This month's Asset Drop Co discovery box has screamed value for money. With a total of nine products that you can combo with each other to create some stunning effects. Fortunately for me one of these happened to sync well with my stormcast theme and helped we achieve greater detail and realism. But before that I'll cover the other products that were included that I'm yet to play with.

Foundry Paint System isn't a company I've been aware of before and I'm always excited to try new paints and products so I can't wait to get into these. They came with three colours, Nipple Pink, Light Nipple Pink and Dark Nipple Pink. Stop laughing! My initial thought was that I'd be very limited to what I could use these for and they'd end up in the ever growing pile of paints I'm yet to open. After reading the guidebook that comes with each Asset Drop I found that they're especially good for naturally highlighting reds and will definitely come in handy when I get around to the stack of bloodbound I have at the bottom of Sprue Mountain.

 

Another newcomer to me is Colours of War. Not only do they come in a bad ass dropper bottle but the paint itself has an amazing consistency when used. The set of three included Dark Leather, Sicily Yellow and Motherland Earth, I used mainly Motherland Earth with a splash of Dark Leather. My main use for these was to dry brush a few shields to give them a war-torn dirty look, not so much so that it completely masked the copper’s sheen but enough to make them look like they had been mud wrestling. However the guide didn’t stop there on this weathered look…

 

Ammo of Mig Jimenez Gun Metal pigment and Alclad II Warpigs Mud pigment are an almost symbiotic duo that provide the finishing touches to an already convincing weathering technique. I felt that applying the pigment with my fingers was a messy but effective method and helped the pigment to really stick down in the different recesses. My first step was to add spots of gun metal and then apply streaks of mud over the top, I found that if I applied too much it was easy to just grab a small dry brush and gently flick off the excess. 

Any observant bystander can see the above doesn't look like the shield of a mud wrestler. After the success of the weathering technique I decided to tamper some more and see if I could pull off a verdigris rust effect in spot areas on the armor and weaponry. This isn't because I was unhappy with the mud and gun metal, I have use for a verdigris rust effect in my next army build and applying it onto dirt and rust felt like the right time to experiment. There are still patches left open where you can see a dirty copper and I think the mix of both gives off the desired weathered theme. 

As always I'm happy to receive constructive criticism and am keen to hear opinions 

Arcane

Despite the release of Nightvault this week I have actually managed to make some progress on my Soul Wars Stormcast and not spend all my free time having my warband smashed into oblivion. I've certainly learnt a lot with this set, mainly from my own mistakes. The decision to prime the models in Chaos Black was made with a very different colour scheme in mind. Upon changing my mind and going for a very light scheme I found that I needed to paint several thin layers of Palid Wych Flesh just to stop the black desaturating it too much.

This was also the case with the Fenrisan Grey used on the bulk of the robes and tabard. Fortunately because the model has lots of recesses the black assists with shadows and makes it easier to bring definition to the cloth materials. Despite that I would definitely choose a white prime next time or at the very least a lighter grey. I also somehow ended up now painting in a backwards order, applying the copper layers before the larger robed areas. This has lead to needing to touch up copper areas again, something I can avoid going forward. 

As you can see in the pictures I did go on to finish one of them to use as reference and begin the production line. I'm happy with the overall scheme and plan on basing with some snowy/winter aesthetics to compliment the pale blue scheme. I'll be sure to keep the progress updated here and continue to highlight my lessons learnt. I also have plans this week to unbox the newest Asset Drop box and give my thoughts on each of the items including this month as well as my plans to implement them into projects

Thanks for reading

Arcane 

Hello again,

I've been thinking a lot about how I want my content to look and what kind of things I'm most interested in and want to share. I don't want to flood the feed with WIP but I also don't want to have weeks at a time without content. My greatest love so far is experimenting with different products and I believe that's the answer to my predicament, my aim will be to review and discuss products that I'm currently toying with while showing you how I'm applying them to my projects.

So without further adue I'd like to start this new series of laboratory-esque posts with a review of Darkstar Molten Metals. My discovery happened when I signed up to a subscription service called Asset Drop Co but there will be more on those guys and girls in a later post.

My only experience with metallics so far was using Liberator Gold which, despite being smeared into my desk still, I found worked fine yet was a little hard to manipulate. Darkstar's series is a different ballgame altogether. For starters the drop bottles make everything so much easier especially with metallic, there's no messing around with frantically shaking the bottle to try and get a smooth consistency and there's very little chance you'll spill any. The most important thing is of course how it looks on a model... 

These are a few of my Stormhost from the Soul Wars set. They are currently being used as Guinea pigs for different effects I'd like to achieve on a future project. To start I used the Molten Metals Aged Copper colour to basecoat any visible armour. Applying this was amazing, it reacts like regular paint and is easily moved around without clumping while still creating a really convincing shimmer. 

My initial thought was to then go back and edge highlight the armour to really make it pop, but by this point I'd had a few cups of coffee and was too impatient to not try out another copper colour. Instead of edge highlighting I wanted to try and make the armour even more aged by drybrushing, utilising the aged copper underneath and giving it a shinier copper tone over the top. 

Overall I'm completely in love with this paint series and will continue my experimentation. As you can see in photos (despite poor lighting) there's a great shine to the coat which I hadn't been able to achieve before. 

You can find darkstar paint here 

http://www.darkstarmini.co.uk/darkstar-molten-metals.html

Check them out, and thanks for reading!

Arcane

Hello again!

I've been itching to finally sit down and document the completion of my very first set! Now it's taken a lot longer than I expected (roughly four months) to finish this to an acceptable standard but I'm proud of the final outcome and would love to go over what I learnt in the process and things I will definitely avoid next time.

Assembly and priming:

I foolishly went into this thinking that painting would be the only difficult part and attempted to auto-mode the assembly. This in turn lead to a lot of failed attempts with knock off super glue that left a few warriors with slanted spears and disjointed shoulders. A little bit of research always goes a long way and I quickly learnt that using a plastic glue such as Citadels own or Revells Contacta were the go to solutions as they actually fuse together the plastic rather than providing a bonding agent.

Priming didn't provide too many complications,
I went with a simple Corax White coat to try and brighten the colours and ensured I didn't drown the models in it. One thing I would try and avoid next time is fully assembling some of the more intricate miniatures as priming in between all the shields and fancy feathers was a nightmare.

Painting and basing:

Now the reason this set took months to complete is because I was dreading painting my lizard babies, they'd become part of my desk and secured a space in my heart which I didn't want to destroy by giving them a bad paint job. This is the wrong mindset to be in. A wonderful piece of advice I received was this "just throw the paint on and get it done". And that's exactly what I did, I stopped procrastinating and just threw paint onto every piece of empty scales I could find.

By doing this I learnt more than I would have if I took several hours to perfectly finish each miniature. For instance never use your paint brush to scoop paint onto your pallet, this will clog the ferrule and in turn make you curse the fact you've ruined several nice paint brushes...totally unrelated to me, I wasn't foolish enough to burn through seven brushes on my first build. I think the most enjoyable aspect for me was learning to drybrush and detailing the saurus. Drybrushing took me a few attempts to get right as I kept leaving too much paint on the brush, I doubted the tutorials I found when they said to wipe 90% of paint off the brush but it really is the case and once you get used to the technique it's very rewarding.

The whole project was a great experience and since completion I've started my Stormcast models so expect some wip photos of those this week. Thanks for reading.

Arcane