with the standard bearer and was considering doing it for the lols and variation! So fr so good, the skintones are working out well, the contrast with the hair/beard and skin is a non issue it works fine. Remember you can always work in darker shades if you think it's too light so no dramas there. Certainly shaping up and I can't see any problems with the colour choice.

 

[JesusRanchal]

View attachment 61079

I love what you have done with this boy, man. You have reasons to feel motivated .

 

[droidworkshop]

@Chaotic Creations: cheers mate, I'm having a lot of fun painting this one
@Torn Blue Sky: cheers, it's funny you've dug out this guy too. I defo recommend slapping some paint on him!
@JesusRanchal: thanks! I do feel like I'm making progress

I received a package this weekend of a new daylight lamp specifically to help paint in the evenings given its getting darker, and the clocks have gone back this weekend meaning it'll be even darker going forward over here.

I did a bit more work on the dwarf today, and played around with some of my camera settings to try and get better pictures, as I found the settings I was using made things look a little flat.

Most of today's work was on the hair, which was a bit tricky, so I used a mixture of drybrushing and layering for highlights, whilst tried glazing on shadows to add some tonal variation, which I'm pretty happy with.

I messed around with the shadows on the face where it felt the shadows were a little too heavy, glazed the nose with a tint of red, and stuck in his eyes.

Finally made a a start on one of his arms with the same highlight colours as the face, I still need to build up the shadows so there's still work to do.

On to the pics:
View attachment 61346

View attachment 61347

View attachment 61348

View attachment 61349

Cheers folks!

 

[Coyotebreaks]

its looking great, loads of character.

 

[Torn blue sky]

Can certainly see the evolution now, like I said hair colour choice is a non issue turned out nicely. The way you've done it is generally the best way too. People rend to think "oh no...hair" and break out a drybrush where painting it as you would anything else and then gently picking out highlights is a much more effective way of doing it...Not to mention far better looking. Skintones are coming along nicely too, starting to look full of that proper dwarfy character!

 

[droidworkshop]

@Coyotebreaks: cheers I'm really quite happy with how this ones progressing

@Torn Blue Sky: cheers, and yeah completely agree with you on approaching the hair. I think when I first looked at it the strands were so thin I wasn't too sure if I'd be able to put the paint where I wanted it, but "if you don't give it a go, you'll never know"

Made a little more progress this evening, mainly working on the other arm and hand, and starting the boots and what I can only describe as "beard clasps" but in truth I don't know what to call them!

Just a front facing picture for tonight, I've put others up on my site, but the evenings run away from me so this is going to be short and sweet
View attachment 61378

I'm beginning to feel the start of "the fear" on this one; the point where I'm happy with what I've done so far, and I'm starting to think about how annoying it would be to mess the remainder up - it's funny how the feeling creeps up, but it always does at some point, I'm sure I'm not alone with this particular phenomenon! I think I'm getting better at pushing past it though so it doesn't hold me back!

Its worth me saying thanks to everyone who's commenting on this thread - it's really helping with keeping me motivated

 

[Chaotic Creations]

This is really starting to look great, excellent placement of highlights on the hair and beard, really draws attention to the face... he,s got a real angry sort of feel to him !!! Can’t wait to see what you do with those axes...
Haha the fear of messing up, I get that every time I load paint on a brush

 

[KruleBear]

Definately looking good. And with the look of the effort so far, I don't think you could screw it up. So keep charging forward.

 

[droidworkshop]

@Chaotic Creations: Thanks for the comments. Angry is definitely the look I was going for - the sculpt of the face just screams it doesn't it! It's been really great painting a miniature with a characterful face, the only models I've painted this decade have been the ones on this thread (both small and rather uninteresting faces), and a few Orks from 2013 that although have interesting faces, was from a time when I was just trying to work out if I wanted to try this painting stuff again! I guess the lesson I've learned is to paint those models that pique my interest.

@KruleBear: Ta - I'm pretty sure I can figure out a way to still screw this one up hahaha! I am intending on doing blue and white striped trousers which is something I've never tried before, so I expect if anything is going to get messed up, it's likely to be that, so I need to hold my nerve and go for it! Oh well, have to try these things don't you.

Tonight's update is going to have to be a quick one, and it's slow progress I'm afraid. First set of rough highlights on the boots (I need to smooth these out a fair bit yet), and just a little work on the bracelets on either arm. I've gone for a leather look on one (same colour choices as the boots and pouches to tie them together), and on the other side I'm using the gold again for one, and bringing in a blue for the other as a strong contrasting colour to the orange beard and ruddy flesh tone. I'm quite pleased with the blue one. I'm probably going to use the same blue for the stripes on the trousers (if I don't wuss out). A couple of extra shadows have been added to the arms and back, but nothing to obvious, just little bits here and there to add contrast and depth, but that's about it.

I haven't decided what to do with the axes yet. Maybe wooden handles with metallic metal axe heads and gold details? Maybe a glowing rune on the right hand axe? Suggestions welcome, that way I can blame you all if I try it and it looks cack :curl-lip:

Piccy:
View attachment 61397

If I get the chance later on this evening, I'll add back and side views to a post on my website. There's not a great deal of difference with previous pictures, so won't upload them here too at this stage.

Cheers

 

[droidworkshop]

It's been a bit of a gash week for hobbying for me, work has been hectic, and there's been a bunch of other things that have got in the way of getting paint on mini.

all I've really done is make a start on doing some wood effect on one of the axe hilts, and started adding some white to the trousers.

