Monday Miniatures: Arius
Well loyal readers, I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving. For my part, I did a lot of relaxing, and even more driving. After a week off, there are a couple items worth reporting on.
First, this week there were 9 minis submitted before I wrote up the post, a new record.
Second, after being in existence 29 months, this blog has hit 100,000 views. That’s hardly enough traffic to set the world on fire, but still, it’s a pretty cool milestone.
Thank you all for your continued readership and participation.
Rum and Bones – CMON is releasing another product (note: not project). It looks fine, but you can probably get it cheaper on Amazon down the road.
I’m pretty happy with this week’s efforts. The red shading I added to the cape didn’t come out well on camera, but otherwise it turned out quite well.
Arjen went with the same color scheme as last week.
Jessi went for a statuary look. love the tarnish. Want to share your secrets?
Jake continues to awe and shame me with his amazing cloth blending. Just wow.
Tallghost seems to have a different shield than the rest of us. Did you greenstuff that?
Jo has some very precise gilding. The effect is quire nice actually – good contrast.
Magnus actually goes for a similar color scheme to Jo’s above.
David needs a better camera. But seriously – the mini looks nice, it’s just hard to make out some of the finer details.
Brian win’s the most colorful mini this week. It turns out that even in Technicolor this mini is still frightening.
Dain Deepaxe – He’s not quite Santa, but the beard is close enough.
Break for Christmas
Please continue to send me your suggestions!
Caffeineforge 
David: I love the green glow effect on the letters on the front of your sword.
I also like the glowing eyes. I went back and forth over weather I should do something with the eyes.
Arjen and Jessi: You both went for worn armor and they both look great. I stink at weathering stuff. I am jealous.
Tallghost: I honestly just couldn’t get behind the symbols painted on the shield. They seemed kind of like random squiggles, so I shaved them off and glued on an old shield embossment from a GW skeleton unit.
Brian: It looks like you have some nice tarnish effects too. Where was I when Tarnish Class was being held? you guys are all like three steps ahead of me!
My worn armor is rather simple: black basecoat, then edges and details with a 1:1 mix of black and silver and finish of with some grey drybrushing. I find that mixing metallics with colours gives a dulled realistic look to metals. Non-diluted metals always look like freshly polished for a parade.
The armor had a sort of “GW Space Marine” vibe to it at certain parts, which made it seem a little odd and overly bulky.
@David: Excellent work on the green inks for the sword! I really like the look of that effect.
@Tallghost: I really like your shield mod, and think it looks much better than the default “squiggles”.
I love all the entries! As far as the verdigris effect, I can’t take credit. I found this awesome tutorial: http://randomplatypus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=32
And used the second technique. Now I have a bottle of premixed verdigris paint and the gw one. 🙂
The glowing runes on David’s sword look fantastic, I wish that my purple glow had turned out that way… I was trying too hard to work with the metalics and it just didn’t work as well as it had with the armour (Still kicking myself that I didn’t get a better camera to take a picture of this mini with)
Argen’s champion’s legs look great, but for some reason the torso looks more grey than black with edge highlighting? don’t know why but I just like the legs more than the torso. The legs is that worn black metalic effect that I always try and strive for and screw up by adding too much silver.
Absolute favourite mini of the lot was Tallghost’s though, it wasn’t the shield but rather the sword and the cloak that got me, the cloak especially just fit.
I spent too much time on my cloak -laughs- I loved how the back of it turned out, getting much better at dealing with rougher textures and blending… Even if the next miniature is a dip back into smooth shadings (going to be going for a neutral grey or brown this time though)