Hobby exploits 2020 and onward

Apparently her name is Judy Moreno.

A nice little civilian mini from Unit 9 Patreon.

Still in the Combined Army mood, but I’m slowly changing to something else.

I’m not sure if the photography on this one went well. I couldn’t get proper white balance and in the end turned automatic balance on. The pictures look oversaturated on my screen, but still better than anything I managed with manual balance.

Since I was working on the Xeodron with the same colours as the rest of my Onyx/Combined Army, I could as well finish the two little ones (I’d started them like half a year before). And so I did.

That was a quite long time since last update…

Anyway this is my entry for the Mayacast Masterglass Q2. Again, I received a shout out with some constructive criticism from Tom (speckling).

Just a fun fact, body of the bike is painted with oils (white, black and turquoise), while the wheel rims are done with acrylics, I managed to pull very similar effect on both.

The Girl is done with acrylics, so is the base.

Then, I painted the red parts using method presented in Giraldez’s firs book. That is: red wash (2 layers), the same with added black-red, and again in deepest shadows this time with addition of a drop of violet ink.

8’00” in total (each).

Waiting for subsequent layers of washes to dry, I did couple of things:

I painted the weapons (rifle and pistol) with base colour of sombre grey. Two layers on each took 2’50”.

Overall glaze of turquoise: 2’30” each.

Painted heads with bone white : 1”30” each.

Blue-violet wash over the weapons 0’20” each

And at this point I had to go to bed…

Next session started with white oil edge-highlight, the greatest time-sink in whole process – 24’00” each.

And from here everything was easy and fast:

Black oil wash (overall) : 0’45”, head details (green lines and violet/pink mouth): 1’10”, varnish 0’45”.

I didn’t paint their headgear – I assumed the wash and some white over-spray on the black were enough.

All in all, they both look rather similar, yet the one started with white took 70,6 minutes and the black 75,5. That being said, total time spent painting those two was somewhere between 3,5- 4h (including beverage, and toilet breaks, mixing paints, waiting for the paint to dry and cleaning airbrush).

The process can be leaned further, and goal time would be around 1h – 1h 5’ per mini, starting from white primer.

Final product.

Apparently it is good a good idea to keep record of painting recipes, thus I put together bellow step by step, to have it on hand whenever I paint Defiance minis. I had to break this in two parts due to projects system limitations.

I wanted to find out the fastest way to paint Defiance enemies – and in the end generally Combined Army/Shasvasti models from Defiance. I started with two Nox and primed them with white and black (by airbrush).

BTW, sorry for unpleasant backdrop, I was just working fast.

To have reference, I worked with stopwatch. I turned it on for each instance of application of paint (not for preparation, mixing, drying, cleaning airbrush etc.).

Priming by airbrush took:

White: 0’20”

Black: 0’45” (I have no idea where the difference comes from)

Next, on my black model I applied white on each part that was planned to be red in the end. I used big (size 8) brush

White: 0”

Black: 1’35”

Then the same places (on both models) were painted with sunny skin tone – this isn’t opaque colour and need a couple of layers. To make my exercise even more scientific (???), I switched from brush to airbrush between models.

White: 6’40” – brush

Black: 1’45” – airbrush

Following that I repainted (on black Nox) or painted (on the white one) all the armour with black (both with traditional brush).

White: 10’40” + 8’45” (the second value describes time spent on fixing errors made with black),

Black: 18’0” + 8’15”(with this one, I thinned black paint too much and had to apply two or three layers, thus the difference),

Next was a simple step of establishing “light points” as Giraldez calls them. Since it was sepoused to bequick job I didn’t spend time gradually building them up – I just sprayed some white ink here and there (paying some attention to keep it generally top to bottom direction).

Both: 2’20” + 1’ for retouching some skin tone areas which were over-spayed. From this point on, both were taking similar amounts of time, I used same techniques on each of them.

Actually her name is Dr Chen and she comes from Unitr 9 over on Patreon, but after looking at the third photo I couldn’t shake off the notion that she actually looks like Austrian flag. I guess this is telling how much I miss skiing this year.

Anyway, I like minis like this one, just enough details to give her character and not to swamp the sculpt with nonsense.