Hallelujah! Come to the Lightroom!

Photoshop Lightroom Review

I'm here on a Saturday afternoon seeing how many unfinished drafts I can polish off and schedule for the coming weeks. Here goes this one, which I've been wanting to post for some months. Yes, this one is a big block of text. But if you take pictures of miniatures, or anything really, I hope reading will be worth it to you.

If you've touched a digital photo recently and you haven't seen or used Photoshop Lightroom before, you should immediately go download a trial copy. Just be prepared to shell out $110 bucks because you aren't going to want to let it go at trial end. I've been using Photoshop for many years and have some solid expertise, and have the latest CS suite with Bridge. They are brilliant full stop. That said, trying to use Photoshop and Bridge to do the sorts of tasks I do for my pictures of miniatures is a bit like using a lawnmower to trim my hedges. Lifting the lawnmower up to cut vertically all these years has worn me to the bone, and I have an awful lot of hedges in my garden.

In fact it's an apples to oranges kind of comparison really. Whatever you do, don't think of Lightroom as some sort of Photoshop "Lite." It's not that. Not only does it share no code at all, it's not even coded in the same language. Whereas Photoshop is an amazing tool to take a photo and turn it into a work of art, or to begin making graphics and art from scratch, think about the core mission of Photoshop that's implied by the name "Photoshop." If you're running a shop it's all about repeatable processes, keeping track of things, maintaining a pipeline, organization. In Photoshop you have powerful macros and Bridge adds powerful organization, but neither of these tools accomplishes the mission with any kind of efficiency. And I'm really understating the problem by saying that. I think Adobe realized they weren't really succeeding at the original mission, that Photoshop had instead morphed into the perfect tool for another application, and built Lightroom to address the gap.

So let me say that for 100%, yes, 100% of tasks I used to use Photoshop for Lightroom does better by orders of magnitude impossible for me to exaggerate. All hyperbole aside it may be the most perfect application I've ever used. It does organization and collection management, metadata, retouching, calibration, processing, cropping and publishing and it does it in way that I have to call revolutionary. In a few months of owning it I've found religion and I honestly will never look at a digital image the same way again. It's not even a stretch to say that in giving me a more intuitive feel over the science of color and light, which I already understood fairly well from my classical art education, Lightroom has literally caused me to see the world in a new way from this point forward.

Now before I get all wound up about this thing and start raving, don't take my word for it and whatever happens go download a free trial of it and watch the really great introductory tutorials they have. There's just too much to say about all the different features and aspects and Julieanne Kost explains them a lot better and more concisely than I can. Incidentally what a dream job to have, demonstrating Adobe products!

What might be of some value to add to that, though, is my own case story. Let me contrast my life before and after and try to impart how much good this thing has done for me. In the Photoshop (or Gimp) way you start either in Bridge or in your folders or in Picasa or iPhoto and you copy your digital negatives from your camera. You might start grouping them into a collection. Then you open them in Photoshop or Gimp and wind up making a psd copy/Gimp equivalent with your adjustments, crops, etc. Then you save a web copy to your computer, usually another directory. You have two or three directories of stuff for the one set of pictures at this point. If you're smart, you macro all of the above adjustments and web copy and run through the whole collection. Otherwise you are really in for a sad time and you have my special sympathy. Next if you're smart you'll go and tag your pictures in Bridge and do the titles, etc. But the shit part is you don't want to just tag the web copies. Do you spend the time to tag the digital negatives as well? Then you go back to Bridge or Picasa, or the (shoddy) Updatr flickr app and upload to your picture hosting service of your choice. If your hosting service is flickr and you didn't tag your pictures, you then have to go micromanage things on the flickr end. The whole process takes hours. If anything goes wrong, you have to redo many of the steps. Each step is dependent on the next. This describes my digital pictures nightmare before Lightroom.

