[Rambunctious]

Welcome to yet another "my first Dwarf" thread.

In my infinite wisdom I figured that I would start with one of my awesome eBay Ironbreakers. I thought to myself, how hard can it be, it's 95% silver right? As it turns out, not quite as simple as I had first thought. After about two hours of painting I am up to the following:



I know right, a silver and gold Ironbreaker, the most unique Dwarf piece ever? He also has a gold and blue shield (not shown ... yet)! I hate that it's so stereotypical but blue and Dwarfs go so well together ... I had initially planned to paint the model almost entirely silver with only a few gold decals, but I'm enjoying the gold look on him so I will likely be adding more areas in gold. I figure that Ironbreakers are wearing just about some of the highest quality armour in the Warhammer world, it should look like it.

Questions at this point:

1) How exactly do you guys go about adding water to your paints? It's definitely too thick when I take it directly out of the jar, but it seems that even with a drop or two of water it gets too watery and runs off to places I don't want it to. This is proving especially frustrating with the design on the shield, I have the blue/gold almost perfect then the gold decides to take a running leap onto the blue ...

2) Washes. What you see above has had maybe two or three coats of slightly watered (1 or 2 drops) Badab Black wash. It's starting to show a little now, but should it be THAT translucent? I am just wondering if I might be adding too much water. Maybe only one drop? I would test it myself but am scared of ruining the entire thing.

This post has been edited by Rambunctious: 31 March 2010 - 11:29 AM

[Ok Okri]

1) I usually water down my paints to the consistency I require. How watery your paint is will depend on the water/paint ratio. Just how much paint are you adding that water to? I imagine you are probably just overloading your brush. Try wiping the excess away.

2) Contrary to point 1, I imagine you are using too little. I heavily overload my brush when applying a wash. The nature of the wash requires it to be very diluted, so a thin wash isn't going to show much. You need it to settle more in the creases to deposit more pigment, which requires more fluid to be applied in those areas (I usually appy enough to obcure the detail I am shading).

[Rambunctious]

Ok Okri, on 05 March 2010 - 11:31 PM, said:

1) I usually water down my paints to the consistency I require. How watery your paint is will depend on the water/paint ratio. Just how much paint are you adding that water to? I imagine you are probably just overloading your brush. Try wiping the excess away.

Thus far I've been loading my brush with the paint then mixing it with the water in a plastic tray. I do try to wipe most of it away, I suppose it's a matter of practice, I seem to either have too much or too little. First mini I've painted in ten years.

Ok Okri, on 05 March 2010 - 11:31 PM, said:

2) Contrary to point 1, I imagine you are using too little. I heavily overload my brush when applying a wash. The nature of the wash requires it to be very diluted, so a thin wash isn't going to show much. You need it to settle more in the creases to deposit more pigment, which requires more fluid to be applied in those areas (I usually appy enough to obcure the detail I am shading).

Obscure the detail? I'm not sure I understand, shouldn't I be trying not to obscure detail? Little confused there, or maybe it's because it's almost 1am here.

[Dirken Thorn]

Looking good. I find i need to spice up the new ironbreakers because there is little left to paint after all that heavy armor. I like to use a brass/gold mix undercoat beneath any gold highlights or pieces. Expirement will all the mithril armor too, a diluted wash of midnight blue or a lighter blue like ultramarine, followed by a drybrush of mithril can bring out some great detail.

[Perv]

I find it very difficult watering paints down but I dont have to now due to all my paints drying up. I was too tight to buy new ones so I added in a load of Daler Rowney Flow Enhancer into them, a couple of cleaned pebbles and shook the buggers up. Work better than they ever did now Try adding a bit of flow enhancer instead of the water and see if that makes life easier for you as its worked wonders with my citadel paints.

Seems like you're watering down the wash too much mate and its more of a glaze. I find the citadel washes dont need to be diluted any further than a 50:50 mix with water for the final coat. Use Badab Black straight out the pot for washing the silver, drybrush again with silver, then do the 50:50 mix of Badab Black to water and use that as weak wash or a glaze to tie the shading in better.

When Ok Okri says he adds enough to obscure the detail he means it looks that way when the wash is applied, after its dried it looks different and the detail shows through fine. Sorry if I'm mistaken here.

[Barin]

You can use paints straight from the pot for basecoating, in this case the less strokes of brush you make, the better. For other work I mix a bit of paint and water in the pot cap.

