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I basically only have one friend, and it’s kind of surprising to me how well that’s working out.<\/p>\n
If we were to rewind five or six years, I would be hanging out with quite a few different circles of people– all gamers of varying stripes, but technically<\/em> still people. I had my D&D group; a handful of Warmachine players I was still close to despite having soured on the game itself; the Infinity group I had just started to poke my nose into; a small group of friends I met with on Tuesdays for cards and board games; and even a group of “my friend’s friends” whom I occasionally joined for random movies and games. In most of these groups, there would be people I enjoyed hanging out with, people who were… let’s go with “inoffensive”… and people for whom I spent considerable mental energy devising plans to avoid having to ever speak with.<\/p>\n Here is an approximate venn diagram of these groups circa 2012:<\/p>\n As you can see, I considered my entire board game group to be good friends, with maybe one or two people from every other group warranting semi-regular communication outside the physical confines of our gaming store. There were certainly positive aspects to having a social circle of this size, however it was also very stressful for me– people usually don’t guess this based on my hilarious, charming, and generally spectacular personality, but I’m actually quite introverted. I can put on a dazzling show for a few hours, but when it’s done, I need to crawl back into my dark cave and shut the world out while I recharge for a few days.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jump Ahead!<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Hey look, the sidebar is back!<\/span><\/p>\n Spud is going to keep rationalizing his social ostracism for another thousand words or so, and then he’s largely going to gloss what you probably came here for (the painting process of this, yaknow, PAINTING PROJECT)<\/i> in favor of somehow shoehorning foamcore construction into this post. If that all sounds as entertaining as pounding nails through your foot, you’ll probably want to jump ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n If you do decide to keep reading, don’t say you weren’t warned. And then, over the course of a few years, things started to shift. A core member of the board game group moved away, and the group dried up soon after. My growing disgust for Warmachine made it harder and harder for me to justify driving out to see those people, and eventually I just dropped the game– and the local humans who played it– entirely. And then the big weight dropped: my local store, where all of these groups were based, closed its doors.<\/p>\n If I could be bothered to animate the diagram above to reflect these events, you would basically see three things happening:<\/p>\n Tom is one of the worst people I’ve ever met. He isn’t particularly bright, ambitious, creative, interesting… attractive… I could go on. Tom likes the DC movies, looks like John Oliver after a bad motorcycle accident, and thinks puns are funny. But despite being a walking, talking singularity of negative traits, there are three qualities Tom possesses that have allowed him to survive the Hunger Games of social collapse that has occurred since 2016:<\/p>\n And so we arrive at the current state of affairs: I’m doing less nerd stuff than I used to, involving smaller groups of (admittedly less annoying, on average)<\/em> people, and I talk to exactly one person on a day-to-day basis. Having only one friend might sound sad to you, but for an introvert like me, only having to expend energy on one person turns out to be far less stressful and draining. And I still get to interact with the wider groups at designated times, but when game time is over… that’s it. I’m free! I’m reminded of one of my dad’s quotes while growing up:<\/p>\n “What’s the best thing about other people’s children?”<\/span><\/p>\n “They go home.”<\/span><\/p>\n Thanks Dad. ~_~<\/p>\n Aside from the general reduction in social stress, only having one friend has turned out to have one other surprising benefit: I can give way<\/em> better presents now! Pre-collapse, I simply knew too many people to be able to afford to buy<\/em> things for all of them, so I opted to build awesome models for my friends instead. As a result, I used to spend a huge portion of my annual hobby time building Christmas and birthday presents for various people I didn’t hate. Like, I would start making Christmas presents in September and usually not be finished until February. It was an insane self-imposed workload, and even in the year or two preceding my social collapse, I had started to narrow the scope of who got presents each year just to give myself some room to breathe.