Palette Portrait

I have finally -- finally! -- gathered all the paints needed for my next project. It took a lot longer than I expected it to, because I had some issues getting a couple of colors right -- mainly, the different shades of turquoise for the base and highlight. Then I needed to find a complementary color range to use for things like cloaks and banners (more on how I did that a little later in this post).

Anyway, once the colors were decided and then matched to a real-world equivalent, it became my quest to actually find all the ones I didn't have locally and buy them. I have this thing about buying things locally -- if there's a business in town that carries what I need I'll go there and buy it. Now what with me being a network engineer (well, ok that was my title, before my promotion) that I would be all up in the whole Internet shopping. For most things, you'd be right, but when it comes to hobby-related things, I keep my money in Austin...it's just a thing I do.

Anyway, it took a little time and a little driving about town but I finally got everything I needed and thought I'd share this little portrait of me next project's palette. :)

Now...can any of you guess what my next project is based simply on the colors in the palette? (And no fair telling, fellow Austinites!) I have a feeling some of you just might be able to get it right...

Now let me tell you about a couple of nifty little resources I discovered in my quest to match paint colors to colors in a digital image:

Let's say you have a digital picture or document that has colors you want to match. If you've had artistic training you can probably do it without thinking about it too much. Well...I don't, so...technology to the rescue!

First thing I opened the image in Photoshop CS4. There's a tool in Photoshop that lets you "sample" a color and it will return the "values" of the color in several formats, including RGB "hex" color codes used in web pages. I took a few random samples of the color and then proceeded over to Color Match v1.0. If you've never used this site before...I highly suggest you check it out. You feed it a color -- either one from the extensive list of paint ranges that's available, or by RGB hex value. I fed it the value I'd gotten from Photoshop, unrestricted the paint ranges it would choose from, hit the button and 2 seconds later I"m looking at a graphic of my chosen color surrounded by the six closest matches from it's dat abase (and like I said, it's pretty extensive). After that I used a couple of other sites (that, I just realized, are on my other laptop so I don't have the links for them...let me know if you want them and I'll pop them up later). that will take a color (again, by RGB hex value) and present you with the complementary, contrast, split complement and "box" colors of your color from the color wheel. I think it's pretty bad ass.

Finally, I took the hex values from the color "theme" generating sites and put them back into Color Match and badda bing, badda boom I had the info on the colors I needed.

So there you have it: a portrait of the palette and how I got the paints matched to colors in a digital image.

How about you guys? How do you choose your color schemes? Ever use one of those nifty color wheel thingies? How did things turn out?

Terminator Pics (or, "Screwing Around Trying to Learn the Camera, Light-box and Lighting")

Holy crap, it seems just like yesterday I was talking about putting up some sample pics that resulted from taking some test pics with the light-box. But it wasn't "only yesterday", come tomorrow it will have been a week since that post -- which means, ultimately, is that I should have been able to smell the FAIL in that idea. :)

Fast-forward through this craptacular week until last night. I was finally had the time to pull it all together and take a few pics with the new gear. Adding new gear into your photo-making world is pretty much like adding a new brush into your painting tools. Sometimes making only a change or two can have fairly dramatic (and sometimes unforeseen) consequences and will take time for you to learn how to use the new tools and smoothly integrate it into your processes. It can also reveal deficiencies in your existing gear, too -- I realized almost immediately that I don't have enough "proper" light sources to use the box most effectively. These photos have fourescent, CFL, and incandescent light sources...and that's probably the worst mix of light temperatures to attempt capturing the subject's color accurately. Don't get me wrong, I knew this going IN to this little "photo shoot" but I made the best with what I had on hand. Needless to say, a trip to Lowe's is in order to purchase more "shop lights" and "daylight" CFL bulbs before I try to take any more pics.

Luckily, it's Photoshop to the rescue (as it often is when you're dealing with digital images). If you're unfamiliar with digital image manipulation software, there's a halfway-decent tutorial on CMON that covers the very basic basics. And if you don't have Photoshop (and it's an expensive beast, I'll grant you that), well that's OK, you can always use The GIMP. It's free, open-source software that works, and works very well (having most of the core functionality of Photoshop).

Like most things, though, do a little research and a little reading and you'll quickly learn how to "clean up" your images with minimal effort.