Now the Lightroom way. I stick in my flash card and Lightroom opens and starts an import. The digital negatives are automatically numbered and stored in a convenient system (which I can configure to my heart's content if I really want to but works perfectly out-of-the-box). That is there is there's a database on the backend. Then I select the thumbnails I want to group and hit ctrl-N to group them into a collection (which offers hierarchy, unlike Picasa). I weed out the ones I don't want using one of several great tools specifically for this purpose. Then I take one photo and slide some sliders to fix the white balance, contrast, etc. I crop the photo, retouch with a spot tool or adjustment brush etc if needed (hardly ever in my case but just letting you know it's there). Then I hit ctl-altl-c ctl-alt-v to copy and paste all the adjustments(no more macros!!! Seriously, let that sink in) to all of the photos. If any crops resulted in a figure being a little off-center, I can browse to the image and move the figure in the frame with the hand tool. I then highlight the collection and enter the metadata using stored metadata tags packages. Once tagged and titled I drag the collection to my flickr publishing service and hit publish. The pictures arrive tagged and titled in flickr with the one click. The whole process above from start to finish takes about five minutes. Yes, five minutes compared to literally an hour or more previously. And if anything goes wrong, it takes about thirty seconds to redo any and everything. No step is dependent on anything. The lack of dependency from one step to another is another thing where it's hard to convey here how much time and headache this saves.

But the real miracles start here. The whole process creates zero (0) extra pictures files on your drive to keep track of. There is no psd file, no jpg file. There is no web copy on my hard drive—it exists only on flickr. There is just the digital negative, with an auto-created-and-managed piggy-back file to keep track of the on-the-fly adjustments I've made (all of which can be rolled back, altered again, etc). Also, say I'm on flickr the next day and decide the pictures are too dark. Or I forgot some tags. Back in Lightroom I fix one image and paste to the whole collection. Fine. And lo, at that point Lightroom pulls all the images from the published list of pictures and let's me know I might want to republish them as they've been updated. When I click publish, it updates the pictures on Flickr without a hassle and just the one click. I can also delete pictures from flickr from within Lightroom without touching flickr (anything to stay out of that time-suck web-app!).*

At the end of the day all my pictures are organized in collections (once), tagged and described, published.

The above is just a really basic scenario, too, and haven't started talking about how amazing and intuitive all the tools at your disposal are within the app and how not only does it cut the time down by a factor of twenty (!) or more it also produces results I could never do. I could never fix my camera's failings with regard to purple (comes out a dull blue-grey) or my struggles clearing up a white background without resorting to the time-consuming selection tool.

And I actually have a lot of fun doing it, where Photoshop was drudgery plain and simple. Again, that's easy to gloss over when you're reading this, but turning drudgery into fun is in itself a revolution. I don't want to sell Photoshop (or Bridge, or Picasa for that matter) short, though, as they are all amazing tools that can do really great things. When you're creating in Photoshop (as opposed to macro-ing white balance settings) Photoshop is equally fun. But if your work starts and ends with a photograph (as opposed to constructing a image more or less from scratch that happens to incorporate photographic elements) there is no question what the right tool is. Back to that question of the lawnmower, etc.

All this said, there is one downside to my Lightroom experience, though I can't fault Lightroom. That is, I use a nine-year-old, 4MP Canon G3 camera, which was considered "prosumer" at the time but obviously technology has gone forward since then. I think it gives me really good pictures, but even before Lightroom I was aware of some of it's shortcomings with regard to capturing color and light. Lightroom, while it gives the user many tools to overcome these shortcomings (for instance the problem with purple I mentioned), at the same time it brings one directly in contact with them. The flaws are right in my face and inescapable. It's especially true after I switched from JPEG to RAW format. Maybe more on this later, but essentially I find myself hitting my head on the ceiling in terms of the quality of pictures I want to get, and it may be time for a new camera.

And I mentioned it costs, what, a fifth the price of Photoshop, right? If you take more than a handful of pictures a month, you need this thing. Hell, if you take just a handful of pictures a year you still need this thing. But if you made it this far you deserve a break. I feel a bit like Sifl and Olley plugging something for Precious Roy so I'm going to stop. I'm not kidding about the Lightroom though. You own it to yourself.

* I do need to point out that since the recent Flickr overhaul this ability to update pictures in Flickr from within external applications is only available to those pro members, and pro accounts are no longer being sold, that is you have to have been grandfathered in to have one.

