Glowing Chickens and a not yet dead chick...

So I have slowly been puttering away at my Cryx battlebox.  Are they awesome, not hardly. In fact now that I am looking at them under a harsh flash, they look terrible (actually I am running the flash through a diffuser box, but anyway).  One sure way to ruin your self esteem in the painting world is take up close photography.  Maybe I'll do a post on the pro and cons of self photo critique later.  What looks to the normal eye to be a decent start on blending looks like sports black or a watery paint mishap.  However the lighting int eh basement is so bad (and yellow tinged) the flash works well enough until I get out the light box, and have a little more control the photography.  I have a hunch, it will still look terrible though.

Here is the group currently.

Denny is all her unfinished glory.

I play football.

Seriously though, this Stalker is only in the beginning phases of highlighting and blending.  The massive blue blotches on the head are barely visible to the human eye.

Here are the orange painted and green inked ones.  I have started the highlighting  and some of the touch ups.

Amd here is the orange inked bad boy.  I am not really happy with how he turned out though.  Since I had to mix custom orange from red and yellow, I didn't really get the color I wanted.  Inks when concentrated look nothing like what they turn out to be spread on white paint.

The woes of yellow ink...

So for anyone in who lives in the NoVA area (specifically the 95 corridor in Prince William County), you know we have had a bad run over the past few years with gaming stores.  Recently, I discovered it is even creeping in to craft stores.  So with our GW gone for years now, Game Parlor gone for a while, and HobbyTown gone, I went to Micheal's for of all things... yellow ink.

I am painting some Cryx and I wanted to a nice orange glow from the "furnace" over a deep blue chassis (Exile Blue for the PP paint people). For what ever reason, the first attempt I used paint.  This gave me a chicken 'jack that looked like it was on fire.  Neat, but not at all what I was after.  So I decided to try and do it with ink to get a more menacing glow.  Well, okay, I can see orange ink not being that common since it can easily be made from red and yellow ink.  Given that it will take a lot of ink over an entire army of Cryx that happen to glow a lot (actually they wont, but I want the glow consistent over all my models to do and will painted at different times).  I decided to hold off making a big batch of custom orange ink, and just try out of the inking methodology on a chicken 'jack with green just like in the back of the Cryx book.  Well it turns out I didn't own yellow ink...

Yellow ink...  I tend to use calligrapher's ink for my models.  It is cheaper, comes in bulk (for my purposes bulk is those little glass jars), and is generally nice high quality stuff.  It doesn't come in yellow though.  Which when I think about it kinda makes sense. Who writes in yellow?  Well, as I mentioned above, hobby supplies are in kinda short supply in NoVA.  So Micheal's doesn't carry it (or sable brushes anymore).  GW doesn't carry ink anymore (woe to me, for I have all the other inks).  Fredericksburg is so far away that I have to plan my trips there carefully (which wasn't going to happen in the time window I wanted to start the orange glow).  So Warstore here I come...

Ah Warstore...  If I ever get married, I have a hunch my credit card will be blocked from there.   So I am snooping through the volumes of stuff on there and find Vallejo Transparent Orange.  Oh, premixed Orange?  that is exactly what I need, so I go and order it and red and yellow and wood.  Wood ink you say?  Ya, that should have tipped me off that I wasn't buying ink.  Of course, I proceed to buy tons of things that are not ink, like Heavy Gear: Blitz, ACTA: StarFleet, an extra Ashlynn to convert into a non-pumpkin head, etc..  The key is, not ink.. .  Well, Neil manages to get that box to me in less than 48 hours, pretty sweet, and everything is actually in the order!  So I run to the basement with my transparent paint in hand, excited to get my green grow trials underway.  And I was less than impressed.  Transparent paint is cool, and I can see potential for it; however not as a substitute for ink.  After all that, off to Game Vault in Fredericksburg Saturday night for yellow ink (and red, and green and blue).  Oh well, So here are some snap shots of what I have been painting.

Here are the base coated Cryx models that haven't had any attempt at lighting.

  The bugger on the left is my first attempt at OSL of an orange glow, as you can see he is on fire, which is not a sinister orange glow.  The Green glow is the attempt where I actually had yellow and green ink.  I also switched shades of green ink from Windsor Newton Green, to PP green. I am starting to get the hang of the white base for the white base. The use of the white base for green glow is giving me fits.I think the inked one looks better in person, the camera is picking up a ton of glare that wont be there on the final model (ink being shiny until sealed and all).

Here are the same models on the opposite profile.  On the right is my green glow using green ink and yellow transparent paint.  While not hideous, it was not what I was looking for.  You can also see the subtle highlighting and shading I started on the orange one.

Back from the brink.

Okay, so a good 6 sinus infections, two gaming groups shrinking to near nothing, numerous hobbies and Lord knows what else, I have finally found the time and energy to start back at this.  So that is the why I haven't been blogging, now what I have I been up to? Well, I read a Song of Ice and Fire, got a high end Kichten Aid Mixer, actually played in a series of Warmachine tournaments, started teaching someone how to paint and play that game, started new factions for games I rarely play (Cryx, ALEPH, early war British), bought way too much stuff for game systems I don't think I'll ever play even once (Heavy Gear: Bliltz!, Uncharted Seas, Firestorm Armada, MERCS among others).  I even stopped buying GW products other than paint.  My last model purchased was the Space Wolves termies adn the last book the Grey Knights Codex.

Hopefully over the long weekend, I'll get a chance to document my partially painted Cryx bottle box and summarize my experience with the Heavy Gear starter.

Along the way, I am going to also start documenting a bit of my other unfinished hobbies inculding photography (ya, I bought Adobe CS 5 Design Premium which was an more costly and foolish decision than most of my miniature expenditures) and fancy bread baking.