Monday 9 April 2012

Liquid Green Stuff and the New Citadel Paints

Today, as a birthday present from my best beloved, I got some of the new Citadel paints and some Liquid Green Stuff.

New Paints 
I made sure to get a few different types to get the best impression of the new range as I could. I didn't get any glazes as I don't have any projects that require them at the moment.

Base
Pretty much the Foundation paints they released a couple of years ago but with a much bigger range of colours available. Lots of pigment and can stand being thinned down a lot before you start losing coverage.

Shade
A revamp of the previous Washes, again with a greater variety of colours. Don't need too much thinning unlike some of the heavier washes and inks and pool well in the recesses without making them too dark.

Layer
This is the straight up replacement for the Citadel Colour range, some of which has been in service for around 25 years. Well-formulated and give good clean coverage.

Dry
Drybrushing paint! It's like a sort of pigment sludge; very thick and you don't need much to load a drybrush. Takes a lot of wastage out of drybrushing as it removes the requirement to get as much paint on a brush as possible and then wipe most of it away.

Overall
The new range seems like much more of a deliberate attempt at creating a coherent set of paints for use with Citadel Miniatures, where there's always a suitable lighter or darker colour to use during the painting process rather than having to bugger about mixing Skull White into whatever colour and never getting it to look the same twice. As much as I liked the 'old' paints, some of them were absolutely dire and the range did mostly feel like an exercise in giving acrylic paints exciting names rather than producing a minimum-fuss-maximum-results set of products.

Skeletons
To test the new paints vs. the older ones I painted up a couple of skeleton spearmen, both using colours and techniques prescribed by Games Workshop for getting a fast and decent-looking finish.

Old Paints
Skeleton - Old Paints
Bone: base coat of Deneb Stone, wash of Ogryn Flesh, drybrush of Bleached Bone & Skull White.
Spearhead: base coat of Tin Bitz, dry brush of Dwarf Bronze, edged with Burnished Gold.

New Paints
Skeleton - New Paints
Bone: base coat of Zandri Dust, wash of Seraphim Sepia, drybrush of Terminatus Stone.
Spearhead: base coat of Screaming Bell, wash of Reikland Fleshshade, layer of Hashut Copper, drybrush of  Golden Griffon.



Skeletons
As you can see the skeleton painted with the new paints is a lot more natural-looking and less grey, with a much smoother paint coverage. This is the first time in 20 years of doing this that I have been able to paint a bone colour I am ompletely satisfied with.

Liquid Green Stuff
This really is rather special. It's a non-toxic, water soluble version of the Green Stuff epoxy putty used by modellers the world over. It is designed to deal with all the cracks and gaps that are near inevitable when putting together a multi-part model kit, and it does its job very well. Just look at the before and after shots of this Ork Mekaniak that I had managed to put together with a big gap in the shoulder.

Mekaniak - Before

Untitled

The simple conclusion here is that I really like the new range of paints as over the next 12 months or so will be gradually replacing all the paints I currently own with new ones.

Sunday 8 April 2012

Western Erithas

So... due to spending an awful lot of time lately running a Pathfinder campaign I am going to include more  RPG-related stuff in this blog. The first such post is this map what I made using Campaign Cartographer 3 of the area the campaign is so far operating in.


Western Erithas

I'm quite pleased with this, really.