<\/p>\n But with my non-family gifting obligations reduced to a single person, the workload has been reduced to a nearly perfect state of “do whatever occurs to me”. If I think of multiple present ideas, that’s fine! I probably have time to do all of them! If I think of a present that has a dollar cost (instead of just a time cost)<\/em>, that’s also fine, because that doesn’t immediately make me feel obligated to spend similar dollar amounts on anyone else! And if one of my present ideas happens to be an absolutely enormous project that will dominate my production schedule for months on end… also totally fine! It’s the only present I need to work on!<\/p>\n It probably sounds like I’m being a bit facetious here, but I swear I’m not– I’ve spent most of my adult life imposing unreasonable gift-giving obligations on myself and then enduring months of suffering every year to somehow try to fulfill them, and being free from the weight of those obligations for the last two years has contributed immeasurably to my general mental well-being.<\/p>\n As it turns out, Isolated Potato = Surprisingly Content Potato. <3<\/p>\n Tom has wanted to start an Onyx Contact Force army since the day the Xeodron TAGs were first previewed. However, he had several hobby priorities further up the line than his beloved alien robots, so nothing ever came of that dream. However, with his birthday approaching last year, I decided to pick him up a basic Onyx force (300pts + a couple of swap-in models for variety)<\/em>. He was excited to start them, but had been making good progress on finishing his two previous armies in the preceding months, so he decided not to open any of the alien boxes until his queue was clear.<\/p>\n This ended up happening about three months later, at which point the two of us started discussing various colour schemes that might be within his grasp. You see, nestled amongst his library of other failings is the fact that Tom has spent his gaming career aggressively competing for the position of “worst painter I’ve ever seen”.<\/p>\n Over the course of 8+ years of excruciating instruction, I’ve managed to drag his painting level barely over the line from “AAAAAHHH MY EYES” to a comparatively lofty “May cause mild nausea”. But even with those gains, we must remain realistic; while you and I are free to explore the breadth of our imaginations when devising new and exciting colour schemes to thrill the senses and delight the mind, Tom’s priorities must necessarily revolve around ways to minimize the harm<\/em> his models inflict on bystanders.<\/p>\n This, understandably, limits his scheme options somewhat.<\/p>\n A low-key discussion of possibilities (“No, Tom. You can’t just… dip them in jam<\/em>.”<\/span> “PEOPLE LIKE JAM, SPUD!”<\/span>) continued for several weeks. However, this discussion came to an unexpected conclusion toward the end of the summer when I stumbled across some models that were posted to the WGC Infinity Facebook group by a Russian painted who goes by the pseudonym “LazyPainting<\/a>“:<\/p>\n When I saw these pictures (and some others from the same army<\/a>), I immediately had the following series of thoughts:<\/p>\n QUICK DISCLAIMER:<\/strong> I’m going to talk a lot in this article about “applying Lazy’s technique” or “mimicking his effect” and so on. However, in practice,<\/p>\n So, yeah. Anywhere I say I’m doing what he did, just mentally substitute “badly mimicked a picture I saw on the Internet months earlier and didn’t remember correctly anymore” and you’ll have something closer to the truth. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the past, Tom and I have “collaborated” on models in situations where I wanted to try some painting technique I had seen but was too afraid of ruining my own models if I screwed up. However, because literally anything <\/em>Tom does to his models ruins them by default, there’s no actual risk involved if I simply borrow his stuff to act as my test dummies. And on the off-chance that things do go well, Tom reaps the benefit of prettier models. Everybody wins!<\/p>\n The most notable example of this type of situation happened with his Maghariba Guard; I had had my airbrush for around a year and found it useful for painting terrain, but was very intimidated at the thought of transitioning to airbrushing models<\/em>. I figured that a larger model like a TAG would be the easiest way to get started, but I wanted my own TAGs to look… yaknow… good<\/em>, so I didn’t want to use them as my guinea pigs. So instead, I borrowed Tom’s unpainted Maghariba and painted the basecoat for him, then returned it to him to finish the metals and other colours.