In Which I Start Painting My Night Lords Finally! But Then Realise That Vallejo Paint Just Isn't Going to Cut It!

With the name of this blog being 'Fifty Shades of Night', and what with it having a large (if crudely drawn) Night Lords emblem at the top, you might be forgiven for wondering why I haven't actually mentioned any Night Lords yet!  Well wonder no more, because I finally started painting them - now I've completed the Ravenwing Sgt, my next little project is the Chaos Chosen Champion 'Draznicht' from the Dark Vengeance boxed set.  This guy is going to be a test for my Night Lords colour scheme - which I thought I had worked out.  It was going to be based around a black undercoat, followed by the Vallejo Game Colour shade 'Night Blue':

Night Blue looked like the perfect shade - and it obviously comes in the Vallejo dropper bottle, which I love.  But my affair with Night Blue was short lived.  With the few Vallejo paints I own, I'd noticed that I tend to get quite a glossy finish - you can just about see this on the radar screen of the Ravenwing Sgt I posted last time if you're interested here.  A quick Google search showed me that I wasn't alone in having this problem, but also that the solution is simple (if quite annoying) - you just have to shake many Vallejo paints for quite a long time in order to get a matte finish.  No problem I thought - at least the bottle design saves me time and fuss, offsetting that a bit.  But when you've shaken a bottle for a couple of minutes - as I did with Night Blue - you'd probably expect it to be a very consistent shade.  This was not my experience here - my Chosen Champion currently has one leg which looks a much lighter blue than the other - even though both were painted within minutes of each other.  That's the first problem I found.  The second is that this paint chips easily!  Again, a quick Google search shows me that I'm not alone with this problem either.  To be fair, this problem might have been compounded by the fact that I basecoated the mini with Citadel/GW Imperial Primer (black), which is extremely easy to chip (unlike a spray undercoat).  But usually when I use Imperial Primer, I find that after a top coat has been applied, it's pretty resilient to chipping damage.  Night Blue does not give this effect at all - I can very easily remove paint with my fingernail, and around the model's feet, the paint has worn away a lot already.  This might not be a big issue - I usually varnish my models when they're finished anyway, but as I'm going to be painting a whole army of Night Lords, there's no way I want to put up with this from the main colour that I'm using - I would spend my life touching up scratches on half-finished minis.

Vallejo paints do have a lot going for them - as I've mentioned, I find the bottle design to be at least 1001% better than the Citadel/GW pots - and they're certainly much cheaper (as well as containing more paint).  I'm a massive fan of Vallejo's Acrylic Thinner Medium - as followers will know - so I'm certainly not biased against Vallejo, and I think it's good that GW don't have a total monopoly on painting supplies (especially because they're so cut-throat), but there's no way I can use this paint.  I'm looking around for a cheaper alternative, but I think I'm going to have to go with Citadel Kantor Blue as the solution to my problem.  One thing I might start doing with paints that I use regularly however, is to decant them into Vallejo dropper bottles.  Citadel should really start using these - especially at the extortionate prices that they charge.

Ravenwing Bike Sgt Complete (Just About)!

This blog seems to be doing my painting good - today I found that I had the motivation to finish the Dark Vengeance Ravenwing Bike Sgt that I've been working on for waaaaaay too long!  Well, I say 'finish' - he obviously isn't based yet, and I need to write something on the scroll on his right shoulder pad.  I've not highlighted the tyres yet either - but I may want to match that to the basing, which I haven't decided on yet (this being the first Dark Angel I've painted), so that can wait.  I really wish there is some way I could fill the gaps down the centre of this model, but it would have been almost impossible to paint if I had properly assembled it first :(  Anyway, without further a do, here it is:

Far from perfect I know, but as I say, I'm still learning! :P  Seeing as I was talking about adding 'eyeliner' (or should that be 'guyliner') to human models in yesterday's post, here's a close up crop of this Sergeant's face:

The eye on the right (his left) is the one I painted first, and for some reason it seems to have been the more successful of the two!  I think we can agree that 'eyeliner' makes a big difference on models like this though - it makes them look a lot more human and realistic.  It's annoying that you can see so many imperfections in the paintwork when it's blown up like this, but they aren't quite so noticeable in real life.

