Those crazy goliaths..

..What ever are they up to? Cadian plastics + marauders + big hair = goliaths. If I´ll ever manage to paint more than one, that´s a different question entirely.. 

A possible way forward

I am still looking for a decent sized project to help keep me sane through the long winter months. One possible idea is to work on my Nurgle daemons. This picture shows some of the collection - an Avatars of War herald, a very old painted Fenryll putrid horror and a pile of plastics. There's 15 assembled plaguebearers plus a complete box of 10 still on their sprue. In addition, I have 7 old school metal plaguebearers that I painted a few years back - these are on round bases and are pink, which may or may not be a viable starting point. I have a few other bits that I reckon I could add to this lot, I am pretty sure there are a few more metals lurking around the back of the cupboard somewhere, plus more non-daemon plastics that could be drafted in. At a minimum then there are 32 plaguebearers here, plus 2 rather portly heralds. With a bit of chopping and scrounging from other sources I reckon 2 units of 20 plus herald would be doable.

Here's a scale shot of the heralds and a minion. They are big chaps, there's no doubting who is boss here. The winged daemon I would make some changes to - probably remove the wings and some of the softer looking spikes. I would repaint him too, the dark green is a very poor base to add special effects such as gore and drool.

Hands up if you love Nurgle!

Grand Inquisitor conversion.. DONE!

A.k.a "walking traffic cone" :).

He´s more machine than man nowadays; who knows what lies under the hood? Orders are issued with a cold metallic voice, and his arm has suffered some damage revealing bionic upgrades...

 Got this puppy done, and I must say I do struggle a bit with them bright colors. All the red was glazed with red tamiya clear ink, giving than super vibrant shade and the gold metallics are JRN style, with purple ink and clear tamiya orange glazing. Base color is coat ´d arms "bright gold".

Group photo with his maniacal posse coming up soon..

Head issue

Here's pretty rough sketch of the forthcoming character for my Mercenary Group. The reason for why there ain't a real life miniature of this fella yet is I'm quite sure that somebody has a better idea for the head. long horse skull with meaningless wiring just doesn't work well, and I'm here to get inspiration from you guys. Also, the second reason for the lack of figurines is I had a surgery last week and I'm slowly recovering. I'm able to get known to my sofa better and better, but I'm not able to sit yet. Phew.

Check this Gladiator out:

The idea behind this character is to represent a gladiator who has seen his best days. His Lower body is amputated, and now he drags his remains in a mine cart. Yes, I know the dimensions here are goofy, but hey, what the heck. I decided to use the mine cart form Battle of Skullpass and upper body of a Gorger. Fits well. BUT THE HEAD!

I see red people....

The missing link,the last member to this inquisitorial posse getting some paint thrown at it. HAH! you didn´t expect the RED inquisition.. What´s that sound? It´s a sudden dose of inspiration hitting old fogey like  a thousand volts.. :)

Looking for some....

.....of this. A nice big spoonful would go down a treat just now.

Now that the long summer days are slowly dissolving into a distant haze (for the four northerners anyway), I feel like I should unveil some grand master plan, some amazing project to look forward to. The problem is, I don't know what to do next.

It's not like I don't have things I could be doing. I have piles of unpainted figures crying for attention. For warhammer, I have some recently acquired plaguebearers, marauders and skeletons from years ago, semi-painted trolls and dwarfs, almost built  chaos knights, and a vampire and fell bats primed just a couple of weeks ago. I have a shit load of Studio McVey Sedition Wars stuff from the kickstarter - a new parcel arrived just this weekend, I have barely looked at it. I have a small selection of Darklands figures that are still in the box, one is part-painted and looking for love. And I have a delivery of Red Box dwarfs that should turn up sometime soon. And yet, none of these appeal at the moment.

What are you guys going to do over the next few months? Maybe your ideas will feed me the inspiration I desperately need.

Back in the game

I was invited to join, and did so with pleasure! It´s great to be among a set of painters of this caliber, and I feel even more motivated to finish off some old projects and start some new ones.

Most know me from the warhammer forum and warseer as just plain old "Mika", so I decided to keep the same handle here. No, i´m not the gay singer, though..

As far as my history, I have 20+ years of painting experience under my belt, and around 10 of those years I have focused mostly on a darker, more realistic type of painting, often described as "dark & grim". For me, the inspiration for color schemes has always been in real life, and I like my paintjobs to have some sort of connection to, or a sense of reality.

As far as the hobby scene goes, I have always been a GW mini painter. Not too thrilled about the direction the company is taking at the moment, so I predict my focus will be more in older minis and conversions for the time being. I would definitely like to do something for both necromunda and mordheim, as I seem to enjoy those projects the most.

I hope this inspires the co-bloggers to get some painting or converting done as well! I hate to repost stuff, but here´s my latest finished piece, dubbed as the shotgun preacher;

5th member of the Crew

Dear followers of Brushes United: 

I'm happy to inform there's a newcomer in our group ready to take over the earth with the original grime and eerie madness. United we stand taller. (At the moment he shall remain anonymous until he's ready...)


Please welcome our "new" face - and surprise yourselves with awe, wonder and fear.

Coming soon!

BA Commission work

Phew! Just finished a set of blood angels and now they're ready to be sent back home for the client. This commission took me pretty long time, and it delayed time after time, but my client was very supportive and I thank him for the patience. The painting itself didn't take too many hours, but I had problems with scheduling my actual work and commissions jobs.

But, now were here and it's time to dig out the next commission army...

I made a battle worn look to the armor - even it's plain red, it's pretty organic looking overall. By using acrylic inks I got this funny effect. Acrylic inks stick quite badly over white basecoat, and it can be rubbed away with another paint. This time I used clear orange to rub the acrylic ink away.. So the whiter/lighter parts of the armor is rubbed clear orange ;)  

Crash boom bang.

Aeon Blacksmith

The former grandmaster of astral magic, the planetary blacksmith and the creator of subspace timezones and forbidden corners of the red planet - nowadays a poor traveler with zero income and only cheap tricks in his sleeve to entertain his travelling company (you see, for a certain reason in this particular time and place this sort of scholars of magic are relatively poor, because the amount of tricks and godly miracles depends on the insides of your wallet - don't ask me why) Still, even he's a poor chap and needs to do the sweaty work for the merchant, he's able to teleport and divide zero by two, not a big deal.

The psi-energy surrounding him is pretty massive and causes horrible migrenia to everybody. The only one who haven't been complaining about brain issues is muscle fort lurking behind the leaders - and the reason for not having deadly ache is probably he doesn't have the organ which could be hurt by the wave of psi-energy. There's a traffic light-like collection of eyes in his head, but truly the only seeing eye is his hand - this eye sees trough dimensions and time, as well as the walls of private rooms. 

Allright; here's something I invented:
I painted this dress with acrylic inks and drawing inks. I made a basecoat of Daler&Rowney FW flame red acrylic ink. The awesome thing here is, that acrylic ink covers with one coat and you can make it pretty rough. Then I made another coat with Liquitex Naphtol Crimson ink. After this I got experimental...

I took my W&N orange ink which I had kept open the past weeks, and started to make a coat over the previous inks. I had a brush which had pretty hard bristles, so my brush tore off the previous inks. But because I had orange ink in my bristles, the brush stated to make 'orange damage' to the figure instead of just revealing the white basecoat. It's like drybrushing with ink + making damage to the previous paint layers... Reverse drybrushing? 

The golden parts were made with W&N gold ink, which is liquid gold leaf and irritating as hell to handle and impossible to photograph.