Setting up the mood and preparing

A walk in the woods leads me usually to the older, nearly abandoned graveyard in my town. It's totally one of the places that gives you the right mood to start reading or painting. Let's have a look:

I'm not that good photographer that I could freeze the moment as it was then, but these pictures I take from the wilderness reminds me of certain values I should have. If the walls inside start to look too familiar and the anxiety is creeping in, open the door and take a deep breath outside. You never know where the road might lead you.... Most of the times it leads me back to my Mocca Master! Coffee! The fuel for doing nothing important even faster!
Uh, yeah, this cemetery picture I took gave me the idea for the Necromancer who is mystically called Slemmy.
 
For me preparing miniatures is also one of the 'artsy' side of the hobby, and I need to have something to fuel creativity. The best ingredients for preparing are of course coffee (Black!) and few records. Also, the workspace must have some sort of zen-feeling and the right chi flowing trough it or I end up cutting my nails or staring the walls.

I've tried to work with the smaller miniatures I own, but somehow this Skrag the Slaughterer of the Ogre tribe wanted to be prepared... Damn. He's a heavy guy with irritating casting failures. I needed to throw the metal base off from the projects, because this dude was impossible to assemble on the scenery base. The holes didn't match, and the chain connecting the cauldron and Mr. Skrag was just pain to glue to it's place. Oh well! Farewell idiotic scenery base!

I see Mr.Tom Waits photobombed these pics. He's rising from the unholy pot of massacre remains.

I gave the cauldron's victim a pair of legs. This will be nasty.

Not at it's cleanest, but there's always some sort of mess going on

Even my table is big enough to serve meal for 8 persons, It's usually full of junk I accidently gather to it. And messyness lowers my motivation to do the cleaning, so that's the reason why I do miniatures slowly. First world problems by TurskanPerkeet. If the preparation have given me good chills, it's even more fun to start paintng. And when the table is clean...

But as some wise man said - messy work table tells only it's owners bursting ideas. It would be scary to have 100% clean table, because then I know I'm losing creative mood. Mess is good, but also clean is good. Ying and Yang baby!

All hail Coffee!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUS_sjVaRjU

Halloween countdown pt.2

Okay folks. Few months ago I visited a wargames store in Joensuu, Finland, and I decided to buy those new GW paints. I only bought 2 of them and I felt embarassed because my shoppings were so tiny (finnish mentalitet I guess?). So, I also bought this Vampire Counts Necromancer which indeed is a cool mini, even there's not that much detailing or muscles or spikes or any other annoying things - only the huncbacked black magic expert.

Two days ago I raided my bitz box and found some of the Giant kit's parts, for example the running peasant and that giant's fist holding another peasant. I chopped the excess away and look at that, here we have some zombified peasants! Jolly Good!
 

 As you can see, the corpses aren't rotten yet. Fresh victims of the plague or whatever!
 Eventually I found some use for the tiny mice from the Hellpit Abomination box. Boy they are small critters....

I did this piece in the atmosphere of waiting Halloween to come, and that's why I used retro colours and tried to make this scene a bit funny too. The red eyed mice... Maybe they are the ones who are using black magic there and the hunchback freak who likes skulls was just walking buy and saw this resurrection? Who knows.

I'm lucky to have this size of candle holders - a bigger round base fits there almost perfectly. 

Halloween countdown

In our country Halloween celebrations ain't that big deal, but it's definitely getting bigger every year; Influences around the globe are finding their way to our culture - American geekyness about plastic skulls and papier mache corpses (which I find fascinating) have also landed to finnish geeks storages. Including me... Me and my friend have been crafting a bunch of Halloween prop to our party that is held at the beginning of November. In the past times this All Hallows Eve day/week has been a major part of the traditional finnish beliefs. Here All Hallows Eve was more about harvesting and getting ready to cold winter, as it was everywhere before inventing plastic skulls...

Last year's Scarecrow that we made

One of the eeriest parts in my opinion about the dead worshipping was to serve dinner to your dead relatives - people served normal dinner to the dining table (I assume that the dinner consisted of porridge and dark bread) and closed the doors so the dead had a moment in peace to enjoy the harvesting meal. Also getting drunk, shouting, acting like lunatics, breaking things and general chaos was a part of frightening the spirits and not welcoming death to your home!

