Hi everyone,

I've been back in the hobby since last October and still trying to get my army painted up.

I wouldn't mind except I'm not exactly trying to paint up to Golden Daemon standard, just trying to get my High Elves up to a reasonable standard and get enough painted that I've actually got an army I can take to tournaments (or even out of the house without stuff falling off the bases).

So far I've got 560 points worth of models over 4 units painted to a basic-ish degree, although I've not done anything with the bases yet other than a quick coat of one of the brown paints.

These first two pictures are a couple of general shots of my assembled forces.







This is a shot of my work in progress on the White Lion cloaks



Finally this is the current status of my first stab at a Dragon Prince - i've currently spent about 3 hours on this (no, really) and feel like I've barely got anywhere with it. I've just done an initial layer of Boltgun Metal over the armour with Burnished Gold. Still need to decide what I'm going to do for the colour of the shaft of the lance as well as the cloth bits on the legs (I've actually decided to give up on the white cloth in my army and try a different colour)



anyway, I hope to update this as and when I actually finish stuff and hopefully improve on it as well.

Barely competent is pretty harsh man, your stuff is nice and really crisp and clean, which is normally important, but even more so with HE, looking good, and the moment you do something with the bases it'll make a massive difference.

A couple of quick suggestions; it looks like some of your paints could do with a little more watering down (e.g. the brown on the axeshafts in the first picture, although the white lions in the last picture look much smoother so maybe you've already done this/got a new paint or something), also I'd consider adding a little more depth to the leather, maybe with a wash or something.

Looking forwards to more pics

Byronic wrote:A couple of quick suggestions; it looks like some of your paints could do with a little more watering down (e.g. the brown on the axeshafts in the first picture, although the white lions in the last picture look much smoother so maybe you've already done this/got a new paint or something), also I'd consider adding a little more depth to the leather, maybe with a wash or something.

Yeah, in the rush to try and get stuff actually done I forgot to water the paint down (you can see the same on the arms of some of the White Lions if you look closely). Unfortunately the White Lions in the last picture were from an earlier stage in painting - I decided to make the axe handles a lighter brown so they're mostly all in the same predicament as I was busy trying to make sure I got all the handles the same colour while I'd got paint mixed up.

At the moment I'm planning to get away with the minimum I can so I can meet the minimum painting requirements for tournaments so I can actually enter them but go back and try and improve the finish on things like leather as and when I get the time.

I'm just a bit peeved that it looks like it's going to take me an age to paint the Dragon Princes as I've got 10 of the blighters to paint for my current 1999 point list which means I'm probably going to have to wait even longer before I can consider entering tournaments

if you're looking at doing the minimum maybe you could paint them basecoat style, say chainmail followed by a wash or something, they'll look o.k, and when you do have time to finish them of you'll be able to do it straight away without any prepping?

I might do... This first one is just so that I can check that I'm happy with the final result and that I know the order i'm going to paint the various parts of the model in.

I'm with byronic on this, you've got a nice tidy paintjob going on there.

For the dragon prince it looks like you've probably been a little too fussy over your painting. I've become very lazy on my metals with the range of washes which are out now, my process is:
Step 1 - Paint all metal chainmail (gives a good basecoat for gold colours to get a decent layer on and ideal start for most silver metals.
Step 2 - Wash with Badab black or your choice of washes (I like to use purple on my silver metals) actually will usually do multiple washes of different colours.
Step 3 - pick out raised areas in silver/chainmail to taste and golds in gold of choice.

My gut feel is that would take you quite close to where you are right now and I've found it to be dead simple to do, longest part is the drying time on the washes so you'd not be painting for 3 hours.

As for your feel of not getting very far with it I know exactly where you're coming from. Painting dwarfs a lot of them are heavily armoured so you spend a lot of time working on a model which comes out looking 'mostly silver' which is pretty much where you started before undercoating it! Once you get putting a bit of colour onto the model it will suddenly start to spring to life, but I always like to do the metals first as it allows you to be a bit messier with the basecoat/wash and don't need to worry about ruining anything else.

All the stuff you've finished is looking really nice though, so just push on and trust in your abilities.

Dave wrote:For the dragon prince it looks like you've probably been a little too fussy over your painting. I've become very lazy on my metals with the range of washes which are out now, my process is:
Step 1 - Paint all metal chainmail (gives a good basecoat for gold colours to get a decent layer on and ideal start for most silver metals.
Step 2 - Wash with Badab black or your choice of washes (I like to use purple on my silver metals) actually will usually do multiple washes of different colours.
Step 3 - pick out raised areas in silver/chainmail to taste and golds in gold of choice.