Thank you followers and subscribers!

100!

To mark Belched from the Depths reaching 100 followers I'd like to take a moment to thank all my followers and other subscribers for your interest, comments and shared appreciation for the kinds of games and miniatures I cover here.

It's not always an easy road. A blog with a niche interest is one thing if you play to that core interest. In my case I've got several interests, all niche, which means some of you may have arrived for the old school D&D, and others for the Necromunda or Hordes, etc. I fear, for example, that by including so much miniatures content I'm unlikely to gain real traction among the OSR blogs, even though I feel a strong affinity with them. But, since there's no way I'm doing multiple blogs I have to simply trust that what I find cool many of you will too, even if it's not what you came for. And if I haven't posted that stuff you like best in awhile, hopefully it all comes around to cover all the bases in short enough cycles. There's lots more of everything coming down the pipe I'm excited to share, that is I've got over thirty drafts of posts and add more all the time, it's just a matter of how much time I can carve out to keep the posts rolling out.

Thanks again, all, I wouldn't be doing it without your interest and support!

Remembering Featherstone

Since Donald Featherstone passed away last week a good number of people have posted remembrances, and in case you missed them, here is a small few:

• At the Wargames Foundry
• At the Vintage Wargaming blog
• At Hill Cantons
• At Greyhawk Grognard

While for many Featherstone was primarily an influence on their early experience of wargaming, Featherstone loomed largest over my own gaming experience in the last five years or so. This, quite frankly, because I was disappointed in the contemporary wargaming discourse and I was wondering what may have been lost over the years in terms of culture and ideas. The OSR, which to this point, to my knowledge, has only been in reference to roleplaying provides a model for this. That in going back to the roots of the hobby we can see the other paths not taken or abandoned and explore them. But I haven't seen it applied to much to wargaming.

There are people exploring these ideas in the public sphere, in places like on the Vintage Wargaming blog, but in the forums I frequent mention of the old ways is usually in passing and in the past tense, of the kind that begin something like, "I recall back when I was a lad we would...." or simply, "ah, Featherstone, those were the days..." and then after a sentence or two that's the end of it.

Anyway, back a few years ago I was looking for some historical gaming material, and thought it strange again, that very similarly to how there was little talk of the old ways on forums, there was little available on the web or file sharing networks in terms of old material, this is stark contrast again to roleplaying, where for anyone interested you can find the whole history and all the primary sources readily to hand. Maybe it's just more obscure and I haven't stumbled into the right spheres, so don't take my word for it that's not there. But I wound up going to the library where, at my library anyway, Featherstone was the only source on the shelf. That's how I came to Featherstone.

That there was just a single volume on wargmaming at the main library of a major metropolitan city was sad in and of itself, but Featherstone's Complete Wargaming was everything I had hoped it to be, a real window into a world that I saw reflected pretty much nowhere in contemporary wargaming. On the one hand there is a frame of reference that can be communicated in a book on the topic of wargaming as opposed to a set of rules itself, which affords fewer opportunities of this sort, but on the other hand there is a way that he is always moving between a historical reference to a particular tactic or a particular even to how you would start to build a game around it. There's a thin membrane between history and mechanics and a fluid exchange between them, with mechanics rough and custom-fit to serve the particular purpose at hand.

Since that trip to the library I've bought my own copy of that book in particular and read it several times. It's been a huge relief to me, and I've put a number of Featherstone's ideas to practice in my own designs my friends and I are playtesting.

Before anyone gets ideas, I want to make it clear I don't claim to be an expert on old school historical wargaming or on Featherstone in particular. I've only just begin to get my feet wet. But I think there is an awful lot of room for us to not just honor and remember the old ways and the forefathers of wargaming, but to give them the same treatment that roleplayers have given the D&D phenomenon and guys like Gary Gygax. While, surely, many will miss Featherstone, he's still with us, in print even. Here's to the man and may his legacy live on in our games.

No one knows who they were, or what they were doing...