So, I'm getting ready to Halloween and trying to keep up the spirit of this wonderful celebration by doing some photo-researching about the atmosphere what makes this time of Harvesting scary to us.
Also I will take few shots of the minitures I've finished lately - just to keep this blog alive and trying to include Warhammer into the spirit of Halloween. Yeah!

Last year's Scarecrow that we BURNT

Cat Ganondorf (WIP)

Alright folks, here's a quick picture collab of a Ral Partha miniature I own. I don't know wich race this represents, or the name of the miniature. But, the mini is cool as heck and I wish I could get more of these fantastic sculpts someday.

I think I'll give him a showcase-base (IT WOULD BE MY FIRST COOL BASE) and then finish his legs and maybe give another tattoo/warpaint to him somewhere. I'm not sure about the colour of the sash he has under his belly. Maybe there'll be some changes before I call this a finished piece.

Tutorial (well, kind of)

Well, I'm been asked to make a tutorial of miniature painting and especially about the advances of white basecoat, so here's one. Enjoy and feel free to give me further advice how to make these tutorials better!

Let's paint another santa's little helper with blood and stuff.

Step 1: White basecoat over the miniature.

 Step 2: Tanned flesh over randomly picked areas



Step 3: Charadon Granite, Snakebite Leather and Tamiya clear orange and W&N nut brown with water and a drop of dish washing soap.



(Here's a picture of my palette after that mixture - with a little bit of black added for the next mix)


Step 4: The same mix again with a bit of bloodletter included.


Step 5: Again; the same paint mix as before with added Blood letter shade! Added to areas wich looked like in need of reddish tint! In this step it's important to build up gradient with the fles mix as used before. Few light coats does the job.



Step 6: The previous mix with a little bit of added black.... Added to the places I have no idea. The picture tells more. The poxes are painted with black and the eye got a orange glow from Tamiya clear orange over white. Poxes are highlighted with charadon granite. Highlighted some of the muscles with a mixture bleached bone and ceramite white.



Step 7: Finished. Tamiya clear red with black added to the wounds and the previous flesh mix added to deepen the skin tone if needed. The tone is mixed again with a tint of black, and the paint is added to the deepest parts of the minitaure (Under muscles and so on). I also used Clear yellow to pick out some wounds, and made a mixture of Tamiya brown and Tamiya clear red and black to make realistic looking feces. The mix is added between the *cheeks.



And that's about it. As you can see, I use the same mixture of already used mixed and just add something more everytime I wan't to make new tones to the miniature. Using wet palette makes this thing possible and saves your paints and helps to keep the tones earthy!


-Turska

Santa's little helper

Well, here's one of my Germany souvenirs painted. It was interesting to see if I had forgotten how to use paints anymore. White basecoat, green, brown and red washes and a little bit of blood. Few minimal highlights and that's it. Darn I like this hobby!

Next I'll start AGAIN with chaos dwarfs or plague boss (for which I have a marvelous idea!)

Feel free to comment and rant :)

Back from the dead

Okay fellas, I moved back to my home after a three months perioid spent in Germany, and it's nice to see that things in the miniature world have taken huge leaps to the direction of awesomeness. Forge World has released the new Bull Centaurs for Chaos Dwarfs,  GW made new daemons and other things chaos that really pleases me and gives me new hobby motivation! To be honest, I visited the local wargames store quite often to see if there's any new releases, and the new daemons were spectacular in my opinion, and I bought me little souvenirs from Germany... Not beer pints or any other local things of coolness but plastic soldiers:

I have no idea what I'm going to do with the AOW dwarfs, because for me it was only interesting to see the differences between GW's boxed sets and AOW- sets. I think that the AOW Dwarfs' sculpts are phenomenal, but the casting is a bit poor when compared to the newer GW-sets - There's not so many mold lines in the new GW's plastics, but the AOW castings have the same problem what GW had like 7 years ago. Mold lines, mold lines, mold lines in horrible places what you can never scrape totally off.... Argh.

But I think that these dwarfs will join the evergrowing gang of mutants or evil dwarfs, who knows. People of internet have made cool conversions with the AOW Dwarfs and I assume that next I'll fetch my knife and file and start working with them - Let's see what happens.

Also, it's interesting to see if I can paint anymore!