Just for fun (and an an attempt to help those newer to painting than I am), I've decided to show all the paints I used on this model.  I think I used nearly everything I own!  You can see them all in the photo below, which also shows you how messy my workspace is - something that I really ought to fix!  It's especially annoying when dust/crap from doing conversions gets into your paint!  Anyway, here they are:

One especially cool paint that I forgot to add to the picture is Vallejo Metal Medium.  This stuff is basically a plain white metallic that you can mix with other acrylics to make a metallic version of that colour.  I've not actually tried doing that yet, but I found that it made a great highlight for the GW Boltgun Metal paint that I used on the blades of the chainsword - it's much brighter than the Mithril Silver I'd normally use, and gives a really 'sharp' look to the blades.  I will report back when I've actually used the product the way it was intended to see how it works!  Hopefully it will be as good as Vallejo Thinner Medium, which I love (I promise I'm not on commission from Vallejo)!  Anyway, that's all for this post - I just thought I'd show off the latest fruits of my labours - this being a painting blog and all :P

First Post - And An Ode to Acrylic Thinner

Hi, and welcome to my new blog 'Fifty Shades of Night'!  Firstly I'd like to thank my friend Ben for helping me come up with the name - which he assures me will 'increase traffic'.  So if my blog becomes swamped with horny middle-aged women, it's all his fault!

This is going to be a painting blog, based mainly around my quest to paint up a 40k Night Lords Chaos Space Marines army (hence the name).  I also have a H.R. Giger (and Alienids) inspired Tyranid army that I'm doing, along with the Dark Angels from the Dark Vengeance 6th edition boxed set, and a load of other stuff - including a magnetised Goliath gang for playing WYSIWYG Necromunda.

I started painting miniatures from a very young age, and my first visit to GW was with my parents when I was still in primary school, to buy 'plastic paints' so that I could paint my toy soldiers (the green plastic kind).  After a while I stopped doing that, but got into collecting GW stuff in a big way in high school - although I hardly ever played.  I kinda stopped this when I discovered cars, drinking and girls, at around age 17.  Fast forward a few years, and I'm now 28 years old and fully nerdy again, yay!  Until recently I had a weekly Necromunda campaign going with a couple of mates, and this has got me back into the hobby in a big way.  Anyway, I've been getting plenty of practice in with my painting, and I reckon that I'm now better than I was when I was a teenager.  I'm by no means the best painter, but I thought I'd start a blog to share my experiences and learn from those of others.  

To give you a taster, here's the very first miniature I painted after my long hiatus - a Goliath ganger named 'Big Louie'.  He eventually ended up leading my gang, and I made a conversion of the same model holding a plasma gun.  I'm proud of the conversion, but it still hasn't got painted unfortunately!

Let me know what you think!  I think I've improved a lot since I painted this earlier this year.  The biggest tip I've discovered is to paint 'eyeliner' on my human minis by painting a 50/50 mix of black/brown into the eye socket before I paint the 'eyeball'.  This gives a nice outline effect (unlike that seen on Big Louie here).  It also makes it a bit easier to paint the eyeball part as it increases contrast and you can see what you are doing a bit better.

Anyway, this week I've mainly been raving about this stuff - Vallejo Acrylic Thinner Medium.

You'll notice I've written 'awesome' there - and that's because it is!  This stuff is just amazing, and I can see it really changing my painting habits.  Every blog I read from pro-painters or skilled amateurs recommends thinning your paints - and this has had me a bit confused, because every time I thin my paints to the 'consistency of milk' (as they all seem to recommend), they begin to run like washes, and even kind of bubble away from the surface I'm trying to cover as if it is greasy or something.  This stuff almost completely stops that from happening.  It mixes in really easily (although it looks like it wouldn't), and even comes in that ultra-handy Vallejo dropper bottle, so you don't have to dirty your brush to get it in your palette.  I can't wait to see how this works in conjunction with Vallejo Acrylic Retarder, which I also have a bottle of sat on my work desk, but unfortunately my skill-set doesn't include wet-blending yet!  Anyway, for a couple of quid I highly recommend this stuff - which I bought through eBay.  It's been helping me to paint the Ravenwing biker Sergeant that I've almost got finished (pics soon).

Anyway, thanks for reading and please follow me if you enjoyed my post - I'll be back soon :)