Painted: Druids of Orboros

Manufacturer: Privateer Press
Line: Hordes
Faction: Circle Orboros
Set: 72015 Druids of Orboros
Release date: 2006
Date painted: 2008

More of my Circle Orboros force to share with you today. I think these guys are pretty cool overall and they were an obvious choice for inclusion.

Conversions

I just really didn't care for the heads, which are way too round and way, way too large. That and PP couldn't even be arsed to foot the bill for six different ones. The heads are separate except for the leader, which is convenient in a way as you don't have to saw off the old ones, on the flip side the head pieces also include a fair bit of neck and even part of the cloak, so I had to fill in a fair bit and sculpt a few details. Below you can see the conversions. The black mist is because I was in a rush to prime these in the fading afternoon after getting home, and remembered just a second too late that I had wanted to get pics first. In addition to hoods and facial hair I also gave the old guy a bit of a paunch to set him apart from the skinny guy with the busted lip, and this meant redoing his oversized belt-buckle-armor-thing. I gave the leader a beard that juts out a bit like Leonidas is portrayed in the 300 graphic novel. The yelling guy turned out even better than I hoped, I really get the sense he drawing down the power from the heavens and eyes rolling back in his head he barely has it contained. Overall I'm really pleased with these, especially how they each have their own personality now—very unlike the originals!

Painting

I've already said some things about how I approached the painting of this force and these were done in the same way. When it comes to black, I recommend thinking about what material is represented and how it reflects light in real life. A rough black cloak is reflects a fair degree of light and appears fairly dull and light under the sun. I made the highlights fairly neutral but a bit on the warm side, giving them a more natural feel than the comic-book blue-for-black style Privateer made popular. The armor was meant to look burnished in a way similar to Celtic charms and trinkets I've seen in real life, and was done with the P3 Blighted Gold as a base, which is a dark green-gold and a unique color you'd be hard-pressed to get another way. The weapons and flesh were given a number of very thin glazes of brown ink with matte medium to really saturate/enrich the color.

Also I just want to throw this in somewhere that I much prefer the way the armor detail was sculpted on these figures than what became the set way later on in the range. Also, these are about as layered and encumbered as anyone can be expected to believe, but the later range kept weighing the druids down with silly stone things, glass baubles and weighty garb. Oh well.

For those interested there are many more individual shots in the flickr.

P.s. pardon me for the Spinal Tap reference, I couldn't help it, and anyway he did it first.

Magnetic, low-profile miniatures basing

Every miniature its base

I don't think there's a single perfect basing method you can apply to all varieties of figures, but for any particular variety I have to believe there's a good solution out there. Sometimes, and it's the case with the D&D collection and my choice of low-profile, magnetized ellipse bases I want to focus on today, there is a clear winner when I weigh the pros and cons of the options in light of any particular variety. Then for other collections, say my Oldhammer collection or my dark age fantasy collection that has some Red Box games figures, any solution I consider seems to have cons and there's no clear winner. For those, because it's usually a fairly big commitment to go one basing method or another, I find myself avoiding painting any of it and leaving the figures to lie in boxes un-based.

But you have to live in the imperfect world and for me that means making up my mind on a basing method every now and then and carrying through with it. This topic has literally kept me up at night often enough to warrant an infrequent series of posts to come whenever I make up my mind and have something to show for it.

That out of the way, this first post, about the low-profile ellipse (and sometimes round) bases I do for my D&D figures, has a happy ending with no lingering regrets. While I spent quite a long time researching options and trying them out, once I made the decision I rested easy until I came to the next collection I needed to base.

First up, here are a few examples of the figures I've shared already:

Why go with these ellipse bases that conform to the basic footprint of the figure itself, rather than the more trendy method of putting the figures on a few standard sizes of round bases, often much larger than the figures footprint? In contemporary D&D a figure includes a base size in it's stats but this base size could could better be described as an area of control, as something the creature may, if it wishes, enforce during combat. In my view, even if you want to enforce area of control rules there's no reason to impair the overall utility of the figure by putting the figure on a base that's much too large for it. You can simply eyeball it or use a template when it becomes relevant. Meanwhile, those figures on large round bases become extremely unwieldy when you try to negotiate them in a 3D dungeon, one like mine made of Dwarven Forge pieces, or in buildings. In a roleplaying game anything can happen, or anything should be able to happen, and thinking about overall utility when considering things like bases can help make that anything happen. Why can't an ogre mage share a pipe with the characters in a tavern? Your basing choice may make that awkward or even impossible to represent the activity with miniatures.