Mindless purchasing - CD edition

Well, after this Germany trip I will totally reward myself with this fella. I'm 100% sure about it. Really; thinking about ordering this piece of resin makes me a little too excited to assemble and paint this piece before finishing Chaos Dwarf infantry that I have, so this must be stored well to my secret collection of unstarted miniatures.

My full-metal Chaos Dwarf army consists of the following ingredients:

24 Chaos dwarf warriors (painted? no? yes? stripped again?)
18 Chaos Dwarf Blunderbussers
20 Sneaky Gits
6 Bull centaurs
1 Sorcerer on Lammassu
1 Lord on Bull taurus (painted!)
2 Heroes
Earth Shaker+crew
Rocket Launcher+crew (Halfway painted!)

At this point my Chaos Dwarf collection is large enough to keep me busy a long time, but here in my secondary apartment I can't do anything to get this project going on - except that in a local hobby store they also have AOW plastic Dwarf Berserkers which have given me a good idea of converting some slaves to the army. Hobgoblins would be cool to own (I have 20 Sneaky Gits with identical poses - oh gosh) but I'm sure that I'd need to spent a fortune to get a playable unit of those guys. The other thing I've decided to order are these three daemonsmiths. I already have few characters of the old range, but I think that these might fit to a special group I'm planning to build.

And how about the new Bull Centaurs? The old ones are tiny compared to them... but that's the policy nowadays - bigger is better. I must agree.

Where am I?

Hullo friends!

The reason for why these blogs of mine haven't been progressing lately is that I moved to Germany for three months (studies abroad) and I'll be moving back to lovely Finland at the end of August. That last week before I moved was the rushiest days of my life, and I was not able to update here NO MINIS FROM 'TurskanPerkeet' FOR THREE MONTHS 'SOB' (reason: hysterical arrangement and endless paperwork). Here I don't have access to internet so often, so this is the first time when I have a little time to write an update here.

I'd move here if it was in Finland...

Home ;_;

I have not any of my hobby-equipment with me here, so the only things I'm able to do here in Germany is to drool the Avatars of War minis at the local hobby store... Maybe I'll take few champions with me. I've also decided that when I come back from here I will buy myself something big made out of resin - with wings and attitude and a rider with tall hat.

Germany is a nice country for it's almost free-like beer from the stores, and people here are maybe the friendliest I've ever met. But as I have grown up in a country where summer is the time when people actually start to live their lives - swimming in the forest lakes, sitting in front of campfires trough the ever light nights, catching trolls in the forest and listening to the sound of the wind- it's hard to me to see that here the nights are cold and dark, there's only one lake and I must live in the city centre... It's nice but different.There's no place like home!

Spirit of the water - a good old friend of mine from the fountain near my home

When I get back to Home, I'll build a fortress out of sofa pillows and chairs, and just paint miniatures inside my citadel until my bones break and winter comes. 

The inner burning flame!!!

I've realized that miniature painting is something that gives me energy - like if you listen a good record or draw a picture or enjoy a horror movie - and three months break is a long time for me ;) I start to feel typical kind of anxiety if I can't just do my own thing, and I've seen that painting miniatures is one of those things.
But, If you have time please feel welcome to visit me here in Germany. I live in City of Hof, and I think there's many nice places to sit down and talk about miniatures or beer drinking.

See ya at the end of August!

Desert planet force

It's been quite a rush last couple of weeks - there's been a lot of things to take care of and I have had no time to sit behind my table and relax with miniature painting. Two days ago my month long summer vacation started and I celebrated the situation with mindless purchasing. I saw very interesting documentary about egyptians and sphinx building, and somehow I got inspirated about Necrons and Metroid games' Chozo ruins colours.

Necrons have always been my favourite race in the 40K universe, don't know why, and desert themed living metal soldiers gave my brain a nice kick to start something unique with the miniatures. GW studio's paint jobs with Necrons are tarher nice but they remind me too much about Matrix. Here's a test (and most likely the last) Necron army piece I will ever have. What a blast to paint but dreadful to assemble! Also I experimented with strippling - in this case foam - and what I see is that the technique suits 40K dudes quite well.

I think that the twin linked tesla coil will be added later to the bottom of the vehicle. There's also few things that I need to fix or finish before I call this all done.

What do you think?