Vampire Complete

A little later than planned, here are the finished pictures of Lord Vacu, Dark Prince of somewhere eerie, drinker of the blood of virgins, etc, etc.  He's come out alright, but doesn't have quite the "presence" I was hoping for.  Maybe it's just the miniature itself, or it's the paint job, or more likely a combination of the two, I don't think it quite pulls off the elegant, decayed look I was going for.

A really simple paint scheme for the skin:

• Base:  Dheneb Stone
• Shade:  Thinned Devlan Mud wash
• H1:  Dheneb Stone
• H2:  1:1 mix of Dheneb + White
• H3:  Pure White

It gives that pale stark look, and frames the sunken red eyes really well.  In the picture below you can see a slight slip-up - the hand furthest away is missing some flesh tone under the thumb side of the palm - not sure how I managed to miss that, but it will be fixed at some point

I wanted to give the black an aged, decayed look, so I used the Charadon Granite and Dheneb Stone highlighting method I've used before.  It's pretty simple:

• Base:  Neatened up black
• H1:  1:2 mix of black and Charadon Granite
• H2:  Charadon Granite
• H3:  1:2 mix of Dheneb Stone and Charadon Granite
• H4:  2:1 mix of Dheneb Stone and Charadon Granite

The last thing to do was the base:

• Base:  Charadon Granite
• Shade:  Devlan Mud Wash
• H1:  Charadon Granite
• H2:  Khemri Brown
• H3:  Dheneb Stone
• Wash:  Gryphonne Sepia

Originally I tried sticking some "Autumnal tufts" that I bought back at the Colours show, but it just looked too bright and cheery, so off the tufts came and I fell back on the more appropriate GW Scorched Grass.

In the pipeline is something from Freebooter, this chap from Reaper, more article stuff, a bloody great Malus Darkblade model for some chap called Kenny, and some Malifaux...

As always comments and criticism are most welcome - especially if you could offer some advice on giving this chap more impact.

Vampire - Adding a Little More Colour

Steady but slow progress on Mr Classic Vampire (he doesn't have a name yet).  Nurgle appears to have visited the Walker household, as both the wife and I are suffering from whatever winter bug is doing the rounds here in freezing cold Swindon.

I didn't want to do a bright red for this chap, so I went for more of a maroon colour:

• Base: P3 Sanguine Base - this is a nice colour, but does seem to take a couple of coats to cover a black undercoat properly
• Shade:  Leviathan Purple wash - in hindsight, I should have watered this down a little, and maybe added some Baal Red, as it's gone a bit dark.
• H1: Sanguine Base
• H2: 2:1 mix of Sanguine Base and GW Vomit Brown
• H3: 1:1 mix of Sanguine Base and GW Vomit Brown
• H4: 1:2 mix of Sanguine Base and GW Vomit Brown

I reckon the colour has come out pretty well, and makes for a nice change from my normal red scheme.

Next up is the face - I'm going for a really pale skin tone, and I'm toying with the idea of some small tattoos on his face - not sure yet though...

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

Vampire - Metallics Done

A little bit of progress tonight:

The gold was made to look a little more bronze than usual, I wanted it to look old, but not dirty/oxidized.  I'm hoping it will work well with the Maroon/Black colour scheme I want to use on him.

• Base:  Tin Bitz
• Shade:  Devlan Mud
• H1:  Tin Bitz
• H2:  1:1 mix of Tin Bitz and P3 Blighted Gold (I'm really liking this colour)
• H3:  Blighted Gold
• H4:  1:1 Mix of Blighted Gold and Mithril Silver

The other bits I got completed were the jewels - apologies for the picture, I used my phone camera to make the transfer to PC a little easier, but it does mean the quality suffers.

They were done in the classic GW style:

• Base:  Reapplied Black
• H1:  Dark Angel Green
• H2:  Camo Green
• H3:  A small "tick" of White added to the opposite side of the jewel.

Next up is the dark red/maroon of the shirt and sash.

As always, comments and criticism welcome!

A little Vampiric WIP and some shopping

Nothing too much to report, but I'm going to try and get a few more of these little updates done each week.

First up, the Vampire - the bat idea just wasn't going to work, so I hacked up a little polystyrene to go around the pins:

I glued some larger stones (Woodland Scenics medium ballast I think) to the top of that and coated the whole lot in PVA glue to make it a little tougher.  Unfortunately I managed to miss a couple of small patches with the glue, and the propellant from the spray on undercoat ate away part of it (D'Oh!).  The little holes were filled with glue and stones, and actually look pretty good. 

The lack of progress this weekend was due to a break in London, which included the usual trips to Forbidden Planet and Orc's Nest (who have a good restock of Reaper miniatures), but I also took a side trip to Waterloo and visited Dark Sphere a lovely little store with a good range of products and really friendly, helpful staff.  I didn't spend too much, but did manage to pick up Kapitan Ivanka and Granny Weatherwax as well as a couple of bottles of Vallejo paint to experiment with.

I strongly recommend you pay them a visit when you're that way, from my 15 minutes in there I spotted:

• GW
• Privateer Press
• Infinity
• Malifaux
• Flames of War
• Spartan Games
• Avatars of War
• Kromlech
• Micro Art Studio
• Scibor
• ForgeCraft
• Gale Force 9
• Vallejo
• Army Painter

Coming from Swindon, where we have GW, and not much else, it was a little bit of gaming geek heaven.  :)