Finishing up the Squad

So I got the rest of my berzerkers done for this first squad, so without further adieu, here they are:

First up is the finished mutant

Next is a berzerker with yet another wooden shield, what can I Say, Khorne knows defense.

Next is the second Mr. Skulls,

Now its the second running marine,

No its time for one of my Favorite, the Beast,

Finally, Semi-Permanent Leader for the Squad, His Majesty Kharn,

So there there are, in all their glory. A few things that I would like to point out. First, I am not completely happy with the way the hazard stripes turned out on the chainaxe and chainsword, I think I may try to touch them up a little bit, especially after seeing the pictures. Second, the base that the Beast is on is a Micro-Arts Studio Skull base. I plan on doing the whole army up on them, they are pretty cool. Also, on both Kharn's base and the Beasts I will be painting on some Khorne symbols on the foreheads.

Finally, what do you guys think about adding some battle damage and wear to the marines, it should look good with the verdigras brass. I did it for the first time on my Cthulhu Marine, and thought it turned out alright. That being said, I don't really want to mess up 2 weeks of painting with something that might not look good.

Tyler Out.

p.s. Aaargh! Blogger formatting is annoying me!

What have I been up to lately?

Well, I actually have been doing some modelling recently, especially getting some stuff painted. Here is a few of the things that I have been working on recently....

Just as a note these are the first pictures of miniatures that I have taken with my new camera and tripod...I'm thinking I love it, the only editing that I did was adding the watermark, not even resizing or cropping....

Berzerkers I really want to get my khorne army done so I have been painting mainly my first squad of berzerkers, and hopefully will start on the landraider once those are done.

 

 The last on is still a WIP, a little bit left to paint on him, but I figured I would take his pictures anyway.

Next up is some further progress on the Ork Mek that I am doing as a commission for my brother. Added a bit since the last post, just need to do some casting to finish up the work on his left arm power klaw.

Finally is one of my crazy fantasy conversions that I decided to do, its a Slaanesh/Night Lords type demon prince. I will probably end up selling it when I am done converting it, so if anyone is interested, hit me up.

Not sure if I am going to give him wings, a jump pack, or nothing yet. For those that were hoping for more Cthulhu marines they are coming, I have the bits for a standard bearer and am planning on doing a Librarian psyker, but I need to clear some of my backlog first.

So what do you guys think?

Some WIP stuff I have been working on

In an effort to post a little bit more regularly, and keep myself on track, I decided to post some WIP of a few of the things that I have been working on

Cthuhlu Base:

I just kinda did that in an hour last night on a whim,

And an Ork Mek that I have been working on for my brother:

What'cha think?

Sons of R'lyeh - Concept Marine Finished

So here is the painted and based Son of R'lyeh, I tried to push myself quite a bit on this miniature, trying both a lot of shading as well as some battle damage on the armor. I also tried water effects which I messed up twice before I started to get the hang of it. So without further ado, here he is:

So what do you guys think? These pics were just taken with my phone, hopefully I will get some better picture to post on Coolminiornot.com sometime this week.

BTW, if you haven't seen the WIP pics they are Here

Blood For the Blood God! World Eaters Landraider WIP

So here are some WIP pics of a World Eaters Land Raider that I have been working on. I am going to have two Land Raiders in my list, and I wanted them to be pretty unique, thus on this one I decided to do kind of a cauldron of khorne type of thing. I am going to fill the cauldron with clear red resin to simulate blood, as well as put a skeleton and some skulls in it.

Let me know what you guys think of it.

 To Be continued....Also, I am almost done painting the son of r'lyeh, so that will probably be up in the next week or so...

Sons of R'lyeh - CSM Concept

So this is an idea for a CSM Chapter that I have been toying with for awhile. I love the H.P Lovecraft Cthulhu Mythos, and have read just about everything Lovecraft has written. I wanted to do something a little different than the normal tyranid cthulhu guys.

The Sons of R'lyeh

Background: It is believed by Imperial Inquisitors that the Sons of R'lyeh Chapter are an off shoot of the Notorious Alpha Legion. Shortly after the heresy three companies of Alpha Legion were attacking an unknown Oceanic world. Shortly afterword one of the Marine Strike Cruisers was mysteriously destroyed, the other two left the planet shortly thereafter, leaving the indigenous population intact.

Since that time the Sons of R'leyh have been sighted numerous times, mostly near large world mostly covered in deep oceans. They almost never engage in direct conflict, usually leaving the planets population alone. The only lasting sign of the marines are the small cults that are left behind, remaining mostly hidden from the general populace.

