Painting Tutorial from Biohazard Painting: Dust Axis Light Walker "Hans"

If you are interested in Dust maybe I have found an interesting painting tutorial for you:
Biohazard Painting posted a nice tutorial for the Axis Light Walker "Hans" on his blog. The picture on the left shows the finished model and is directly taken from the article.

He also has some other tutorials on his page (at the moment mainly for Sedition Wars) so maybe you can have a look there too.


So long,
Paradox0n

Hobby Basics - Cleaning your stuff

Today I had a very frustrating moment (to be honest moments): Since the wheather here is REALLY bad I loaded my wet palette, got my miniatures I wanted to paint and switched some nice music on. Then I wanted to do the first brush strokes and BÄMM! One brush stuck together nearly to the point and the other brush divided itself into two nice halves... And worse to that, my airbrush completely stopped working and I had to disassemble it completely. And oh boy... it was nearly completely glued together (although I cleaned it after every usage like I described earlier). After calmly counting to 10 and taking some deep breathes I gritted my teeth and set to the task of cleaning my stuff. The brushes are my everyday brushes and its not really a loss if I can't rescue them but with the airbrush it is somehting completely different.

Lesson learned Number 1:  Keep your brushes in safety from your cats. Seems they found a new toy to play with on my desk and made things even worse...
Lesson learned Number 2: The Vallejo Primer I reviewed some time ago is a bit more sticky than normal paint and a normal blow out and cleaning isn't enough.

To see the positive in this disaster I thought on doing another Hobby Basic post on cleaning your stuff the advanced way :)

Review: Vallejo Surface Primer

Since priming is an absolute necessity when its about painting miniatures (oh these old sins when painting with Revell emaille paints didn't need that) I thought of trying out some primers myself. I have spray cans of Games Workshop (black and white for doing a 2k priming), a brown primer from Army Painter (too many Skavens to work with) and shortly after I bought myself an airbrush I also bought the Vallejo Surface Primer in grey. This is a waterbased Poliurethane Primer which can be directly sprayed from your airbrush or if you want painted on with a brush. It comes in three sizes: 17ml, 60ml and 200ml. At my hobbystore of trust the big one costs around 12€ which is pretty much the costs of the GW primer. The bottle is designed to let you pour the primer directly into the paintpot of your airbrush which is pretty neat since that is exactly what I have bought this stuff for.

Hobby tips - Cleaning your airbrush

As some tutorials in the web I read tried to tell me told how difficult the cleaning process of my airbrush should be and how it really isn't I thought a short article to sum up my experiences would be the best.

First of all: Cleaning your airbrush is neither complicated nor will it cost you much time. On the opposite! It should be part of your painting routine because it really makes the painting process much more comfortable.
If you ever opened your mouse to clean it.. Tadaaaa you can clean your airbrush too.

WIP - Lava bases

Finally having the time to try out my 0.2mm needle in my airbrush I did a quick test for the lava bases I plan to do for my Chaos Dwarf army. I cut out an appropriate piece of cardboard, glued some cork onto it and primed everything. Then I loaded the airbrush, beginning with red, mixing in more and more yellow and finally some white. Then (big error!) I painted the cork black.

Test for a lava base

Since it was only a quick test for working with the 0,2mm needle and how much pressure I need for the different layers, it is OK. I now know how to do things for my Chaos Dwarves. First I have to use real bases or some MDF or some plastic card as base, then I'll have to prime everything black and drybrush the stones and THEN the airbrush comes into use. Think this will work much better.

And I'm really scared by the amount of work this will be *looks in fear to his Skaven, Dark Elves and Chaos Dwarves* :) 

Weathering techniques - Videos from Mac McCalla

I found some nice videos for wheathering techniques by Mac McCalla and collected them into a playlist. Some very useful tips there, hope you enjoy them as much as I did:

So long,
Paradox0n

My airbrush setup

Raindrops are falling on my head...
Wait! Wrong context :)

After plaing around for some days with my airbrush and feeling like a soldier who can disassemble his gun while sleeping I think I can finally show my setup. Because I bought a complete set I can't say how much the parts would cost. The whole set charges around ~200€ in germany. In the following I will try to go through the different parts I have bought and in use.

Starquest Miniatures - Marines WIP

Another peak on my working table. Today I show you some pictures of the GSG from Starquest. They are stongly WIP I've only done the basic shading with my airbrush. First thing I learned to love in preshading with the airbrush is the soft color transitions you get. Especially in this easy way, with a normal brush I could never achieve this. Again my camera blurred some of the transitions :( I must look to get some better photo equipment.

Review: Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop

So I got my new (and first) airbrush system and with the set also arrived a dvd called "Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop". I ordered this dvd because I thought some advice on how to work with an airbrush could not be bad. Therefore I thought of doing a small review on my first thoughts about this dvd from the view of an absolute beginner in airbrushing who only watched Youtube tutorials.

Harder & Steenbeck Airbrush Workshop

Starquest Miniatures - Androids

As promised I started painting some of the Starquest miniatures. Since I am really out of painting and never used a airbrush I thought of using this miniatures for some experiments.The first miniatures I chose are the androids (very similiar to the Necrons of Warhammer 40k).

Androids of Starquest

Airbrush finally arrived

Finally my airbrush set arrived yesterday so I set up my workspace (which you can see here) with my new equipment and started some basic experiments. But after the first minutes I noticed that the trigger and the needle are sluggish. So I disassembled the whole pistol and cleaned and checked everything. After that everything seems to be working fine.

Thanks to the great bunch of tutorials for airbrushing! One of the series I relally like is the beginner seriers from Chung:



My first victims will be some of the miniatures of the very old game Starquest (in english its Space Crusade). I hope I can show you some of the achievements in the near future.


Perhaps I will make a post about my setup when I know what I'm doing ;)


So long,
Paradox0n