Ghostly ship sighted on horizon

Just finished the Shadewraith.  Love this ship and enjoyed painting it.  Very simple process - grey base, green wash, grey highlight - couldn't be easier, and the airbrush made the basecoating even easier.

Ahoy!

The Wizard has moved in

As soon as the first rumours of Skullvane Manse appeared I knew I wanted one.  It’s a fantastic looking item and looked like a great addition to the tabletop.  Ordered mine as soon as it was available on the Games Workshop site.  It arrived a while back and I immediately set about assembling it.  The kit itself is massive, but offers little in the way of customisation out of the box as it is mainly made up of several large pieces that just fit together.  I say fit, but even with lots of glue and hard work the fit is still quite poor and results in a number of large gaps.

After the application of some greenstuff (I need to practice with this stuff as it is currently difficult for me to use) I undercoated it and put it to one side.  My intention was to follow the painting guide in the December ‘11 issue of White Dwarf but the first step suggested spraying it with Charadon Granite.  I’d been contemplating buying an airbrush for a while now but thought this would be a good excuse to buy one and use it.  The choices, however, were vast and being a complete beginner I had no idea what to look out for.  I did some reading up on finally decided on a model that was on ebay.  A few days later I had it in my hands

Good or Bad?  Who knows? I love it though!

It was time to give it a try.  I thinned some Charadon Granite, got the manse out and got down to it.  Wow – wish Ihad bought one sooner – what a great way to quickly paint.  If I’d done this with a brush it would have taken me ages, but in no time I had a thin even coat on the entire model – I’m converted!

Anyhow, with the main basecoat on I could get down to the rest of the paint job.  Didn’t take too long – completed the entire thing over two sessions and I’m happy with the results.  Not as stunning as the version in the marketing materials (pfft! my paint jobs never are!) but looks good.

A worthy lair for any astromancer

Plan to get the airbrush out again this weekend and use it for my Dreadfleet Shadewraith ship.

As you can probably tell, I’ve finally cleaned the camera lens!

Photographing the little beasties

One thing my new blog has highlighted is just how rubbish my photographs are.  So I've been playing with some new techniques to see if I can improve my pictures.

Progress so far:

Existing image.  Need to improve on this.

First attempt. Too dark!

Light source moved closer. More like it

Still not brilliant but I feel I'm getting closer to where I want to be.  The above was with a very makeshift light box, a single light source and a cheapo pocket camera.  The first thing to notice is that it really shows up my amateur paint job!  That aside, I'm not happy with the way the top part of the figure is out of focus.  I'm led to believe this is due to a shop F-Stop on the camera.  Unfortunately my cheapo camera doesn't have the ability to change that.

At the weekend I might break out the fancy camera (if I can find it) and see if I can improve a bit more.  In the mean time I'll finish with a post-processed image that should serve as the starting point for the next post on this topic.

Getting There!