Also keep in mind that I did VERY little image manipulation on these pics, spending only a couple of minutes on each one. So while they look pretty good...they could look a lot better if I wanted to spend the time to do it -- but for my purposes at this point, I think they're acceptable.

Another trick I need to learn is improving the "detail" shots -- you know, when you want to highlight a specific detail or two on the mini. Planning the shots out before (or while) you've got the camera on the tripod will really pay off. One thing's for certain, you're probably not going to get that nice "money shot" of those details if you didn't take some good pics of them in the first place. :)

Now if only the Blogger editor could handle image placement in blog postings, we'd be in business. But for some reason, it doesn't, and by that I mean, "Yes, it does, but BOY does it SUCK." If anyone has any tips or knows of a way to place images in blog postings using a WYSIWYG editor, please let me know, because the stock editor is FAIL.

Oh, and before you even suggest it: No, I'm really not interested in cranking out some custom HTML code to make pictures display exactly where I want them to. C'mon guys, it can't be THAT had. I'm pretty sure both Microsoft Office and Sun's OpenOffice have word processors that'll do it...get with the program, Google, and suck less! :)

Anyway, enough about that. I mean it's not like you can't place images in the posting at all (obvioiusly, huh?).

This final image is the one I'm most happy with (or should that be, "least disappointed in"?). I did a tiny bit more image manipulation on it (though the background -- at least in the image presented to me in the Blogger editor -- looks kinda like ass and could definitely use some tidying up.

Ah well, that's a project for some other time. :)

So what do you use for taking pics of your minis? Any specific gear? What about where you take those pics? Indoors? Outdoors? In your secret underground lair? What about touching those pics up before posting them? Any specific steps or procedures you'd like to share?

The "Secret Project" to Make Something That Will Make One Part of This Hobby Easier...

OK, longest post title ever...but it basically sums up what I've spent a few hours working on lately.

Here's a pic (taken with the camera on my phone, which is "eh" at best for this sort of thing) of the almost-completed light-box I built to make taking close-ups of minis easier.

I was going to go the "cut up a cardbox box to make the frame" route, which certainly works and does what a "light box" or "photo box" is supposed to do...but for some reason, that just didn't seem like sturdy enough (and yes, I know just how crazy that sounds). I figured if I was going to take the time to actually build something like that, I might as well make it so I only have to build it once. I know me, and knowing me, I'm pretty sure if I'd built one out of cardboard I would have damaged/destroyed it before getting more than one or two uses out of it.

I had a couple of ideas floating around in my head for a possible design. I was thinking about making the frame out of PVC tubing, or something similar. Not wanting to re-invent the wheel, I paid a visit to one of my most favorite sites in all the Internet: Instructables. A quick search yielded a potential design using electrical conduit, but that seemed perhaps a bit too involved. However a little more searching and I discovered this design, which utilized expandable window screen units and was "folding" for easy storage/travel and actually looked very professional. We had a winner!

I wasn't able to find "squard" window screens, so I had to modify one of the screens with the trusty Dremel to make it square for the back panel, but other than that I followed the plan from the instructable pretty closely.

I'm very pleased with the results. I picked up a "utility light' (basically a light-bulb socket and an aluminum reflector) and a couple more "Daylight" (6500K...supposedly, anyway) compact flourescent bulbs and I can pretty well flood the interor the light box with bight, diffuse light.

All that remains to be done is adding the "diffusing material" (yep, I used a cheap bed sheet, too) to the back panel (which I'm going to do today) and then do some trial runs. I'll post up some the results of the trial runs either today or tomorrow.

Anyway, that's my latest little tangential project to enhance my hobby experience. What little side projects have you taken on make something that will make some part of the 40K/WFB hobby easier, better, or simply more "professional" looking? Have you ever had an idea for something -- a new tool, some object, or maybe even a new process or way of doing things -- that you think would enhance your hobby in some way? If you have....share it! You never know what kind of inspiration you may get -- or give!

Back for the Attack!

So...it's been a while.

When I last updated, I was talking about getting my motivation back. Well, it's come back with a vengeance! I've been painting or modeling pretty much every night for the last couple of weeks.

What I've been focusing on is "learning to suck less at painting". I've been experimenting with new techniques, new paints, and even -- gasp! -- bought a "real" paintbrush...a Winsor & Newton Series 7 Size 0.