Modes of operation: The Sons of R'lyeh rely heavily on the use of cultists and mutants in the few battles that they do fight. It is believed the Chapter numbers under 100 marines. The chapter also seems to conflict more with the other followers of Chaos than Imperials, the cults usually stamping out any other chaos cults on the planets.

Without further ado, a Son of R'lyeh:

What do you guys think? Should I continue with the project? I do want to add some barnacles and stuff on the armor of the marine...

EDIT: The painted marine can be found Here

Light Bulbs - Test and Review

So recently I had to take some pictures for a contest over at ThroneofSkulls.com of a WIP Angron model that I have been working on. Now taking good pictures is something that I always find difficult, and have never really mastered. Taking that into account, and the fact that I don't/didn't have a tripod, light box, or sunlight (At the time) the pictures came out pretty badly.

Fast forward a couple of days to when I was walking around in shopko while waiting for my car to get some new tires and I spy some GE Sunlight, and GE Daylight CFL light bulbs. For those of you that do not know, CFL (or Compact Fluorescent Lights) are those weird spirally looking light bulbs that use a ton less electricity than your normal incandescent bulbs. I had previously noted that a 26 Watt (100 watt equivalent) CFL bulb gave out a tone more like that the incandescent bulbs of approx. the same size, and extremely more than an average 60 watt. The CFL light is also much more white rather than yellow, which I thought might help my pictures since they tend to turn out rather yellow tinged.

That brings me to today, when I decided to test out 4 different types of light bulbs and see how they took pictures. In order to do this I set up my Demon Prince model in front of and on top of a regular piece of paper, set up two lights, and set my camera to its no flash, super macro, ISO 64 settings.  I then proceeded to take a picture of the miniature from approximately the same angle, and distance using 4 different light bulbs.

I took pictures until my camera's motion detected said that there was no motion blur. So what light bulbs did I use?

60 Watt Incandescent - Probably what most people use, it fits in normal light fixtures and lamps, and are relatively common.
26 Watt CFL - This is a 100 W equivalent bulb. In terms of lumens it gives probably about 3x as much light as the 60W incandescent.
26 Watt Daylight CFL - Pretty much the same as regular 26 Watt, but wanted to see what the light quality difference would be as it is a "Daylight" bulb
26 Watt Sunlight CFL - Again, I wanted to see the difference in the quality of the light from the bulb, and specifically how it differed from the Daylight bulb.

Now onto the results:

60 Watt Incandescent
This was my control, it is the light most commonly used, and has a very yellow glow. Here is the picture that it took:

As you can see the picture has quite a yellow/orange tinge. The red is washed out, the bronze looks more brown, and the colors are extremely different than if you see the miniature in person. Just to give you an idea, the background should be white, not off white. This picture would in my opinion require a bit of color tinting in GIMP to really show what the miniature looks like.

26 Watt CFL
This is the bulb that I took the pictures of Angron with, It should be a lot brighter, and from seeing the differences in light, should also be a bit whiter and have truer color.

Well there it is, it does look a little bit better, but still quite yellow. The Background should be white, but once again has taken on a yellowish tinge and washed out the colors. The brighter light did seem to help a little bit, but it still suffers from the same problems as the incandescent.



26 Watt Sunlight Bulb
One of the two bulbs that I picked up the other day to test out. Wasn't sure how it was going to work, but since sunlight is amazing to paint by, I had to give it a try. Here are the results:

So as you can see the difference is pretty extreme. The background actually looks white, the colors are much truer to light. Some of the red still got a little washed out, and the camera cord got in the way on the left hand side, but the picture is still light years ahead of the other two.

26 Watt Daylight CFL
So here comes the daylight bulb, again, I was not sure what I was expecting. I know that there are some really expensive daylight lamps that look very good, but considering the price of the bulb was under $10, I wasn't expecting much.

The picture is again much better than the incandescent or regular CFL. The Background is actually a little bit blue, but the colors look pretty good and close to real life, but i think that they are a little bit more blue than they should be.

OVERALL

Considering that all I change was my light bulbs, not fancy editing, no light boxes or diffusion screens, and using only two lights and a pretty basic camera, It think that light bulb definitely matters. I am never going to take pictures with incandescent again, event the extra brightness of the CFL wasn't as big of a change as I thought it would be. I would say that the winner in this test was probably the Sunlight bulb, because of the fact that if really gave a good white background where it was supposed to. The daylight bulb is a close second, and I am going to have to do some more tests to see which one I like and works better.

What do you guys think of the pictures, the bulbs were the only things changed, I even edited them all the same. What experiences have you guys had with different bulbs?