Moreover, even if you're strictly interested in tactical combat having your figure's base match it's area of control doesn't make sense, as the creature should be able to selectively enforce area of control to it's advantage. Take, for example, the bugbears above, which are a little too large for 25mm bases, but if I'd have gone for 30mm bases they wouldn't have been able to fight side-by-side in a dungeon corridor, and thus they'd be that much more easy to kill if the party had only to face them one at a time. And with larger figures you come to situations where if you put the figure on round base with a diameter equal to it's widest dimension you'd have a base that wouldn't fit in the 48mm across Dwarven Forge hallways, when it's clear when you look at he model that it should be able to fit if it wants. Common sense is my underpinning philosophy when DMing, that characters and creatures should get to do what they want when it makes sense.

Some few other pros to toss out. The low profile means the figures don't look out of place next to furniture, and they more closely look a part of the environment, especially painted as I've done them in a subdued, nothing-jumping-out-of-you style in colors that match their most common environment, again the Dwarven Forge. I've also decided to magnetize the larger ones to vastly save on efficiency when it comes to storage (though I don't magnetize the 25mm human-sized ones as I'm concerned about their lead ankles over the long run).

Now the cons. I think the main con is that every now and then I'd like to do big battles with the D&D collection and for battles square bases make ranking up units easier. Or, if the figures were on round bases one could make use of pre-made laser-cut movement trays that have a round cutout for each figure. It's not a big deal overall, as I can model movement trays that have foam turf over the whole surface and I can put however many figures on each one, but I thought I'd toss this out as it's really the only con I've come up with beyond that final, inescapable fact of all miniatures, that you have to model them on a single style of terrain, and unless they are historical figures fighting only in green fields their live long days (I envy them sometimes!) one day your figures will be fighting outside their element. Those battles outdoors will suffer slightly for it I guess, if and when I come to that, but as these figures spend the vast majority of thier time underground what could I possibly have done better than I did on this point?

So that's why, and here's what. I get my ellipse bases from Fenris and Ian there is really fantastic to work with, I couldn't be happier. Below you see my first big order from a few years ago and in the meantime I've gone back several times for more.

I spent several hours going through my collection and determining a number of core sizes I needed and in what quantities, and then I did a reality check by printing off test ellipses, often a number of variations of each size increment, and doing a test fit of the miniature on the paper template.

Magnetization

For large figures, magnetizing them is a no brainer in my opinion. In fact, I don't think I could store my collection in my apartment otherwise, and it's not a small apartment. What you need to drill a clean hole in a base is a moto-tool and brad point bits that fit it. The brad point bits are essential and I'm grateful to a TMP member or two for pointing (sorry, that was unintentional) me in the right direction.

I even lucked out in that the diameter of the various bits match the magnets I had already bought absolutely perfectly. You might want to buy your magnets with the brad points diameters in mind, however, and not chance it.

And then you'll need some kind of rig for drilling. Here you can see what I came up with after some trial and error. Arrived at this setup through trial and error. Needed to get the drilling platform up high enough that I wasn't killing my neck. Those boxes are a good counterweight as they store my Dwarven Forge collection. I figure anything I put them to use for is helping me get my money's worth!

Now, above was a few years ago. Since then I managed to score a Dremel drill press for very little at an estate sale, and this is really drilling the way God intended, this thing gets my endorsement:

Ok, now for the slightly fiddly bit. The bases are drilled but before you glue you'll want to give a passing thought to aligning your magnets. You see if two disc magnets are placed side-by-side with their poles aligned the same way, they repel each other. This can mean you go to glue two magnets in a base and the magnets leap out of the sockets. The second thing you should be aware of is that if you glue a magnet directly into the hole, even if you glue on a very even surface there is a likely chance that once the glue has tried your base doesn't lie perfectly flat and the magnet is sticking very slightly out the bottom. I don't know why this happens, but it does.