As for the washes/inks, I'd pick inks over washes if you can still get them. Inks have to be strongly diluted but they do the job better IMHO. With modern washes you need to mix them in the pot, and dilute at least 50-50. It is always better to apply 2 washes than have a shiny beard on your model

Generally when i do armor I start with darkest metal I have, and then drybrush with brighter colour. For GW colours I use boltgun metal\chainmail\very light drybrush of mithril\wash of diluted black ink.

[Theo Frostbeard]

OH MY GOD, ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO WATER PAINTS DOWN?

Hah, why? If you water a paint down 50:50, it is not a paint anymore, but a wash!
And washes...should they TO be watered down? Holy cripes, why...?

Theo

[Barin]

Why I have a feeling that you're joking ?
The problem with inks and washes, that they can make unwanted parts of the mini shine instead of shade. On the other side you shouldn't dilute the washes too strongly, otherwise the figure may just get dirty

For drybrushing you should use undiluted colour, for more complicated technics you need to keep the paint thin if you want to get that smooth blending of CMON/GD finest.

[icewolff]

Great looking ironbreaker, looking good so far. have a nice ale on my tab,

i use always a different mixen of water and paint, almost all my collar is a different thickness so it always i try and mix to add up with a nice mix. so collar are 8 years old and still ok, and some of the newer collar only 1/2 year old are allready thick, i do not know why.

This post has been edited by icewolff: 05 March 2010 - 08:54 PM

[Rambunctious]

Thanks for all the comments thus far guys. Today:



The hammer is actually proving the most infuriating part of the model, so many perfectly straight lines on a flat surface.

But yes, as you can probably tell he's a little more blinged out now. The gold is actually much more brown than it appears in the photos which make it look very yellow, at least on my monitor. Still, my camera is an ooold point-and-shoot so I do what I can.

I've been using the washes without watering them down at all, or very little, and it's giving a better result. Kind of hard to tell from the photo but the shadows are a lot more prominent now. In my noobiness I would say this guy is coming fairly close to being finished, other than the base and of course the beard. Unfortunately, in my limited wisdom, I bought a whole bunch of paints and forgot to buy complimentary paints for different beards! Shame on me.

UPDATE:

In a random turn of events, my first "finished"(?) Ironbreaker is actually a totally different one to the one I've been working on thus far. I decided to start working on this second guy while my first was drying ... and didn't stop! Must like this model more? Anyhow, the grey/white beard is again a little cheesy but at least I had the colours to make it work ("work"). The photo also came out a lot better:



Don't you hate it when photos point out flaws that you couldn't initially see with the naked eye? I'm going to have to go back and repaint some of the silver where the gold has run over and I didn't notice ... mumble ...

Painting beards is definitely something I'm going to have to get the hang of sooner rather than later. I started this one out with Fortress Grey, bit of a dry-brush with Skull White then ran back over the top with a very watered down Badab Black to try and make the Skull White less stark and artificial looking. Still came out rather messy, but not as bad as I had feared. Phew.

As you can probably tell, painting the shield has also been more than a little challenging, but I suspect that is more a matter of practice than anything else. Anyhow, there it is. Before I started the whole "Ironbreaker" project I had thought to make the metal very bright, Mithril Silver bright, but I actually like the way the darker metal makes the Shining Gold just that much more striking. I doubt I will be winning any Golden Demons with this squad but I do not believe I would be embarassed to game with them, which is the standard I was hoping for (realist that I am).

This post has been edited by Rambunctious: 06 March 2010 - 06:34 AM

[Ingway Ironfist]

Very nice painting!NOW FINISH THE ARMY AND SHOW US MORE PHOTO'S.(please).

[boëndalin]

jeah, thats done really nice...

i would like to see more of your work

[Rambunctious]

In what I promise to be the last update until the unit is finished, I present the first three of my invincible defenders:



I've been working on the shields, the one in the centre is my very first attempt, the left and right are my "improved" versions. I have come to realise that perhaps only having boring beard paints on hand works for these models as the unremarkable beards don't draw attention away from the shining golden pain they are about to bring.

[Barin]

Looks good.I might add a black wash on their helmets to make small details stand out, and you may consider painting bigger rivets on the helms as gems. It will add just this small "vow" factor IB models need. I've been revisiting my iB several times, and in the end I've decided to paint almost all the rivets, but for sure that's up to you. Other dwarven units also have small gems here and there, so you may either pick a common colour, or take different colours for each unit.
And I suggest painting/flocking bases before final touches, so the model stands clean.

