Kabal of the Obsidian Rose, new to painting.

Edit: WHOOPS! Looks like I posted in the wrong section, could a moderator move me down to painting discussion?

Well about two weeks ago I finally got my battleforce in the mail. Bought a few more models in between, and on an unrelated note, got a camera today. I decided I'd like to share some of my work, these aren't my very first paintings (those are complete messes), but this is some of my more recent/in-between work.

Honest criticism and tips are welcome, I know I'm not professional quality, but what do you guys think? How can I improve?

IMGUR Album

Note: The wych is the only wych I've painted so far, and the first time I have to paint flesh. needless to say, I don't think she turned out too well, and I can't get the eyes right.

Plusnote: Haven't messed around with the camera enough to set the images to be smaller, so I just used IMGUR rather than taking up the boards' bandwidth.

Doubleplusnote: Based the very first models I did, but it didn't turn out so well, so I'm waiting on some ideas or maybe some modeling sand.

As requested, moving to Painting section - Gobsmakked

Like the kabalite warriors, nice to see somthing diffrent than black on armour, wych and wracks are...ok....i guess.
I know painting flesh can be pain in ... try thys http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2011/09/40k-hobby-painting-dark-eldar-skin.html its nice and pale/dark skin thats siuts DE better IMO.

Oh and work little more on raider....some highlights, well some more bling

I like the orange/rust red theme - it looks very sharp.

Eyes are a fething pain - I have no advice there.

I think you could really benefit just from a bit more highlight and shading work - your armor has very nice orange highlights and appears to have some darker shading (maybe the lighting is just fooling me) but a lot of the rest (skin tones especially - but also pretty much all cloth bits and hair) appears to all solid colors.

Even just going back and putting on a drybrush or edging of highlights will make these areas pop a bit more and look a lot better. My basic skin recipe is to lay down a base colour, give it extreme highlights, and then wash in a GW Wash - usually it looks pretty sharp. For DE I actually base color gray, wash with Asurmen Blue, and then highlight with Bone White which gives my DE a very sharp contrast and cold, alien features and works well for what I want. All I do usually for tassels in my DE army is base Scab Red (or Red Gore...whichever is darker, I forget) and then drybrush Blood Red. It looks awesome, and takes only moments. For hair I usually do some combo of base color/wash/highlight and get similar sharp results (though blond hair is a pain)

A three layer process can really be fairly quick and easy, and adds an immense amount of apparent quality to your pieces - you already appear to have better hand control than I do (oh migawd, your Raider sigils are so smooth and straight...hate you!) so all you need is some very basic layering work and you'll catapult your pieces up to easily above table top standard.

Thor665 wrote:

you already appear to have better hand control than I do (oh migawd, your Raider sigils are so smooth and straight...hate you!) so all you need is some very basic layering work and you'll catapult your pieces up to easily above table top standard.

I'll give you a hint on the raider details... put some tape over the spot you want the sigil, cut it out with a blade, then paint over that area, I found that a thicker foundation of mechrite red worked a lot better than the thinner fiery orange I was going to use.

That's a good idea - I might give that a shot when adding sigils to my Razorwings.

One thing about using "stencils" from (masking) tape - You don't want to use brush for that. Best would be small sponge dipped (lightly) in paint. Or airbrush.

Anyway with "sponging" you should avoid so called "paint bleeding" effect (edge don't look sharp when it whould be).

Better masking tape (like Frog Tape or Micron Masking Tapes) is also (pricy) solution, but using sponge would be easiest (and cheapest). Also be sure that Your paint don't have consistency of wash or else even best tape wouldn't be any good.



I also don't like an idea of cutting it on model, IMHO better is to:
A) pick flat piece of glass/metal, stick tape on it, then draw Your "stencil" and cut it with hobby knife (watch out for fingers!)
B) use piece of laquered cardboard (glue tape, draw on it) and cut it with paper (this allows You to use scissors)

My 0.02 pieces of soul.