Imperial Knight number 2 progress WIP

On some level I believe I enjoy suffering. So I decided as I was getting lots of painting done I should start a lengthy project even though I'm in the middle of another one... Cunning as a fox me... Anyway here'es where I've got to:

The spray paint stage (his guns and face are also done but I forgot to snap them! First everything got a coat of black. then red on the armoured parts. trying to keep it off the underbody with limited success. Then brown over the base and feet. A little silver for the dred corpse. Grey for the rocky area.

I tidied up the black and used silver to pop in the details like with my previous knight. Other metal will be brass to keep things varied. Hope you like him so far!

Manufactorum building for red planet board WIP

Picture heavy post ahead. Here's a bit of a step by step of where I am so far with this:

First I primed with chaos black spray (and finished with army painter black... because I ran out of Chaos black part way..). I then preshaded with my oxide red picking out areas on the model where wind blown sand and dust might build up and to blend the base of the building into the board. I went over the model with a couple of passes of each colour and flipped the building upside down for both to ensure no gaps were left under all those niggley details and being fairly liberal because more is less sometimes, most won't show through and it might help with wear.

  Heres the where it might build up most on the rood shot.

I then went over the whole model with army painter leather brown. I went in with a couple of passes, again flipping the building to do flooring and interior. I tried to leave a shade of the oxide red and some of the black in appropriate areas. In this one you can clearly see a subtle red in the corners around the roof

This better shows the brown colour as the other was a bit washed out by the bright sunlight.

 Next was the interior. I used army painter uniform grey spray in two light passes to paint all of the interior of the building leaving some of the other colours below as shades. I also tried not to get spray onto the exterior. 

Here you can see the dust effect on the roof edges quite clearly.

Some contrast between the interior and exterior. I quite liked the brown building look and was tempted to change my plan and just do with this but eventually went with the red.

I then used army painter dragon red to paint the exterior of the building being careful not to paint the interior. I did two to three light passes of this to leave the brown, oxide red and black shades visible and only sprayed in a downward direction to help aid shading. The red and grey have a pretty strong contrast I quite like.

This shows where the other colours remain to add shade and break up the solid red.

 Another angle, again the brown colours are visible.

That was my spray painting stages complete. I always feel that some brushwork is needed to make models feel finished. I did girders using leadbelcher and then washed with watered down agrax earthshade which I think was still drying in the pictures and with the direct sunlight looks a bit shiny which its not! The muted silver helps tie the red into the grey roof a little and breaks it up from being one big red block. 

I began to do some more details with the leadbelcher but actually felt it was a bit much and that I prefer the more red look.

I think the next step will be to pick outthe bigger details such as the admech sybols in silver black and white and the stick out generator/goodness knows whats/thingamayigs in silver or brass and weather. I might do a very light drybrush onto some of the red details with a pale orange to bring out the detail but I feel if I were to do all the details in silver it would detract from the model not to mention take ages!

What are peoples thoughts on the bright red building? Trying to look nicely admech but is it too much? Does the silver detailing and grey interior pull it back enough? Hope you like it so far!

Red planet board tiles 4-6 Realm of Battle Gameboard.

The forgeworld tiles are truely gorgeous but really busy. If your board was made up of just tiles like these you wouldn't have any room for your units! So in complete contrast I'm going to do three open tiles from the realm of battle gameboard. First things first is to get rid of those awful skulls. Why does warhammer have a geological layer of just skulls slightly underneath the surface? I suppose it goes on top of the layer of plasma guns the imperial guard veterans have managed to salvage from somewhere....

PVA and sand. Done. (Slight bubbling in a couple of these, try to be gentle when applying the PVA to stop this.)

I haven't done step by step photos as I did that with previous boards and didn't want to repeat myself. If your interested and don't want to skip back to my other posts (board project label) then here's the step by step in text:

Having left plenty of time for this to dry I then went in with chaos black spray to undercoat the boards. This should help the colour match my other boards as the forgeworld ones come in a dark resin purple-black which would shade paints on them. Extra paint should hopefully help with wear.
I then used two coats of the oxide red to give a dark finish and then went over with the brown spray over raised areas and to tone the board down. I then did the stone areas in gray before tidying up with brown. I used bone to pick out raised areas, areas of detail and random patches to break up large surfaces. The bone was also used to overspray the boards with a gentle dusting to tie the colours together and give board uniformity. I then used gryphonne sepia to shade cracks and dips.

Here's a pic of each tile. They're not massively Martian red but have a good oxide desert feel, you could skip picking out areas with the bone and just overspray if you wanted them to be more red.

They're pretty easy to do and in my opinion look pretty effective, perhaps I should have just done six of these instead of the FW ones...

My Forgeworld boards are a-peeling!

It was all going so well...

Then the peeling began, slowly at first and then it took hold across all my forgeworld bits.

I had already washed all the pieces with hot water and washing up liquid but it obviously hadn't done the trick.

Here's a close up of the peel. The paint was coming loose from the board below. Shrinking a back it was cracking and peeling away in pieces. I had put varnish on this board and not the others so at first thought that might be the problem but perhaps it only accelerated it.

After a good scrub the board looked like this. This was a bit odd frankly as in all the difficult to reach areas the paint stuck to but came off on the flatter areas. This is the opposite to what I would have expected from release agent where my washing should have removed the open areas easily but not the difficult bits. I tried scrubbing back the paint and washing the board section again and repainted. But it peeled again! In the end I had to paint the whole board in thinned down PVA glue. This seems to give the paint some purchase and so far its held.

Here you can see the board section pre its second peel. and sadly the two other sections below waiting to go!

And one on its own for good luck post PVA. Fingers crossed this has done the trick once and for all!

Has anyone else had a similar problem and how did you deal with it?

Coming soon:

Painting buildings for the red planet boards.

Promethium pipelines. This kit looks fantastic and perfect for my red planet board. A great bit of cover for infantry that can block vehicle movement without blocking line of sight.

More praetorian guard. Getting more troops painted up and ready for duty Sah!

Esher Gang, some Necromundan's to be our campaign unit hive scum.

Forgeworld Imperial Emplacement Area Terrain piece for Red Planet Board Finished

I've had some MAJOR peeling problems on my planet board (posts to come) and it's taken a bit of a dent out of my productivity for awhile. Anyway trying to get back into the zone as our group wants to start its much planned for campaign within the month. I'll be setting up a dedicated blog for it shortly.

Here is the forgeworld area terrain post having some of the paint scrubbed off, repainted and brushwork. The main thing for the brushwork was filling in gaps of peel with brown and building bac up to bone for the sandbags. Metals on pipes and boxes. Drybrushes of bone and terminatus stone for the earth areas and the sand bags to give them depth and make the spray paint look more finished.

Coming soon:

My boards are a-peeling! Problems presumably with release agent!

More area terrain: Here's the grey plastic that is the first of the two buildings I'm going to do. I want to do a red and grey colour scheme to tie into the forgeworld tiles. (If I can ever get the paint to hold!) I thought I might connect them by pipes but on reflection would probably leave them having to be placed very close together which wouldn't make for great game balance.

I tried to make it look like it could actually have been a building once. The wonkiness has been corrected!