<\/p>\n Can’t tell it was airbrushed? That’s because I had no idea what I was doing and f***ed it up! \ud83d\ude42 The result was very Tom, but I got what I wanted out of the exercise– I became a bit more comfortable with my airbrush, and learned that I needed to use much sharper shading and highlighting colours to get a proper airbrushed effect.<\/p>\n Initially I intended to do much the same thing with Tom’s Onyx– I wanted to try out LazyPainting’s badass “coloured spotlight” effect on my airbrush, but didn’t want to do any of the boring clean-up work that would be needed afterward, so we agreed that I would provide basecoats only, and then hand them back to Tom to destroy. However, as you’ll see in a bit, this commitment kept creeping up as I had more ideas I wanted to try, and, well, long story short, I ended up painting his entire army and handing the finished product to him the day after his next birthday. That timing wasn’t even intentional– it was just when things happened to wrap up on the project.<\/p>\n Which means that without really meaning to, I ended up giving Tom (basically) the same present two birthdays in a row. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alright, let’s look at some actual modeling stuff before y’all go cross-eyed from my emotional LiveJournaling.<\/p>\n After we had decided that I was going to use his army as airbrush practice, Tom started looking into basing options and decided that he liked these Warsenal bases:<\/p>\n However, while I generally love Warsenal and own several full sets of their bases, my first reaction on seeing that picture was, “Actually, that wouldn’t be that hard to replicate.” Artificial basing textures (deck plates, hexes, and so on)<\/em> are hard to do well yourself, but natural textures are SUPER easy. I didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but I was confident that I could get something pretty close with some combination of acrylic gel and craft store lichens and mosses.<\/p>\n Tom and I made an afternoon activity out of it one Saturday before D&D. He had gathered all of the bases that came with his models (which he had expanded since my initial purchases to include about 85% of the sectorial’s options)<\/em>, and we sat down at his dining room table and started poking the ingredients I brought to figure out something that worked.<\/p>\n I had a few ideas that I wanted to try. Right off the bat, I determined that simply brushing the gel onto the bases didn’t give a very interesting texture, so we would need to shape the gel somehow. However, on the plus side, tiny clumps of lichen looked fantastic dropped into the goo. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n My first thought to try to shape the goo was to wet a brush and try to use that to sculpt a texture into the base, but the gel was so sticky that it always dragged around with the brush and tried to lift away when I picked the brush up. With that idea not working, I decided to try pressing natural objects into it, starting with this leaf I grabbed from the bushes outside Tom’s house. The effect I was going for– a clean leaf pattern– was a complete failure due to the stickiness, but I accidentally discovered something else that looked great: if you press the leaf (or any other flat material)<\/em> down into the goop and then pull up, again and again, you end up with this awesome creepy “alien webbing” texture, which happens to blend really nicely into the shape of the lichen.<\/p>\n It wasn’t what we were initially going for, but we were both satisfied enough with our happy accident to go ahead and replicate it across the rest of the bases. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n The bag of lichen I bought was a multi-pack with all sort of different “nature things” inside it; many looked dumb (like a big feathery plant thing)<\/em>, but I found one other bit that I liked for Tom’s bases– the sort of leafy… lichen? Fungus? I’m not sure… at the center right in the picture above.<\/p>\n I tore off chunks of this mystery plant and dropped them onto around 1\/3 of the bases for an extra visual flourish.<\/p>\n And that was pretty much it for the bases. If you’re looking for interesting natural bases, I highly recommend acrylic gel and “random plant bits”. The specific webbing effect we made won’t suit most armies, but there are a lot of other things you can do with the gel if you’re willing to spend more than the three minutes we dedicated to experimenting before we settled. \ud83d\ude1b<\/p>\n I’ve always struggled with airbrushing on small models primarily because of the masking element. It’s easy enough to cover the entire model in a continuous colour area and highlight it, but Infinity models tend to have fairly complicated uniforms, and the handful of times I’ve tried to mask off my first colour to let me apply another one, I’ve screwed it