To resolve these two issues I one, divide up the magnets on a two sides of a piece of scrap metal, one pole on side and the other pole on the other, and when I go to glue I glue one hole on all the bases first and then go to glue the other pole magnets in the other holes, and two, I glue a tiny piece of paper to the bottom of each base, so when the base is glued it's a tiny bit off the surface I'm gluing on, and when dry I can scrape off the paper. Honestly the polarity issue you could ignore if you really wanted to. But the paper step I don't recommend you skip.

This will probably explain a little better:

One note about gluing. I found it's better to set the magnet in the whole and put a couple tiny dabs of glue, and in fact I use white glue for this step, and then once that's dry go around again, picking up each base and applying super glue on both sides with a toothpick and blowing into the cracks, and then setting each down sideways leaning against something for a minute. If you start out with superglue from the start, especially if you use enough to really hold the magnet in there, it will run out the bottom and glue the whole base to the paper or whatever you have beneath.

And in that last pic you can see that each base I drilled is intended for a particular figure. My plan is that one day, literally, every miniature its base.

And here are some results! A number of figures here able to stand up on their own now!

Stone Beasts

Painted: Woldwarden and Woldwyrds

Immoren is a dangerous place and my boy Baldur doesn't go far outside the neighborhood exept under the protective gaze of these golem-like constructions of wood and stone.

Manufacturer: Privateer Press
Line: Hordes
Faction: Circle Orboros
Figure: Woldwarden
Release date: 2006
Sculptor: ?
Date painted: 2008

Manufacturer: Privateer Press
Line: Hordes
Faction: Circle Orboros
Set: 72023 Woldwyrd
Release date: 2007
Sculptor: ?
Date painted: 2008

Let me know if you know the sculptor of these.

The paintjobs are canonical and the main area mine differ from the studio paint jobs is mine are a lot warmer, with richer tones as if under a summer sun. In a wicker object wicker is naturally going to be very dull, but I wanted the wicker parts here to seem supple and vigorously alive, and I also wanted them to contrast nicely with the green tones. So I made them very red, starting with Vallejo Back Red as a base, under the logic the beast creation recipe called for a special red plant, whether it was a kind of rattan or reed or what have you, and that further the life giving creation magic imbues this plant with an even greater luster, as if, giving it's life for the stone beast it dies in a way but nonetheless becomes more alive than ever. You know, that Lacanian thing, the death drive.

The ropes, meanwhile, were done greenish to represent hemp.

I also glazed the woldwarden with mossy green tones starting at the feet and fading upwards to make him more an element of the environment. He spends most of his day standing silent and watchful, and it should show as weathering.

The woldwyrds are easy to paint but that orb in the center is a clear focal point and needs a bit of care to get it right. A plain sphere is not the easiest thing to create forced highlights on so I recommend photo reference in cases like this. I spent a little extra time on these hoping have it look like they were focusing their energy to a single point from which a laser blast was about to be released. That's the whole point of these guys, after all, they fly around and shoot lasers.

At first I wanted to have one or both woldwyrds flying on flight stands, but thee thin and fiddly nature of the bottom of the figure made this a challenge, and I just wanted to get them painted as these were the last ones to get me to a finished force at the recommended mid-range points value. What was that at the time, 500 points?

The woldwyrds are stock but I did tweak the head of the woldwarden. The stock head is longer and has less depth. This was just an aesthetic choice. I cut down the chin and built out the back of the "skull," and then I had to dremel out neck cavity it rests in considerably, which took some time.