[Bucket Kjell]

Looking good.


This is what I like with the ironbreakers.  You get a unit that looks different from the others, but you still get the clan-colours on the shields  to tie it together.

An alternative to full wash of the metal is to use some diluted black ink on the nail-heads to get an enhanced shadow around it and then highlight the top of it again.  That gives more dept to the metal, and is a lot easier than to do NMM-painting.

This post has been edited by Bucket Kjell: 07 March 2010 - 02:28 PM

[Perv]

They're bloody good mate I looked on CMON and the highest rating an Ironbreaker has is 7.2. Theres no outstanding models on there. The 7.2 ones are very good but not master class and then the ones slightly lower, around the 7 rating, arent too much different from what you have here. Give yourself a pat on the back

May be an idea for some NMM experts to do an IB and submit it to CMON as I dont think it will be hard to be the highest rated one for you guys

[Tungdil Goldhand]

Now that's a very nice Ironbreaker you painted there! Indeed, they're usually painted in just one colour of iron and I don't like that one bit! These are very inspirational, simple as they might seem. How do you get around painting twenty of these lads, though? Even with this differentiated colour scheme, they all look alike eachother. Imagine having to paint twenty of these ...

For me, watering down paint is the following. I take a little paint out of a jar with my brush, then making a little pile of paint on my workspace (which is covered by a rubber/plastic kind of thing, now coloured like a rainbow ) like painter's would do with those pieces of wood they carried around. Then, I dip my brush in some water and mix that with the paint on my 'desk' until I am statisfied with the result; gently watered down paint, just a little smoother than it was before. I advise not to do this with metallic paints, though. I always seem to water them down too much or too little. I never get it right.

[Rambunctious]

Thanks for all the kind comments lads. I'm still working on finishing the unit, I have five done in total thus far out of my sixteen (need another blister to make the full twenty methinks), takes me about 1 - 2 hours to finish each of them so it may be a while yet. One area I am definitely improving in would be the shields. Lesson learned: paint the blue FIRST. My two greatest geek-hobbies, models and PC gaming, came together via Call of Duty's sniping (where the character holds the breath to steady the rifle) taught me to hold my breath while painting very fine detail.

I noticed that Games Workshop has an article on painting Ironbreakers on their main site. I was hoping for some inspiration but after looking at their example of a completed model (link here) I feel better about mine, thus far ... Bloke didn't even want to paint the beard clasps apparently ... ? Very sloppy, GW. Dwarfs deserve more love than that dammit. Dwarf masterclass, please.

@ Barin: I've been working on washing the gold areas, but I find that even with a relatively light wash it really dulls down the shine of the gold and dry-brushing never really seems to bring it back properly ... Something I am doing wrong? Also, I suspect gems are a little out of my skill range at that moment but it's a great idea. The trouble is that I am trying to make my Ironbreakers look elite but not "royal" as it were, maybe keep the gems to the thanes and lords? Or are gems fairly common with Dwarfs?

@ Bucket Kjell: I do wash all of the silver, though it does not show up that well in the photo. I'm working with a fluroescent desk lamp, two bits of paper and an old point-and-shoot. I find it hard to keep washes in the areas I want them to be, even straight out of the pot it's very watery (which I suppose is the point). Unless I wash one rivet at a time ... which I am kind of tempted to do now.

@ Perv:

@ Tungdil Goldhand: It's not proving too tedious yet, it might be a while before I'm able to play any games with them so I'm not overly rushed. I know what you mean about watering metallic paints, considering these five are 95% metallics ... My Shining Gold is an older pot that is very thick/gloopy compared to my silver colours (which I bought brand new) so it's really quite difficult to work with and it unfortunately seems to like to cover detail unless I quickly get some water on my brush and engage in some paint-surgery.

[Ok Okri]

Perv, on 05 March 2010 - 04:35 PM, said:

When Ok Okri says he adds enough to obscure the detail he means it looks that way when the wash is applied, after its dried it looks different and the detail shows through fine. Sorry if I'm mistaken here.

Perv got it spot on. For display minis, watered down washes may be better, but for the table top I prefer a heavy, undiluted wash. I put on enough in the recesses so that it completely covers small detail. As it dries, the pigment congregates in the corners, and really shows them up.

[Perv]

Yeah thats what I go for on the first wash too mate, heavy and excessive Subsequent washes are diluted which I suppose become glazes as these are used to blend the highlights rather than add shadowing.