Earlier in the week I also did a little work on another model I have sat on my desk (a palm sized , small Bandai Star Wars X-Wing - the black one). I was doing this at the same time as the Dwarf slayer just for some variation. It's too messy to take any photos yet, but hopefully I'll manage a bit more on this in the next few days and have something to show for a change.

Unfortunately with little time available to me, the biggest thing to suffer has been my photo taking - I think I can take a passable WIP photo in the week with no natural light, but seemingly at the weekend when it's brighter, I just can't get the settings right.

Still I may as well upload them, but I doubt anyone will be able to see much progress on them!

Front view first:

View attachment 61481

You can see I've just started adding some wood grain to the left axe haft. This is the first time I've tried something like this, I think it's started "OK", but I'm not entirely happy so far, but it early doors. I think the trick will be taking my time with thinned paints and multiple layers and a very steady hand, but it's a start and something new which I think is important if I want to get better.

I need to add some highlights to this, then I'm going to glaze it down with a few washes to get a kind of varnished wood look. That's the plan anyway.

Rear:
View attachment 61482

On on the backside, you might be able to discern some progress on the trousers. As I used the airbrush and applyed a black-grey-white zenithal primer, it probably doesn't look to different, but I promise I did actually add some grey and white to them!

I don't recall ever having painted white on a model before, so this is something very new to me. I'm thinking the grey and white doesn't quite cut it for me, so I may look at mixing some browns to the white for a few more subtle shadows instead. I'm not quite sure yet.

I may get a little time this evening to paint some more, but if not I'm planning to push on with some more progress on Sunday morning.

EDIT:
I'm thinking of getting something like this to get more consistent photos and take my lack of photography skills out of the equation:
View attachment 61483
I've see one on Amazon, and although I don't really have any space for it, if it makes taking pictures easier / better would anyone recommend something like this?



Cheers folks

 

[KruleBear]

I bought one of those and don't hardly ever use it as it takes up a lot of space and i didn't like the lights. I haven't taken any carefull picts in a while, but I had started using three lights. Daylight flourescent bulbs inserted in cheap clamp on lights from Walmart (the kind with aluminum reflectors. I then bought cloth covers to go iver them and difuse the light. All three lamps placed ahead of the mini One on each side and the other from the front and slightly above the camera. Seems to work fine and takes up less space than the booth set up.

 

[droidworkshop]

Ah that was my concern. Although my office / hobby room has two desks, one has my computer, and the painting desk is already pretty cramped. At the moment, I'm using the airbrush spray booth for taking photos and as you can its to doing my any favours.

Maybe a couple of daylight lamps would be better investment

 

[Coyotebreaks]

he's coming on well I reckon, the wood doesn't look too bad from here. compared to the one you vet done, adds some nice variation.

 

[droidworkshop]

@Coyotebreaks: I think I'm going to have to a fair few more layers on the wood effect to get it the way I want it - I've probably made the lines a lot thicker than I need in order to sell the effect properly, but it's a start.

Some work today on the axe haft. Photographs are a little better today. This time I glazed down what I'd done so far, and then applied another set of highlights to the grain.
View attachment 61496

Also from the side:
View attachment 61497

And finally from the back:
View attachment 61498

I think on the back side the wood effect looks better. Probably thinner lines are helping. I think I may go back in and mix a few other varying tones of the brown I'm using and add further thinner layers over the top, and maybe this will make it look a bit more natural.

Also did a bit of work on the white on the trousers today as well. I'm still thinking I need to add some colour to the help with the shadows rather than leaving the black form the undercoat, the contrast is a bit much and I don't think t looks quite right, but it's OK for the time being.

I nearly started on the axe heads too today as I had the metal open for working on a X-Wing model, but in the end decided not to push on with that until the axes hafts are done. I did take a photo of the x-wing, but the paint job is still very rough (and the model somehow has got quite dusty which shows up heavily on photos), so I didn't want to scar people for life by showing it!

Finally, just something else that I started some work on:
View attachment 61499

This is more an exercise to practice airbrush affects more than anything else. It was looking OK until I slapped a wash on the model to try and glaze down the transitions - in the end it made things worse, particularly on the shin armour haha. As there's so much flat space on Space Marines, I think I'm going to find this quite tricky to use my normal approach with shading, so I'm not quite sure how to deal with it yet. I have a LOT of Space Marine models in my stash however, which means that I'm going to have to paint them some day!

I've kind of got the urge to build an entire Space Marine Battle Company for display in my hobby room, so I'm looking for a scheme where I can use the airbrush heavily to but down basecoats, and then production line details. The colour scheme I'm going for is kind of a Marvel "Iron Man" theme, which is why the little belt button thing is bright blue. This means I'll have to paint some yellow, which I know is a pretty difficult colour to get right. I think I'll paint up one tactical squad in this scheme, see how it looks and then make a decision on whether to tweak it and then maybe start on picking up squads for the Battle Company.

 

[clarke]

Love the Dwarf, skin tones look neat and blend nicely with hair. I have a couple of these older models around as well and may have a go at painting.

 

[Chaotic Creations]

Coming along very nice, I love the blue rope on the arm, gives it a good pop

 

[Lone Lemming]

Hi,

regarding the photo booth, I received one for one of the xmas, but I did not like the lamps.

The booth is fine, however, I used to take photo on a sunny day in shadow, and it helps to dissipate the lights.

Your dorf is amazing, too, love the oldschool shading on it. Maybe you can spend some time on the eyes, to make them round and even.