I've learned how to make a wash out of regular ol' paint. I've even learned some very rudimentary glazing methods. The one thing you'll notice in the pic is something "new" I've been working on, and that's highlighting. I'm far from great at it but I'm finally learning how to do it and I'm pleased with my progress so far.

I've spent a LOT of time haunting the Reaper Minis forums, especially the Painting Tips & Advice section. There are TONS of very experienced painters there, and all sorts of tutorials and advice and pretty much everything I've learned over the last few weeks I've gleaned it from there (or followed a link or two from there). If you'd like to learn more about painting, I'd recommend you check it out.

Plus I broke in the wife's new super-sexy Canon SD1100IS camera, and that's why I actually have a picture to show you (along with setting up a little area to actually photograph minis). I have some other things I want to share but I was just trying to get a decent pic out of out it and I think I did all right. Expect more to come in the future now that I have the camera and photo-place more-or-less sorted.

Anyway, about the mini in the picture. He's my new veteran sergeant (well, they're all veterans now, but that's the way I'm used to thinking about them). There's some minor conversion work in there, mainly the arm holding the pistol. I took one of the old "pointing hand" arms from the old Devastator set, whacked off the pointing hand and replaced it with the hand holding the bolt pistol. I had to use some green stuff to smooth out the join to the body, and it's not super-smooth but I'm OK with that, considering it's my first try at something like that. I had the pose in my head as what I really wanted to do and finding that pointy arm was the final piece to the puzzle. I would like to note that while I've heard they actually make one or two models with them, I can't for the life of me find a right-handed power fist! So I went with what I could find and I'm very pleased with the results.

As for paint, I used the Reaper Master Series "Ultramarie Triad" (which contains Ultramarine Shadow, Ultramarine Blue, and Ultramarine Highlight) for the majority of the work, though somewhere in the middle of it I purchased the RMS Blue Liner, and pretty much immediately switched to that for shading/shadows/darklining. The Blue Liner is superb -- dark, smooth, doesn't need much thinning (a trademark of all RMS paints, actually) and it plays very well with pretty much any shade of blue. I also picked up the RMS Clear Blue and did some glazing experiments with it (though not on this mini) and I'm very pleased with it, too.

I still have a couple of touch-ups to do here and there before I'll consider it 100% done, and I'm working on a base that isn't the ol' "rock and flock" (which I've used pretty much exclusively in the past).

I've also completed the terminator I talked about in my last post. I'm pleased with how it turned out, too. I'll get some pics of him up soon. I'm especially happy with his cyclone missile launcher.

On the painting table right now I have one more veteran sergeant and two multi-melta guys. They're very close to done as I worked on them at the same time I was working on this guy. Right now their bodies done, including highlighting, and I'm working on finishing the multi-melta parts and the power fist and bolter arm for the other sergeant and then they'll be ready to go.

When they're done, here's what I'll have left before my current Ultras list is fully painted:

Captain Agemman (A "counts-as" Lysander, so I'm using the Lysander model with some conversions)
8 Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield Terminators
2 Vindicators
1 Razorback
1 Land Raider

The vehicles will actually be pretty easy to do, as I'll fire up the ol' airbrush and knock them out. The TH/SS termis will take a while, but one of the reasons I've taken so long on the 4 guys I have on the table in progress is I've been experimenting and learning with them so doing the termis won't be a matter of conquering a learning curve. I'm not deluding myself, it's going to be a lot of work but I'm actually exciting about doing them now that I feel that my painting had taken a "next step". :)

I've also managed to play at least one game a week (except for last week) since I last updated, and that's gone very well. I've even played against a new guard list and pulled out a win (though admittedly there wasn't much of the "cheaty stuff" in the list, so I don't consider it a "true test"). I'm hoping to play JWolf soonish (note to self: talk to JWolf soon and see about arranging a game with him). I know he'll hand me my ass but it's all about the learning, and I'd like to see just how bad the new Guard is, and I'm pretty sure he'll be happy to show me. Painfully. :)

So, anyway, that's the news. I have quite a few posts planned in my head so stay tuned (or something like that).

How about you guys? What's on your painting table? What have you been pushing yourself to learn lately? What are your hobby plans for the next six months?