Ulthuan

Here he is - my noble, good natured, fun loving Ellyrian poster boy and his faithful steed...




Original pictures:





Poster boy:





Close ups:

Brilliant! Poor Lothern poster boy though...

Excellent painting! :3

Love the color combos. Very well done!!

Milliardo, tinman, thanks!

Elithmar, I am a little sorry for him too. But knowing the Eatainii, he may have provoked the knight.
It is all my fault really.

HaHa~ Brilliant! Poor Sea Guard wants his horn back =P

There are more colours there then I would typically use(blue, purple, redish), but they came together really well. I'm impressed.

Love your stuff! Beautiful!

Can you talk a little about your silvers? They are quite bright but still maintain definition. What is your method? I love the look!

Shannar, well, I tend to use a lot of colours. Here I tried to put together purple and turquoise and it worked quite well in the end.

Ptolemy, glad you like it. I am experimenting with mixing metallic colours with other colours. On the Reaver it were shades of purple and of blue. If I am going to go to some detail, I should as well do it properly (you shouldn't have asked me! ). I didn't want to mangle Elves for this, so lets have some fun with the Sigmarite Priest from War Altar set.


I usually start painting High Elves from white undercoat, but here I start from the black. I would probably use the colour I then use for creating the tinge for the basecoat otherwise.



I usually use old GW metallics, but i tried out new ones here.

First step: Mix Leadbelcher (Boltgun) with Scab Red and Royal blue respectively. Water down somewhat and paint over the metallic parts. (Ratio cca 4-1)
(Gold is Screaming Bell - they mixed the orange in for me.)



Second step: Mix Ironbreaker with Blood Red (yes, now it is going to be beautifully pink) and Enchanted blue (I added less red and blue than the last time). Paint over most of the armour, leave only deep shades untouched.



Third step: Make a glaze from Scab Red and black and Royal Blue mixed also with black (add liberate amount of water). I do not use washes for this because they are kind of shiny. This step can be repeated with various colours if you want the metal matted or stained. It can also be used at any other time when needed.



Fourth step: Once dried, use the same mixture as before, or a lighter one. i went with Runefang mixed with a little Blood Red and Ice Blue respectively. Pick up the details, raised areas and lights.



Fifth step: Add sublte highlights of Pure Runefang



Sixth step: I got this paint some time ago to see if I could paint some pearls for our seafaring Elves and ended up using it as extreme highlight on the metals:



With it (I sometimes mix it with silver, sometimes use it straight - it has to be watered down though) the test model looks like this:






I hope this can be somewhat helpful. I am still experimenting with it.


Note: Gold was painted Screaming Bell, Gehenna's Gold, Auric Armour and mix of Auric Armour and Iridescent Pearl.

That's nice work. I've often wanted to mix a little color in my metalics, never been brave enough to try it. Maybe on the next new unit I will. It opens up so many more possibilities of picking clashing colours though. Honestly I'm really happy with my painting technique. But my ability to choose colours is awful. I usually end up with 4 or 5 models to strip by the time I pick a scheme I like. That's a lot of wasted time.

Mind if I ask you how you like the new metalics? Metalics are the only GW paints I use, but I use them because they are the best metalics I can find. How do you like them compared to the old ones? I have several that are almost empty (really it's time to set them aside to be saved for touch ups are adding a model or two to a otherwise finished unit. But that means for new units it's time for new paints. I'll most likely end up getting the GW ones unless they are a lot worse then the old ones- unless you say you're unhappy with them. Then I'll have to think about it.

Shannar, the best way is use a colour you already have on the model, or use neutral colour like to just tone down the brightness.
I've read bad things about the new metalics round the internet, but honestly, I like them. They work well. The one difference is that they like to separate, stick to the brush more than the old ones (better to wash brushes well when using them). Even the drybrush ones work well when carefully applied in thin layer. There is no need to get all the coppers and bronzes and brass layers - some of them are so close in colour I see no point in buying all.

I'd noticed a few complaints, which is kind of sad. Even people with nothing good to say about GW have said for a long time that they like the metalics. I'll pick up a few to try them for sure, and worse case I can always go with valleijo (pretty much the same as the GW metalics of a couple paint ranges ago) not bad at all, just not quite as good.

Here I tried to put together purple and turquoise and it worked quite well in the end.

Ja it did. Is there a process you use for picking colours? Or do you just decide to try things and they work?

