March Monthly Painting Wrap Up

It’s everyone’s favorite day of the month! Where I tell you how I spent my time.

I would say I spent most of March not painting. But not for lack of wanting. A fair amount of that was because of travel and medical procedure recovery. As my wife put it, March is always our busiest month.

But on the plus side, I finally finished the two Forgeworld models that have been haunting me for months. The trick, it turns out, was to stop trying to batch paint two such wildy different models and instead treat them as individual projects. That plus I started (or restarted) a number of other models on my table to break up the Blood Bowl painting. Make myself paint something on the Blood Bowl minis first, then I could throw a few coats on a Tau Breacher or Necromunda miniature for funsies.

The first one I finished was the Loony (though I keep wanting to spell it Loonie, thanks Canada). Of those first two, this was probably the more fun, simply because it’s so ridiculous. Early on I decided I wanted to give the specialist positionals a pop of color (inspiried by the Ooligan, below) and knew the Loony’s big red nose was perfect for that. I went into the model thinking the nose was part of the mask, which is why I made it so clownish, but once I realized it’s supposed to be the Goblin’s actual nose, I had already committed and thought it looked better red anyway.

Desmond Black & Dekker, the Loony.

He’s number one in my heart (that’s a lie).

I immediately turned around and finished the Ooligan, which is an interesting idea but not my favorite Skablin sculpt. I’m not sure I can say it’s my least favorite yet, but it’s down there. One upside is the mohawk, which was the inspiriation for the red spot of color on these specialists. As a Not-English Person, I vaguely understand what the “tool” is the Ooligan is wielding, but only in a “it’s some kind of sports noisemaker and I saw it once on The IT Crowd” sort of way. This is also the model I felt was the most amorphous in its sculpting, chalking that up to the Forgeworld process/style.

Gitz Stefani, the Ooligan.

With those two albatrosses off my neck, I could finally spread out and paint something fun. You guessed it, a Tau Drone!

I painted this one up quickly because I wanted to test a new pin-washing process, as the two Tau Breachers on my desk were nearing completion (after countless single paint layers between Blood Bowl models) and while I know Tamiya Panel Liner is the gold standard for this kind of thing, I just don’t care for using it in this capacity. It definitely does what it says on the tin, and over some gloss varnish it flows in the lines wonderfully. But there’s just something about it - I always find I have to do a ton of cleanup afterwards, seperate brushes, and the (possibly incorrect) warnings about using it on acrylic paints causing damage give me “the ick” as the kids say. So I painted up this drone, hit it with some gloss varnish, and tried using a process with thinned Citadel’s Warhammer’s Black Templar contrast paint. All things considered, it worked great. It felt like there was less cleanup involved (or I’ve just gotten better at that kind of steady-hand painting) and it looks the same as the Tamiya.

On a side note, I don’t know why the Tau Drones get such a bad rap. They’re my favorite Tau models to paint (so far) - I feel like you can really give them personality and go wild with the designs. No two (of my drones) are alike.

But really, the Loony and Ooligan paved the way for me to paint the Fanatic, which was probably my (current) favorite Blood Bowl Skablins model to paint. For whatever reason, I didn’t feel like it suffered from the same “Forgeworld Mush” problem the others did. Everything felt explicit and well-defined. Plus, I was real excited to work on it once I realized I could turn the ball & chain … chain into a mid-2000’s Hot Topic Emo style Studded Belt (I definitely had a belt like that, but it was hot pink studs instead). I would say easily the majority of the painting time was spent on the chain, blocking out each two-chain-piece section of color (and thank god I didn’t decide to do every other, that would have been too busy to look at).

Turns out, being excited about something you’re going to paint makes you want to paint it more often. Who knew.

Five Iron Frenzy, Skablin Fanatic.

And lastly, but not leastly, a real hard pivot at the end of the month. Circling around on the Mastodon is the #fedipaint challenge, asking participants to paint something using only the Zorn palette. Good old Anders Zorn, he could only see four colors: ochre, vermilion, black, and white.

In yet another attempt of “painting things already on my painting desk in order to clear them off” I grabbed a Skaven Grey Seer from the Skavenblight box set. I personally don’t care for this Grey Seer sculpt (I prefer the older ones) which is why I wanted to use it for thise challenge: I’m probably never going to field this specific model, and it’s something I’m famililar with already from a “this is how it should look” sort of way.

I ended up painting it twice, essentially. I started with paints I had on hand - Pro Acryl Titanium White, Citadel Warhammer Abbadon Black, Tau Light Ochre, and Evil Sunz Scarlet. For the most part the colors were fine and were working, but I was having some consistency issues. My Tau Light Ochre was starting to congeal, which was giving the end result a grainy texture which was bad. The other issue was since the Citadel Warhammer paints are pot based, mixing colors with any consistency was impossible. (Oh and using a wet pallette was also a bad idea, with how much mixing I needed, I ended up using the whole sheet on one color mixture.) I hit the store, got some army Painter Fanatics Mattte Black, Angelic Red, and Demigod Flames as replacements and started anew on the model.

Having never taken a painting or art class, there was definitely some fumbling as I was trying to mix colors. “Okay, I want it more red, if I add this, no that’s just another brown-grey.” But it was a good learning experience and I would be interested in trying it again. The range you can hit is surprising with only four paints (pink flesh and grey and bone and cheese orange!) and it’s also my first time with any kind of non-metalic metal (the orange bronze and grey metal armor). For transparency, I did give the whole model a real thin black and ochre oil wash just to hit some recesses and tie it all together.

Since I finished the “unit” (of one model), I gave it a little proper photoshoot. I plan on doing this with the Blood Bowl team once I get them finished too. And a traditional sizzle reel to go with it:

As I mentioned I did start a handful of models but didn’t finish anything else for the month. Two Tau Breachers and two Delaque Gangers are on the paint stands in various levels of finnishment. The Blood Bowl minis will still probably be my priority over those.

Numbers-wise, I started 7 models in March, finished 5 (2 carrying over from January). The chart takes a dive, going from 11 for two months down to 5, but I also didn’t paint any “quick, tiny shit” this month like I have with scatter terrain features and things in the past. The prices of the specialist Skablins really kept the painted Retail Value up though, just edging out Feb with the $10 drone pushing the value to $61 (I have no idea what kit the drone came from so I’m using the GW Tactical Drone kit value).

A third of the way through the year and I’ve finished 27 models and painted almost $140 worth of retail kit. (Almost $100 of just Blood Bowl!) I’ve also stuck to my resolution and have bought nothing so far this year. Still a long way to go though.

Knocking out 3 specialist Skablins this month really makes me think I might be able to finish the team next month (aside from a second troll I haven’t even taken out of the packaging yet). Goals, I suppose.

If you want to get ahold of me, you can now reach me at floppyparts@proton.me. Send me whatever you want.