Well as I said, at the moment I've just applied Boltgun Metal and Burnished Gold. The plan was to then wash with Badab Black and highlight with Chainmail, Mithril Silver and Shining Gold before doing the face, jewels, lance and cloth.

I had been wondering whether it might have been best not to do the inital Burnised Gold and wait until I'd washed the model - I should probably have done a couple of models side by side so I could compare and contrast which is what i did with my spearmen

Dave wrote:As for your feel of not getting very far with it I know exactly where you're coming from. Painting dwarfs a lot of them are heavily armoured so you spend a lot of time working on a model which comes out looking 'mostly silver' which is pretty much where you started before undercoating it! Once you get putting a bit of colour onto the model it will suddenly start to spring to life, but I always like to do the metals first as it allows you to be a bit messier with the basecoat/wash and don't need to worry about ruining anything else.

Well the reason doing this DP seems to be affecting me more than Spearmen or Sword Masters, which themselves are mostly metal areas, is that there's actually very, very little that isn't metal on it.

Aside from the lance, face and a teensy bit of saddle and stirrups, there's only a smidgen of cloth on either leg and a couple of tiny jewels everything is metal. If I were a more accomplished painter I might have gone for a colour on the plate mail rather than a metalic but I don't think I'm yet far enough along to achieve a good result doing that and as I've decided to move away from doing white cloth I don't want to go with a colour that doesn't end up complementing whichever colour I do decide on.

nice and neat you do certainly undervalue yourself
i have high elves too and they are definately my hardest army to paint
empire and chaos are easier to get a good efect but with the elves you have to be so neat or they look pants.
the spearmen bring back memories

A lot of people done realise getting a good solid basecoat is fundimentally important in painting and is hard to master the neatness of colour - personally i think you have a nice looking army waiting to come out there. Only criticism is the metallics look to thick - the bobbling is where dried bits of paint are being applied - do you water your paints down before you apply them? Metallics tend to be very goopey and need to be thinned. I used to paint ina very similar way - straight from the pot not a lot of shading back when i was younger.

As for the dragon princes - the ones i did in my army i drybrushed with a tank brush over black - Chainmail - light drubrush mithril

Black and Blue ink mix wash

Next a chainmail over brush

Finally line lightlighted in mithril then gave a thin black glaze / wash to redefine the cracks

Very simple - that was my biggest problem with the DP models - too much armour on them and not much else

Russ Veal wrote:A lot of people done realise getting a good solid basecoat is fundimentally important in painting and is hard to master the neatness of colour - personally i think you have a nice looking army waiting to come out there. Only criticism is the metallics look to thick - the bobbling is where dried bits of paint are being applied - do you water your paints down before you apply them? Metallics tend to be very goopey and need to be thinned. I used to paint ina very similar way - straight from the pot not a lot of shading back when i was younger.

I have started watering down my Boltgun metal as that one is definitely thickening up (I'm just about at the bottom of the pot now). I started a second Dragon Prince last night and started with Chainmail rather than Boltgun and did water that down although straight out of the pot it seems a lot thinner than my Boltgun did. My Burnished Gold I still wonder if the pot I bought had been pre-watered down as it just doesn't seem to go on too well

Russ Veal wrote:As for the dragon princes - the ones i did in my army i drybrushed with a tank brush over black - Chainmail - light drubrush mithril

Black and Blue ink mix wash

Next a chainmail over brush

Finally line lightlighted in mithril then gave a thin black glaze / wash to redefine the cracks

Very simple - that was my biggest problem with the DP models - too much armour on them and not much else

Well I washed the DP I posted the picture of in Badab Black last night and think i should have watered it down a bit more as its come out very dark - a lot darker than seems to have happened on the other Elven models I started from a Boltgun base coat, although that may be because there's a lot more places for the wash to cling on the DP as opposed to the other stuff.

The DP I started with a base of chainmail last night I plan to do a wash on tonight but will definitely be trying to remember to water the wash down a bit and maybe apply a few thin washes so that I can get the look I'm going for.

I've also decided to limit how much gold I do. Still going to do the dragon heads in gold with gold radiated out on the helmet and bit on the lance, the trim round the mail and the bit above the jewel on the chest plate, but i think i'm just going to highlight the other raised bits with Mithril