Most complaints I saw were about the grain being too coarse. I didn't find it to be a problem (but at some levels of painting perhaps it can come to be, I suppose). They are not better than the old ones, I find them no worse. They are just different. If you are interested, I tried to do an overview here: http://www.ulthuan.net/forum/viewtopic. ... 8&start=30. I have yet to try out some of the Vallejo range.

I have an overall colour scheme (white, blue, silver and usually purple or yellow) for the army, but when it comes to single models, I usually have basic idea what colours I want to use (in the case of the Reaver it was the grey on the horse, blue and purple) and go from that, playing with tones and shades as I go. I also use different shades of the same colour lately (I really like to experiment with colours). But this can be used only on models like the Reaver poster boy, or command figures - it takes unhealthy amount of time and once you put the model on the table, there is not too much difference from common r&f.

Here is a pic of my old Reaver and the poster boy, I tried to make them look similar, but not the same:

There's something about your painting style that is definitely more suited to doing High Elves than more grim-dark races like Empire, I think. Its very clean and well-blended and your colors tend more towards pastels then opaque, bold colors.

Do you get very involved with your make-up? I find a lot of people who are naturally good at blending tend to be women.

Milliardo, well, it looks that way, but I think I would be able to manage a little grimmer look too. But it certainly doesn't have much to do with make-up, for I apply 'war paint' to myself about twice a year.

Shadow Hunters and their pack of white wolves are back, oficially ready to be undercoated.

Ranked up as 14 Elf Archer unit with wolf as unit filler:



Ranked up as ten Archers:



New ones:







Slightly altered:



White Wolves (count as War Lions):

War lions? Do you have SoM, or are these house rules?

Yes, I will use them as the SoM ones.

By the way, I tried colouring my metallics. It looked pretty good. I used Hawk Turquoise mixed with Chainmail, Asurmen Blue wash, then Hawk Turquoise and Mithril Silver highlight.

Elithmar of Lothern wrote:By the way, I tried colouring my metallics. It looked pretty good. I used Hawk Turquoise mixed with Chainmail, Asurmen Blue wash, then Hawk Turquoise and Mithril Silver highlight.

Sounds good, I expect there will be pics?

Yea, pics are needed Elithmar, but couldn't you just use the new glazes for colouring metallics?
Aicanor. I love the Wolf Fillers, I'm going to do that with my Iron Wolves, it'll stretch my ten into 14 ^_^'

Looks nice. Where do the wolves come from?

Warhammer 40000, they're Fenrisian Wolves from the Space Wolves army.

Aerendar, as Elessehta says, we stole them from Fenris. Glad you like them.

Elessehta, of course you can use new glazes (I didn't have them yet, so I can't say if how they work on metals).
But anyway, they have only four (bright) colours. Glazes can be made from any other colour as well. You can use watered down Chaos Black for that, if you want more natural look, or browns, greens, teal and oranges if you want the metal to look worn. You can use more glazes and less highlights to achieve that... that is what I like about it, it is versatile.

To wrap up the july painting, I strayed from Ulthuan and finished the poor Sigmarite I used for testing metals. I even added a lowly, but ambitious Clanrat for good measure.

Here they are, hope you'll like them.

Benedek, Priest of Sigmar




They have strange ways to show their devotion...


Clanrat Hisswik

I'm glad you didn't go all out on them, that priest has a lot more details that you could have picked out, that rat looks pretty clean, did he just go for a swim?

You're right, I was tired of all those details. Let's call it simple elegance.
My husband likes his rats clean, I had to do him to fit the army.

Well, I decided to join the Golden Bat Competition on Carpe Noctem forum. Just uploading some already finished model seemed like cheating to me and so I got this idea of making a diorama. Mind me, I never did one before, so it should be fun, I thought. It should be something epic, like Teclis fighting off Druchii assassins with some fashionable magic. Something like that.
But as you probably already guessed, the diorama had other ideas of how it should be made. But Teclis stayed, or as the story goes, he was in the Old World. As every Elf, he tired of Human company eventually, slipped away from his bodyguard for some solitude and walked for a while under the moonlight, unafraid of any danger. And then he heard the sound from the distance, something like bear's growls, saws felling trees or rumbling thunder. He listened for a while and then, curious, he decided to look what creature it is. He came to a beautiful place under the moon and there...

That's not a great place for a nap, I love the little waterfall!

Yes, not the best of places to lie down. But Dwarves are not the most sensible creatures out there, and Dwarves deep in their cups in particular. I wonder what Teclis did after this moment of revelation.

Glad you like the water, it was not easy to figure out how to do it with what I have available. I also designed the rock so it can be used as a piece of terrain (to be honest, it designed itself ).