up and the paint went where I didn’t want it; and the time to clean up the mistakes took far longer than the time I saved by airbrushing in the first place. However, what I loved about LazyPainter’s colour scheme was that he was treating most of the model as being made of the same material, and allowing the colour splash to spread across multiple panels:<\/p>\n This factor was why I had decided that this technique would be so compatible with Tom’s Onyx army– the models he owned were about 70% robots, which meant that I could justifiably say that they were just made of the same material from head to toe. However, I decided to go for a slight twist on Lazy’s approach– rather than picking one “spotlight” colour for the entire army, I chose three colours– purple, blue, and green– and assigned two of them to every model (with all models in any given “category”– Shasvastii, Morats, utility robots, etc.– having the same colour split)<\/em>. One of the colours would be sprayed from the top left, while the other would be sprayed from the bottom right. This would hopefully create a really cool and creepy contrast effect where they met in the middle.<\/p>\n Because I’m kind of bad at airbrushing, this process dragged on over a month, and I was pretty sick of it by the end. However, unlike my failed experiment with Maggie, this one actually worked out pretty much how I wanted it to! I mean, it’s complete garbage compared to Lazy’s inspiration, but my goal wasn’t individual model quality– it was to create a neat overall effect across the army. Tom sucks too much to deserve anything beyond tabletop quality, but even working within that effort level, there are still things I can do to make the army pop and look interesting. And this dual-colour look was certainly interesting. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I wanted to keep the models fairly dark, but the airbrushing process had over-highlighted some areas, as well as completely failing to preserve shadows throughout most of the models. To fix both problems, I opted to two-brush blend some thinned Vallejo Signal Blue (an extremely dark, but extremely rich blue)<\/em> into the undersides of every model in the army.<\/p>\n This accomplished both goals, but at the cost of tinting the colours on the flat areas more than I wanted. I was supposed to hand the models off to Tom to finish after this, but the tinting bothered me, so I decided that I would expand my commitment to include army-wide edge highlighting to try to use that process to correct the colours a bit.<\/p>\n This was the first expansion. Soon after, I had an idea for a “glowy stuff” colour that would nicely tie the three primary armour colours together; I allowed myself to believe for a week that I could just suggest it to Tom and let him figure it out, but then I remembered that Tom is Tom, and I just declared that I would do all the glowies myself.<\/p>\n But he was still doing the bases! Well, kind of. I still wanted to airbrush them. But he was doing the detailing! Oh, except the detailing would also look neat airbrushed. So you know what, maybe I’ll just do that too.<\/p>\n I was definitely making him paint the skin on all the living models, though. Because I’m doing enough already, jeez! Oh, except I actually like<\/em> painting skin. Skin and faces are actually some of the only things I enjoy painting.<\/p>\n Okay, fine, I’ll do all that. But Tom is definitely doing the… uh… shit.<\/p>\n That’s, uh… that’s everything, isn’t it?<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n …*sigh*<\/p>\n FINE.<\/p>\n So, okay, whatever. Apparently I’m just painting an entire 700pt army for him. FINE. WHATEVER. But I am at least going to make him HELP.<\/p>\n With SOMETHING.<\/p>\n Something he CANNOT SCREW UP.<\/p>\n Uh…<\/p>\n …flat colours? For the glowies?<\/p>\n Yes! Yes, that’s good! Once all of the airbrushing and re-shading was finished, I trucked everything down to his house, and Tom and I spent a Saturday back at his dining room table painting glowy stuff. Under my careful supervision, Tom managed to not complete f*** up the application of flat electric blue paint over the “robot meat” and all the various lights and swords and whatever. And then he passed them over to me, and I blended all of the blue bits with dark purple paint to create a really neat two-tone glow. With a final nearly-white highlight quickly dabbed on top, the whole thing looked good enough that you would never even guess Tom was nearby during any part of it!<\/p>\n The last step for most of the models was the aforementioned edge highlighting. As mentioned earlier, I wanted to use this step to correct slightly for the excessive blue tinting that the shadow layer had created, which I did by employing a slightly pink-purple on the purple models, slightly yellow-green on the green models, and bright cyan on the blue models. This ended up looking pretty sweet– you can see the difference the final highlight made in this photo (the one on the right hasn’t been highlighted yet).