Yeti's Old Valhalla Army Overhaul Blog

It gives a great effect! How quickly do you expect to get the 100+ models done?

I love the ice on your 'marbo' base too, how on earth did you do that?!

Thanks! I'm doing it in chunks, looking to have 50 guardsmen done by Christmas. I work fulltime, have a familiy and go to university almost fulltime as well. Point is, I'm keeping the painting method intentionally easy, since I literally have about 3 or 4 hours a week to dedicate to this project of everything painted.

Ice effect: That's pretty great, there is no ice effect intended, it's just the pooling from the stain around his feet and some other brushstrokes from painting.

I plan on basing them in rocks and snow, exactly like my Warmachine army.

Practical lessons learned on this first finished squad. All in all I’d say I have around 4 hours invested in painting the squad before dip but I did play around a lot with experimenting/trying things out. That’s about 24 minutes a fig. The first guys were 14 minutes but it stretched out as I got into the squad. I guess it’s a stamina/intensity thing when using water based stain (polyu.)


1. Quality of primer coat will be really important. If it goes on frosty in one batch and solid on the next then there will be color differences as the wash does different things to the primer. A loose coat will mean a grainy coalescence. A solid coat will be smooth. Personally I like the gritty finish but that will be hard to reproduce. We’ll see how much deviation there is. On the table it is probably just something you’d notice if pointed out.

2. Related to the above, surface prep is ultra important. Flash lines will totally haunt your waking hours when the dip finds it which is like flash/mold line highlighter. Still, if you are doing lots of minis then who really cares. I have a trick for this that I use when I need to artificially paint shadows on things like cloaks: take a digital picture and adjust the contrast up or down when viewing the image back. This can guide you on what sticks out and what doesn’t, what is in shadow and what isn’t. Seeing it differently will allow you to pick things out that your eye missed or you can exaggerate areas for effect. Also, taking a macro shot of the mini before painting simply helps you find stuff the naked eye missed.

3. You must keep stirring the polyu between applications. It settles that quickly.

4. You will have to learn the features of sculpts and get good with anticipating where the polyu pools in excess. More importantly you need to learn how to do what I call “walking a coat into the corners.” That means when you brush on the dip you have to intentionally brush along all surfaces and get the dip on the surface of the mini into crack/crannies with each stroke; that coat of dip you just put on is a wet sheet that needs to sit on the surface and find an area of different surface tension to draw the dip in as it dries, i.e. a nook or seam. When dip pools too much, you need to guide it down the miniature, down crevices, not lift it off with the brush which will leave a dry spot. In all cases you can’t count on the dip spreading on its own. The main goal is to make one unified wet sheet of dip. On larger miniatures you’ll need to do this fairly fast to be sure you have one wet sheet in a go.

5. White paint absorbs more dip than white primer. Looking at the grenade launcher guy, you can see the shell rotary chambers have a slight shade to them. The bluish-white shade is white paint applied before dip. So you can “preshade” areas of primer with some white paint and when you dip, there is a slight shade. This works well because the areas you want a slight shade is usually where you are touching up a color that overlapped. Like in this case, the blue of the receiver. I’ll look for more absorption/color theory as I go along but this was useful.



Squad pic:



The most exciting thing for me with this is how easily the character of the faces really come out, and that is on minis that already have a few coats of paint on them and then primered over top of for this dip job. I noticed this guy had a huge blem on his face that you just can’t trim/sculpt out. So I just painted it like flesh and moved on. To me it looks like an mass of scar tissue, like he lost an eye. Pretty cool in a grizzled way. I already touched up the silver dot on his chin, BTW (see #2 above, macro shots.)



I love how the rocket launcher trooper came out. I’ve hated this model for years. Now I love him. Can’t wait for a squad of them.

I'm impressed. What polyurethane are you using?

Here's a shot of my updated (but not based) Valhallans in my new snow terrain (not the old arctic/glacier white you saw earlier in this thread.)



I'm considering basing these new IG in this new terrain, not the earlier white snow/light grey base.

Opinions?

Wow, you truly have a grasp for the big picture. I'm impressed.

Thanks for the responses guys. I'm still torn on the basing but there is time to mull it all over. I'm not making any decisions until I hit 50 guys painted but please keep sharing your thoughts, I'm listening

So I now have 2 squads done plus some random guys.

I have a 3rd squad on the table right now, about half way painted, and I'm pretty excited about them.

I wanted to get a quick unit of melta/demo toting brawlers to the table, partly due to my Space Marine friend who likes 2x Drop Pod Dreds and partly due to my fandom of grizzled, dirty troopers who have survived at all cost, blankly regarding the fresh, incoming replacements with sleepy-eyed disdain while they take the new guy's ammo and wander back into no-man's land in search of more mushroom-cloud revenge. I wanted a good counter charge squad to try and dig out bogged units or demo charge some poor idiots who got too close. I wasn't ready to give up ten Valhalans to a creative whim so I scoured my collections for something to use first as a start and then the interwebs for some product I thought would tie it all together nicely.

I had a bunch of very old Necromunda Delaques, who with their greatcoats are easy on the eyes as a start to some conversion. I also have had my eye on Pig Iron heads for some time for something like this so I ordered those from Neal at The War Store. Once they arrived I sawed off all the Delaque heads and attached Pig Irons. In all, I have 10 vets armed with shotguns and lasguns. I also added various Forge World and GW stowage as well as some Pig Iron backpacks/pouches. I think they look very much like grizzled Valhallans at home sapping through the sub-zero nights. I'll grab some more Delaques later to add some melta guns to the squad but for now this will get me started...

Here is a WIP from the squad, a Valhallan Demolition Vet:

I'm stunned at quite how good these guys look!!!!!!!!!!!!

Very nice work!!

Very nice, I really really like what you have done to your army. I can't wait to see what it looks like when you are all finished. Keep those updates coming.

These ice warriors are quite good. I have always loved those figures. I'm just too poor to own them haha

I love the sentinels! I fact, love everything you have done! Keep going!