The dock

After painting the trees it was quite natural to start painting the wooden docks. First some repainting with the base color.

I used slightly greyish brown for the fist drybrush. In the pictures it looks little bit too brown

Dr. Arkadius confirmed that I was on the right path with these hexes.

I will use lighter brown for the next drybrush. I would like these planks to be little bit more greyish so let's see where the next highlite drybrush takes us.

Flu and some spare time

There is one good thing that comes with flu and that's the time left for other stuff when you can't physically train. It's not just yet the knock-you-down-and beats-you-up-kind of flu so I can continue with the hex tiles.

Now that I know the color scheme I started painting other stuff also and could for the first time to really see how they interact as a whole. I like!

Let's see how this turn out..

I used very simple weather effect for the rails and it worked like a charm. I just dapled the darker base color on top of the bright grey. I will weather the pieces more in the future.

Because the table itself will be mostly grey I want some color there also without ruining the overall look. I decided to make the trees little bit orange. This is after the first drybrush.

I think that these trees will be the only ones which are alive on the city hexes. Others will be bigger but dead. Why? I don't kown, I just like the idea. Maybe there is something special in this hex.

New direction with the color scheme

Well, I was drybrushing some of the pieces and had a revelation about the whole color scheme.

I used very light grey to make the final highlite on the paving and then decided to try to use it and another darker grey more on different objects on the hexes. I have had a idea to make the board to look little unnatural and even spooky and I think that this is the right way because I use the same colors everywhere BUT with different concentration. 

 

I think that the color scheme will look even better when I finish the hexes with grass, leaf, trees and stuff.

Onward!

I have decided to try to arrange hobby time at least once a week. It may sound funny but even that will require some planning to get everything to fit in a week (family, work, training and wrestling) and still get enough sleep. Few years ago I could easily build and paint stuff past midnight and wake up fresh, but now that some water has gone by I have found that I need at least that 8 hours of sleep to be able to recover from life and training.

Yesterday all the stars were in line and I even got something done. To get things moving I painted the last two finished city hexes. Well, finished is a wrong term because I had planned to add more decoration and stuff to these pieces but know I think that it's better to just move on.

My initial plan were to use a basecoat with two drybrush layers, then use dark wash to darken the soil under the tiles and finish it of with light drybrush. I tried to make my own wash with the instructions from The Leadhead but although I used my darkest brown the wash was too light and didn't look right. I had to repaint the piece but that's how things sometimes go. I also though about using black wash but I don't like to use black with terrain because it's quite unnatural in my opinion. Instead of the wash I just used light grey to drybrush the tiles and I think that the result is good enough. If I find dark brown ink somewhere I might give the wash another go.

 If you are a terrain maker remember always keep your eyes open for discount brushes. I have bought countless brush sets in the past and now it's very easy to just choose a right tool for the job.

You can take the man out of hobby, but not the hobby out of man

Sometimes you just need a little push. This time it came from Privateer Press forums in a shape off a user named Shoobie. He just commented my thread that "just finish something". F**CKING brilliant!! I have too long though about what I need to do (and in which I don´t have time) rather than what I CAN do. Those harbor hexes have stood there finished for months and I just didn´t pick those up and therefore stalled, badly.

So, today I grapped my brush after five months (?!) of hiatus and let it go.

How can you tell that my hiatus lasted too damn long?

I used very dark grey over the brown basecoat

Over that I drybrushed blueish grey

Of course Dr. Arkadius came to check what the hell was going on.

After the drybrush and with some scenery.

 How about with a house?

I will continue with some drybrushing and ageing but you know, I think that this will end up rather nice!

This session, again, showed me how frigging great and important this hobby is to me!

Until it feels right..

When I build my harbor houses I remember that somebody asked me why it took so long to finish only three houses. I said that I call the project finished when it feels right. Now the same is happening with the Zombicide survivors. I try to follow the character sheets colors but still try to work as fast as possible. The funny thing is that when something doesn´t feel right I just can´t let it be.

I painted Watts trousers brown and moved on but there was something wrong. I pondered it for a while and decided that the brown on the trousers was too cold. So I opted for warmer color, Bestial Brown. The difference is not huge BUT it felt right immediately.

Bestial Brown on the right

Bestial brown on the left. Here you can see the difference better

Well whats the point? The point is that although this correction took only 5 minutes, imagine how long it takes me to build or correct something big or huge when "it doesn´t feel right"? So don´t ask me when the harbor TABLE is ready =)

Slow progress

It´s really annoying when your own mistakes and laziness creeps up with you after some time. Now that my painting table is in order and I´m back painting some miniatures, I constantly have to stop and maintain my paints because they resemble more snot than paint. This of course have happened because I obviously haven´t had the time and effort to do something about my large collection of paints for quite some time. Yes, it would take some time to do this every now and then but in hindsight it wouldn´t be a annoying little problem when painting.

Well, live and learn. Here is Watts at the moment.

Painting Zombicide Season 2 Survivors.

I finally got my hobby hut in order (it took almost three weeks) and because it´s now clean and really invites you to do something I immediately got the new survivors out and started painting.

The fun side is that now I also have to paint the Zombivor version, not just the survivors. I think that I will tackle two survivors at a time so four minis under the brush at the same time.

 I really think that the details of these minis are exceptional in spite that these are rather soft plastic. When compared to the Season 1 survivors the Guillotine Games have really pushed the quality forward. I remember that Wanda from Season 1 was quite bad but every mini in Season 2 seems to be ok.

I have used white under paint before for important figures and I used it here also. White gives a nice "pop" and brightness for the colors and this way the survivors differ nicely from the masses of zombies (which have a brown base coat and a heavy dark wash). Now days I use white glossy spray paint from the local hardware shop because it´s cheap and I think that the next layer of paint spreads really well over it.

First survivors who get the paintjob are Grindlock and Watts!

I like to follow the paint scheme from the cards with the figures so that the aesthetics of the game remain. So first the white, then the base colors and finally some highlights. Nothing fancy or time consuming. Here is a line up after the base colors:

These will rock!!