This is also a good chance to call out the bases. These guys are from the wood and more than most factions I see these guys fighting on their home turf, so forest bases are particularly fitting. I wanted the forest to be lush and dark, like you're under the canopy just at that window of time in the year when the ferns and mosses are their greenest, like the redwood forests surrounding my mother's house which I feel a particular affinity for. What I see as the success of the bases is due to a few factors. One, the temptation when painting ground is to drybrush it, to highlight all the little rocks etc. In the forest, however, the soil is moist and draws in the light. So first of all I used mostly concrete patch (which has a fine gritty texture) and fine sands. I then liberally put in patches of larger rocks (Woodland Scenics talus and course ballast) and debris (little bits of sage brush from Sweetwater Scenery Products, which sadly looks to have closed it's doors). The ground bits were painted a dark, rich brown (Folk Art Burnt Umber, and then brought up only to a slightly brighter hue, a really intense, warm mix of Folk Art Burnt Umber and Raw Sienna. This gave a good match for a redwood forest bed. The branches were picked out in a duller brown and some with greenish highlights as they were new-fallen, and the stones were done with Ceramcoat Hippo Grey (one of my favorite terrain colors) and then highlighted, probably with Ceramcoat Mudstone (another must-have terrain-grade paint). Next up, foliage, done with Noch static grass and AMSI foams of different shades. Many of the little bushes were then given rich green brushovers ("wet-brushing") with mixes including the awesome and electric p3 Necrotite Green (which also figures predominantly in the greens of the beasts themselves).

You'll also see I put faint stripes on the bases to mark the 180° field of vision, which is important in the game. Some folks like to draw attention to this on the bases and quite frankly I think it looks terrible most of the time. Instead, I like to use a dark color you can see easily when you're looking for it, but only when you're looking for it. In this case it was P3 Thornwood green, which is a highly recommended dark, warm, neutral.

As always, these and all my figures are on flickr.

Out for blood

Painted: Tharn Bloodtrackers

I mentioned the Ilyad War Wolf was the #1 reason I started a Circle Orboros Hordes warband. These savage ladies are reason #2. These hottie barbarian girls by Kev White are some of the best figures made for the game and they got the seal of approval from the GF, who favors Hordes generally above the other figures I paint but ones by Kev White over all comers.

I'll try not to overdo it with too many pics here, but I did take individual pics of all the girls which you can see in this flickr set if you're curious. Here are a few selections:

Painting

At the time (2008) I was painting commissions and really giving my all to each piece. With this personal project I was trying to be a little less demanding on myself and just go with the flow. That attitude kind of broke down painting these girls, though, as I had an extremely particular vision in my mind of how they should look, and in the end I exceeded even my hopes for them, but it took several times over the time I had hoped to spend on them and nowhere was I "going with the flow."

In a perfect world it would often be nice to be able to do a mockup of an idea one has before committing to it on a unit of figures. But that's not a luxury I can afford. Thankfully however, there is so much great art and so many photos that can be used as reference that I can often find a picture that matches what I have in my mind's eye—or exceeds it—and that was the case here. Here's a picture from Ashley wood I used as the inspiration for my flesh tones palette:

There was another picture I used for the overall palette, the greens and browns, and while I have my Circle Orboros inspiration gallery intact in Picasa with ~150 pics in it, that particular picture has gone missing.

At the time I always used a black undercoat, but because I wanted the flesh to really glow I went with white for these. I think that decision was one reason it took me so long to finish these. I would see these French painters come up with a beautiful result over white and I would balk when they said how short a time it took them. For me starting white has always meant more time and less predictability. At any rate, I couldn't be more pleased with these and it just goes to show that despite wanting to make it easier on myself for the personal projects, sometimes oneself is the toughest critic of all, and the hardest to please!

Some brief notes about the paints. The flesh was GW Elf Flesh first and then shading down through Bronzed Flesh to Dwarf Flesh and I believe P3 Khardic Flesh. Then a number of glazes of GW Flesh Wash (these are ~2005 era GW paints) with matte medium, and back up through Elf Flesh to P3 Menoth White Base and Menoth White Highlight, more glazes, more highlights etc. until they really glowed. Glazes made with GW Bestial Brown and GW Snakebite Leather (which is really yellow, and particularly great for glazes) figure predominantly all over the figure (including in the glazes for the flesh, come to think about it), and I also used some of the great P3 browns like Battlefield Brown and Bootstrap Leather (which is much more a subdued middle brown as compared with GW Snakebite leather).

As always, the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.