<\/em><\/p>\n Every model in the army had two different armour colours on its two sides, and my initial plan was to highlight each side using its corresponding highlight colour. However, when working on my first test Batroid, an interesting idea occurred to me: what if I used the same highlight across both sides?<\/p>\n I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not, but the cost of any failure would be borne entirely by Tom, so… whatever, I tried it out.<\/p>\n Holy crap! I did a thing and it worked! @_@<\/p>\n I absolutely LOOOOOOOVE the way these turned out. \ud83d\ude42 I was only highlighting to a fast tabletop standard (so some of the lines end up too fat or fall out of the lines, nothing is blended, and I didn’t follow up with a pure white corner highlight)<\/em>, but the visual effect is just so bloody interesting<\/em> that I don’t even see the sloppy application– only the pretty colour contrast. I wanted the models to look properly alien, and this single decision achieved that effect so incredibly well– earthly materials generally don’t highlight that way. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n So, yeah. Super pleased with myself. SPUD = GENIUS PAINTER. Officially.<\/p>\n The bases were comparatively easy to paint, and were all knocked out in an evening. Here they’re all being spraypainted dark blue…<\/p>\n …which is then followed up with sort of a teal spraypaint. I didn’t love this colour, though, so I opted to mix a much darker, greener turquoise colour and airbrush that on.<\/p>\n I sprayed this over all of the bases, then used a paper towel to pick most of the paint up off the surface of each base, leaving the darker colour sitting only in recessed areas.<\/p>\n There we go, much better. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Aaaaaaand then I stopped taking pictures again, so now we teleport forward to highlighted bases with the creepy webbing picked out in nearly-white and the mystery fungus from earlier painted autumnal orange as a sporadic contrast.<\/p>\n Once everything was painted, all that remained was linking everything up. The process of attaching models to corks at the start had left everyone with a wire coming out of one or both feet, so it was a pretty quick process to pull the wires out of the corks and drill them down into a base.<\/p>\n So badass. <3<\/p>\n There are tons of painted pictures of the army on Page 4<\/a> if that’s what you came here for, but if you’ll humour me for just a moment, there’s one last finishing touch I knocked out to complete the project: a fairly neat custom carrying tray!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Infinity armies aren’t very big, so you don’t need a particularly big carrying tray to move them around. Before I built anything, I spent a few minutes drawing shapes on a piece of paper and dropping piles of models onto them to see how big it would need to be, and ended up deciding that 10″x6″ seemed about right– space enough for 15+ models without things bumping and chipping.<\/p>\n I also decided, on a whim, that the tray wouldn’t be square, but would instead be sort of a long pill shape, with a 6″ diameter semi-circle capping off each end. Thusly decided, I whipped the shape up in Illustrator and printed it out on cardstock.<\/p>\n Quick model footprint test. Looks good. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Next, I designed the walls that would go around the tray. I wanted them to be low up front, and then gradually rise up to create a scenic backdrop in the back for models to look cool posing against, mainly featuring an Onyx sectorial logo that I would cut out of craft foam.<\/p>\n These were also printed out on cardstock– note where I had to repeat part of the wall at the top of the page to get everything to print on a single page. After cutting the pieces out, I taped both parts together, using the text to line everything up properly.<\/p>\n The shapes were then transferred to a sheet of foamcore and cut out.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.captainspud.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/onyx_ref_01.jpg\")
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So, hey– guess whose birthday was on Thursday<\/h2>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nGround Goop<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe Actual Painting Part<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n*sigh* Fine, show us your stupid tray<\/h2>\n
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