Right at the ragged end of the year, one last blog update!
Been getting a bunch of painting done this month, including the hatted bug guy seen in the last post. There’s also some Footsore Trolls mostly done and a scattering of other stuff on the painting bench!
The workbench at the very end of 2024. A small crew of WIP science fiction figures, three lovely Footsore trolls mostly finished, a whole batch of 3d printed barrels, and a scattering of other random stuff being gradually worked on.
They’re not great pictures, but here’s a couple of closeups of the most recent finished-except-for-the-base figure. This is some sort of Games Workshop Chaos Beastperson minotaur, I think, snagged earlier in 2024 as GW’s free in-store figure of the month. They had a silly spiked club/mace thing that I chopped off and converted into a big choppy sword, but are otherwise stock.
Captain Spacecow front view.Captain Spacecow rear view.
I’m trying to push my highlighting and edges more than I usually do, and have also been trying to add texture with paint more. It’s most obvious on Captain Spacecow’s horns and the blue piece of cloth/armour/whatever on their back, but there’s also fur texture on the torso and lower legs that isn’t really obvious in either of these photos.
The painted fur texture was directly inspired by this video from Vince Venturella. His entire YouTube channel is worth a look, he’s got loads of great videos that I’ve been watching a bunch of the last month or two.
Happy New Year and Happy Holidays. Hope 2025 is good for you and yours!
A while ago our local GW store was giving away a single Tyranid bug-warrior figure for free. Of course I snagged one, who doesn’t want free stuff? I’m never going to bother playing 40k, but a random free figure? Sure!
I glued the critter together (GW makes some… interesting engineering choices in how their figures fit together, some of the parts are weird AF…) and then it lurked on the corner of my painting bench for months and months.
Then I realized that in Corey’s in-development Under Alien Suns rules you could run damn near anything as a crew, so I kitbashed together half a dozen figures a couple months ago and decided, for the hell of it, to grab a hat with big feathers on it from my 17th Century plastic stash and glued it to bug-guy’s head.
Then in the doldrums of the year I finally primered the whole motley crew and starting painting them. Bug-guy caught my attention and he got finished today, right from primer to done (barring some cleanup on the base) just today.
Not-a-Tyranid. That’s Specialist Ghar under a dashing hat (they never explain the hat) loping through the scruffy weird universe of Under Alien Suns, or whatever other oddball SF skirmish we get up to!
I went purple for the exoskeletal bits, dark red/black for the flesh bits, and bright green for the rifle that may or may not be grown right out of bug-guy. I’m really pleased with the highlighting, especially of the purple and the gun.
Specialist Ghar’s other side. Click, as usual, for larger.
I’ll be getting paint on the rest of his crewmates in the next few days; I don’t go back to work until Jan 6 of 2025 so probably have time to finish all of them!
PaintRack is an Android & iOS phone/tablet app I discovered a few years ago ago, used a little bit, then during a reorganization of my chaotic painting bench remembered the existence of. This little review has sat in my Drafts folder for a couple of years, but it’s worth hitting publish on because the app continues to be really solid and useful!
The core of PaintRack is a paint library/inventory system to help you track which paints you own. It comes pre-loaded with a huge library from dozens of manufacturers, and can use your device’s onboard camera to scan the barcodes on your paint bottles to make creating your inventory as painless as possible. The free version will only scan one bottle at a time, but the paid version has a feature called RapidScan that lets you do a whole batch of scanning then update your inventory all at once. The paid version is only a few bucks, I highly recommend the purchase!
My inventory screen, with Reaper selected as that’s my main paint supplier.The RapidScan barcode scanner in action.Sets – the painting notes utility. Mostly used for WW1/WW2 stuff that has to be vaguely uniform in my case, apparently…Color Tools, figuring out which random Vallejo colour I don’t own is close to something I do own.Part of the Setting page – the app has a “backup to our website” option just in case you bork your phone. Have used that at least once…
PaintRack is actively working with various paint manufacturers to get their lines into the app, so if you’re Kickstarting the latest celebrity painter’s private line of paints the app probably already has their stuff available.
It isn’t just wargaming or model paints like Vallejo, GW, or Reaper in the onboard inventory, there’s art supply companies like Windsor & Newton and craft paints like Deco and Apple Barrel listed too, which means it can be useful for scenery painting or for those of us who branch out beyond just the game store paints.
There’s a Sets tool that’s basically a notepad for painting schemes that links into your inventory, and a set of Color Tools for developing colour schemes and picking paints for your inventory that are close matches to paints you don’t own (very useful for trying to follow other people’s painting tutorials!).
PaintRack also has a Wishlist shopping list feature, potentially very useful if you’re standing in front of a massive wall of paint at your favourite local hobby store trying desperately to remember which weirdly named colour it was you were missing at home! I think it’ll also tie into your Amazon account for online purchases, but I don’t give Noted Sociopath Jeff Bezos money if at all possible so I haven’t explored that part of the app.
