The First of the New Year...is about the end of the last

Howdy folks,

I hope the new year has started on a positive note for you...the end of the year definitely saw an uptick in distractions from the hobby for me and I made the decision to actually take some days off and slowly chill my way into the beginning of this year.

So, allow me to say:

And speaking of chill...we've been under an extreme cold weather warning for...well, long enough that I can't remember when it started...BUT it should warm up today.  By warm, I mean it is currently -16 with the windchill at -19...I think the first time in a couple of weeks it has been that warm...huzzah!!

So, while I was entirely distracted from blog posting, between commitments and deadlines I took whatever painting time I could.  I'm very happy with how it went, I managed to get through a few figs and try out a few modeling and painting techniques.  Ironically, a few days after Christmas I injured my foot which kept me in a chair with my foot up...so from that I was able to begin a phase of one of my long term projects.  Here's a small teaser of the first installment of my Royal Canadian Dragoon Squadron as part of my 4 CMBG force:

Battlefront Leopard 1's - 15mm

At the beginning of December I stumbled across three zombie figures that had escaped the previous mass painting of the undead, so I decided to see how quickly I could paint them up in three different tones.  Overall, I'm happy to be done, but I must say if I had to speed paint zombies, I would focus on green tones as they can be developed much quicker than a brown rotted look.

While overall I'm happy with the result, I think I'm most happy with the tones I was able to capture in the middle zombie and in the clothing for them all...note for next time...

 

The end of the year also saw me revisit my Rogue Stars figures and start on another crew...for this crew I thought I'd have an odd assortment of explorers so I started with an explorer and a gunbot...in my head it seemed a reasonable grouping.

For the basing, I was very heavily influenced by some of the cinematic settings of Bladerunner 2049...

-movie still from Vanity Fair-

-movie still from FilmSchoolRejects.com-

 

I really like the orange and yellow hues in the scene and I thought I would see if I could replicate or at least match as close as possible this setting for my bases.  I started with painting the base bright orange (Vallejo) and then hit it with agrellan mud (citadel)...once it dried I actually repainted everything with bright orange or light orange depending on what was at hand...when it dried it actually kept the mud-flat look and showed a great mix between the brown and orange of the two paints...looking at the base in some of my pics I think I definitely nailed the look...I'm really happy with the result and I can't wait to run a few more figs through the process...I even have a couple of Hasslefree figures that are going to get the full Agent K treatment...

 

The gunbot was an additional collection of inspirations...I decided to go with a metallic paintjob over the majority of the figure, but I wanted to hit the 'mask' with a contrast and chose an Ironman type look for it...kind of explains the blue/light look for his centre...

 

-pic taken from wiki-

I decided not to try to capture the 'bronze' trim of the mask, but instead focused on the red and its tones...in the end I'm very happy with the results...as well, I had to adapt as I lost the holstered rifle that is on the back of the original model.  I figured as the explorer has a sword, a sheathed battlesword on the back of a gun slinging robot in a sci-fi setting would fit in nicely...

 

  

Slightly changing gears in setting...I also finished a random barbarian figure that I bought a year or so ago at Cangames...I decided to choose The Northern City as the setting for this figure.  Although the figure is set for anything but cold and Arctic conditions, this figure allowed me to try my hand at capturing a wider range of skin tones creeping into the frostbitten...I'm pretty happy with the results...I had initially tried to give the final tones a hint of blue but it did not turn out well and ended up drowning out all of the other tones, so I went back to flesh and then varying whitening/graying. 

 

 

I will have a proper year recap in the next few weeks to see how I progressed, but for now here are the raw numbers:

 

Painting in 2017:

 

Painted:

28mm - 91 (+6)

15mm - 75 (+6 vehicles) 

 

Bought:

28mm - 108
vehicle - 1

15mm - 132
vehicle - 7

Overall PROGRESS: -82