He better appreciate it, yeah :P Thanks for that share! I had to roll my eyes a bit on that Instagram account XD But it shows that CBs helmet proportions aren't very realistic, yeah. Thank you :) I managed to finish another Kosmogirl over the weekend: Getting to use a new color scheme on every miniature is a real treat! Here's the inspiration again: I allowed myself to add a little bit more yellow than the artwork shows, just to break up the blue/brown/white some more. What do you think?
And the last one from the Ariadna half: My Paracommando. Since I needed another complete substitute for the male Paracommando from the box, I wasn't sure for a long time what to take. But eventually I realized the Kaplan looked surprisingly similar in design, so I just swapped out one of their guns for the Irmandinho's shotgun. Here's the design inspiration: And here's the group shot for the finished Ariadna half: Very happy with the overall look.
You're right. I have too many conversions XD On it goes with the last two Nomad models from the CS box. For the Sombra, I had to think about how to apply my color scheme. It's a completely new unit, MI, and camo. I wanted her to look different both from the Intruder and the Hellcat, as well as highlight her covert ops nature. So I decided to make blue the main color, keep all cream and olive tones off her completely, and increase the black instead. The result is more minimalistic in nature than the rest of my troops, but I like it a lot. The Hellcat followed the recipe I had established for my other two Hellcats. I only made the kneecaps cream this time, and I switched the gloves to brown to keep them in line with the rest of the box. This completes the Nomad half of the box:
There was one miniature left out of my Crimson Stone box. So here he is: I decided to give him the classical Sabertooth colors, since that seems to be the obvious CB reference here. Now, with him, I'm done with my Crimson Stone box: What a cool box of miniatures!
With Crimson Stone out of the way, Beyond CS not really being that interesting to me rn,and the rest of my Kosmoflot having been delayed until the new year, it's time for a few new projects. I mean, Corregidor and Ariadna are nice and stuff, but for now it's time to come back to my first love, Tunguska. And that means, it's finally time for the big guy: And since this season it's bike season, not only will I have an excuse to paint that MBH that's been lying around for a while, but I also decided to finally start my second Zondnautica. Since the beginning of the year, I had the idea to add a second of these amazing bikes to my collection. But I didn't want to paint the same three models again. So I started thinking what other cool minis could proxy/be converted into a bike+robot. That's when Andromeda came to mind. I almost started OSS last year just because of that mini, so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone here. The conversion went a little different than I had originally planned, but as it turned out, it was much easier to just replace the cat's front legs with the Zondmate's arms than to cut off the hands and reposition them. I must admit, it looks much cooler than I could have hoped. Now all I need is a single second Andromeda to have a dismounted pilot. But that's not urgent. Some other conversions I did this weekend were my Cheerkillers. I pushed this box back for almost a year now, but now it's finally time. I'm happy I waited though, because I'm the meantime I realized I much rather want a second sniper Grenzer than a ML one. And I also got the idea to replace the attacking lady's baseball bat with a spear, and the multi pistol +1B one with a light shotgun I had lying around. I gotta say, I hope CB will never go full plastic. I find conversions with metal actually easier than plastic, because you can bend pieces into place if they don't fit perfectly. Wouldn't know how to do that with plastic that just snaps off. The Zondnautica wouldn't have been possible I think with plastic.
Thanks, but he has to wait a bit longer. But I finished another commission in the meantime: I tried to emulate the paint style of this guy. But I still tried to be fast, so this came out in about two hours but isn't half as clean.
Maybe it was closer to three. But I can't afford to take so long on these commissions. No magic It's just that almost the whole mini is black and white, so I didn't have to mess around with a lot of colors, and the shadows were all finished with priming already, which saves a lot of time. With that, doing rough gradients and edge highlights doesn't take that much time for me anymore. In a way, it's almost like grisaille painting: Do all the highlights, shadows and volumes in pure black and white, then colour in with glazes. Literally the only part where I used an actual basecoat technique were the salmon linings.
Alright, this was a labor of love. For the first time in a long time it happened to me that I finished a model and wasn't happy with it. I chose to paint her in the same color scheme as my ABH on foot in order to have a dismounted model available in the same colors. But it turned out transferring the colors of Saito to the big panels of the bike resulted in too many empty spaces. Below is a comparison shot between the original and the improved version. With the freehands, the foliage and the readjusted highlights on the red, the bike doesn't look as bland anymore. I'm still not one hundred percent happy with how the grey on the front panel came out, but now she's at least much more visually interesting than before. So I'll call her done.
I finished another set of commissions this month: The guy who let me paint his Ryuken and Ninja decided to make me paint the rest of his JSA too. The first batch was two Aragotos and the old Spitfire Raiden. To achieve the synth wave vibe I had established with the Ryuken in a reasonable time frame, I changed my process to another speedpainting technique I hadn't tried before: 1. I started with a very bright white zenithal highlight. 2. Then I took out my oil colors again, but not to drown everything in washes like I had done with my NCA, but instead to use them as a basecoat and get these gradients done quickly. 3. After 30-40 minutes wait I'd gently use a sponge to smoothen out the paintcoat and let a bit of the white undercoat through on the top parts to create more contrast. 4. Finally, almost everything else was done with pure white edge highlights, a bit of ivory stippling on the leather vest, a bit of rough NMM on the black engine parts and more white on the pants to build them up from the murky grey created by the oil colors. Both bikes together took me 5 hours in total. The Raiden was done in between, so I don't have an exakt time stamp, but I think it was a little bit over the 1h mark. Doing these in batches really helps.
Something for myself again: That sculpt somehow looks much nicer in real life then in the promo pictures. Maybe I'm just not a fan of the new official color scheme...
More commission work. This Fiddler was asked to wear the official Nomad colors, and the Jackbots to be painted differently so they can be told apart on the table: As this is the first time I painted the new plastics (the Jackbots), here are my two cents: the casting quality is really the same. Yes, the guns are bend-y, but they weren't warped or anything. And at this size you don't notice the weight difference. Totally fine product imo.
Things are going slowly because I've been working on the big girl Szally. I'm almost done, but I had to squeeze in another commission, which ironically was also a Szally. The customer wanted the official color scheme again, and it was fun to emulate all the little freehands. And to prove I'm not lying about my own version, here's a little sneak peek:
Time to celebrate: My 100th Nomad model has just been painted! Obviously it couldn't be anything but the biggest hunk of the range, Szally. It's definitely the model I spent the longest amount of time on so far (25+ hours). But I wanted to do her justice. Sadly the gun fell off mid-process and I had to go back and pin her (should have done that from the start), which messed up the glue line on the light. I took a lot of inspiration from Steve Garcia's Szally. And here's a side-to-side with the commission:
