Author: Joe B

Good Reads 35 by Broken Paintbrush

Good Reads 35

Published by Joe B

It’s time for another selection of amazing posts from your fellow hobby bloggers. You don’t want to miss these Good Reads. Treelord Ancient The new Sylvaneth (treemen) are some amazing kits and if I didn’t have just a huge backlog, I would have jumped in on their release. But Turkadactyl is going full bore with his trees, painting them in a bright spring color scheme, complete with cherry blossom pink. Reaper Minis You may remember Sean’s post on Oldhammer, but it’s not just old Citadel models he pines over. He posted up his collection of old Reaper minis full of old-time character but with great, modern painting. Xiphon Interceptor Complete Forge World makes some great looking flyers, even Space Marines get flyers that look like they could actually fly. Gothmog painted up a nice Xiphon Interceptor for his Blood Angles that looks brilliant in all that red. Iron Circle I am a long time Iron Warriors fanboy, and of course picked up Angel Exterminatus. The Iron Circle was only mentioned a few times but they sounded so cool. …

Painting Guide for the Chthonians from Mansions of Madness

Chthonian Painting Tutorial for Mansions of Mansions

Published by Joe B

One of the scarier monsters of the game, the Chthonian are otherworldly monsters that appear from nowhere and swallow up the investigators.  Below I’ve put together a painting guide on how painted these beasts. Chthonian Painting List When I painted the Chthonians, I was going for a contrast: ‘natural’ colors for the main skin and strong colors for the tentacles. With that, I’ve put together the paints used before for reference Game Color Sombre Grey Game Color Wolf Grey Game Color Dark Green Wash Game Color Royal Purple Game Color Charred Brown Game Color Tan Game Color Warlord Purple Game Color Squid Pink Model Color Basic Skintone Model Color Scarlett Red Game Color Black Painting the Chthonian Skin For the skin, I started with gray dry brushes followed up with green and purple washes. This helped to create something that looked almost natural. Base Colors As with all my models, I paint the main colors so I can get a  sense of proportions between each block. The main body was done with Sombre Gray, the …

Guest Interview with Adam Jones of The Golden D6

Published by Joe B

I have a special guest interview as today’s guest post. One of the great things about our hobby is being able to connect with so many people all over the globe. And almost exactly a year ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything about Adam Jones. Until out of the blue, he reaches out to me on Twitter saying he has a crazy idea of building an online hobby magazine. In this last year, Adam has since released 6 amazing issues, packed full of hobby articles from your fellow hobbyists. You can check out my review of Issue 3 or Adam put together a special pack of the articles that I’m featured in, you can fill out the form below and download a teaser! Interview with Adam Jones of The Golden D6 Tell us a bit about your hobby? The Golden D6 used to be my regular gaming group and we’d meet on a weekly-ish basis to get out Warhammer 40000 on. At the time, the Melbourne 40K tournament scene was a vivid …

Watch This: Painting Tablescapes from Secret Weapon Miniatures

Watch This: Painting Tablescapes from Secret Weapon Miniature

Published by Joe B

Another new video is ready for Watch This series, this week is with Designer Warfare and painting Tablescape Tiles from Secret Weapon Miniatures. He paints up a few sections of the Urban Road (Clean and Damaged) with his airbrush for our enjoyment. I’ve been looking at picking up some of these Tablescape Tiles for my own gaming table and found this video super helpful. I hope you enjoy his fairly quick video on painting the streets and check out my cheat sheet notes below for later reference. Quick Reference for Painting Tablescapes Due to the manufacturing, some tiles may have variations in the plastic color Doesn’t affect the physical nature and is easily covered in primer (large plastic injection molding is hard and can leave harmless ‘sunbursts’ in plastic) Prime each tile with Grey Primer Use Model Air Pale Blue Grey, focusing on the sidewalk areas Keep some variation in the spray to add interest in each tile Avoid the cracks and recesses Paint craters with Army Painter Oak Brown Start at center of each and …

Dreadtober Painting Challenge

Dreadtober is Coming

Published by Joe B

Can you believe August is already over? That brings a few things: the end of summer for us in the north, Nova Open, and anticipation for Dreadtober! Due to exciting things in Greg’s life, I’ll be hosting the month-long painting event this year, and it’s going to be awesome! And Lo! Dreadtober is coming! For those who missed it last year, Dreadtober is a community challenge to build, paint, and show off a dreadnought sized model during the month of October. There isn’t any competition or reward other than getting one of your models finished. But the participants had a blast last year and some amazing models got painted. I’m still working on the details for the challenge, but if you are interested, sign up below and I’ll keep you up to date. I’ll be using email to keep in contact with all the participants, but don’t worry, I don’t spam and I won’t automatically add you to the newsletter (though I hope you check that out too!). Stay Tuned for More to Come! A more …

How to paint white skin and faces

How to Paint Light Skin – Broken Paintbrush Tutorial

Published by Joe B

Painting skin, particularly faces can be a challenge for beginner painters. Or even those, like me, who have been painting for years but never ‘got’ how to paint flesh. To learn, I challenged myself to create a tutorial on how to paint light skin. Much of this came out of creating a painting tutorial for each of the Mansions of Madness models. I’ve already done the tutorial for the dark skin models, so now it’s only fair to do the same for the light shades of skin. Below you will see I took five bare heads and tried slightly different techniques on each. From fast and dirty dry brush to only using washes to trying to do something more ‘advanced.’ Paint List Below are the paints I used for all five faces.ost of the colors came from Vallejo’s Skin Colors Set that I would highly recommend picking up. Game Color Heavy Skintone Model Color Sunny Skintone Model Color Basic Skintone Games Workshop Reikland Fleshshade Game Color Flesh Wash Game Color Red Wash Model Color Brown …

Broken Paintbrush Good Read 34

Good Reads 34 – Blood, Deff, Magnets, Slaughter, and Wolves

Published by Joe B

Too busy to keep up with all the hobby awesome over the last two weeks? Then check out this week’s Good Reads! I’ve found an awesome lineup including Greg’s amazing Deff Dread, planting blood and gore, and more awesome articles by fellow hobbyists. Blood and Acid Tutorial I shared The Fantasy Hammer’s Broodlord last time, but he returns with a great tutorial on adding gore and slime to your models. He makes it seem so easy, but with the right tools it probably is. Slaughtersmith Combining fantasy (or Age of Sigmar I guess) models into the 40k world can create some awesome characters. Thomas took the Slaughterpriest and created a custom Warpsmith for his army. Shows what you can do with spare bits and some guitar string. Magnetizing a Knight Mike has finished up his White Scars (only for the moment, I’m sure!) to build up a Knight Titan. But he wanted to do ALL the knight types… Solution: magnetize every bit of the Knight. He shows how with a ton of pictures so you can give …

Harvey Walters from Mansions of Madness

Painting Harvey Walters of Mansions of Madness

Published by Joe B

What is an old man doing running around a creepy old mansion? Don’t underestimate the Prof! This week brings a tutorial on painting Harvey Walters, an investigator in the Mansions of Madness game. Harvey’s use in the game is to solve puzzles and has a relatively high sanity – ideal for when the monsters start to show up. He offsets his frailty with a magic staff that allows him to reduce any damage down to one, yup even a Shaggoth can’t swallow the old man whole. Painting wise, I wanted to give Professor Walters a classic suite, but with a hit of color. A white shirt, royal purple vest, and a black jacket it is. And to set off the vest, a bright yellow hanky. Color List As with the rest of the set, I’ve stuck to mostly the Vallejo range as I like their dropper bottles. All the Model Colors used are from the Painting Skin Set. Skintones: Model Color Light Brown Model Color Medium Fleshtone Model Color Basic Skintone Model Color Light Flesh …

Painting Basics Banner

Watch This: Painting Basics

Published by Joe B

In today’s Watch This we are going back to painting basics with NPCChris. This is a great video for anyone just starting out with painting, but also anyone who just wants to review the basics of painting a model. With the Watch This series, I look for videos that help with various aspects of our hobby that I want to share with you. I then embed the YouTube video below for you to watch – but don’t miss the notes I put together below the video. After watching the video myself a few times, I write up the highlights from the video for your reference. So let’s jump in and watch Chris share painting basics while he paints up his Troll. Painting Basics Notes I’ve put the following notes together from Chris’ video. This can help recap what you watched or summarize the different points he brings up. All models have three basic layers of paint: the base coat, highlights, and a shade. Can be done in different orders Single layer (wash) or multiple Prime your …

Site Updates and Why it is Important to do

Published by Joe B

If you visited Broken Paintbrush over the last week, you might have noticed a bunch of server errors, dead robots, or broken pictures. The reason is simple: I have been attempting to upgrade my blog services with site updates. For many of you this article will be a bit more boring as you may not care about server performance and what not, but I’ve always tried to be as transparent as possible with Broken Paintbrush and my hobby blogging journey. So below I’m going to share what I changed, why, and what’s still on my to-do list. Perhaps this is a bit of a self-reflection post, but I hope that you might also glean something off for your blog. At least give you something to think about as you grow. The Background Ten months ago I had declared I was making some changes to Broken Paintbrush. In summary: I was focusing on your experience on my site, adding more tutorials, and improving the articles provided to you. While I have been working on the articles …

Good Reads Week 32

Published by Joe B

Ready for some more awesome blog posts to fill your hobby desires? This week’s Good Reads includes some crazy Grot Bikers, Oldhammer comic battles, Doom Rider!!!, Angles, and an award-winning Drake. Good Reads is a bi-weekly post that gathers up some of my favorite posts and shares them with you. There are amazing hobbyists out there showing their amazing work. Click through to their blogs and give them a follow and a comment! Custom Grot Bikers Do you have some spare bits that need a model? Blazmo shames us all with his amazing creation of custom Grot skorchas built with scrap. Some awesome crazy mek work there – and hard to tell where some of the pieces come from, and when you do, the creativity required is impressive! Old Hammer Battle Report Sean signed up to be a guest writer on Broken Paintbrush (check out his article this Saturday!) which is how I found his blog. Not only is he a hardcore Oldhammer fan, but he does his battle reports in a comic style.  Check the comic reports, …

Painting guide for the Mi-Go from Mansions of Madness

Painting the Mi-gos from Mansions of Madness

Published by Joe B

Back to another monster from Mansions of Madness. This week I have the Mi-Go models – odd looking fly/bat/mosquito creatures that like to eat brains. I went for an other-worldly look with pink and purple skin and blue carapace, and of course, blood. I used two main techniques on the Mi-Go: drybrush and wash. This allowed them to be done relatively quickly while still pulling out the details. Step 1: Base Colors After a white primer, I painted all the base colors to get a sense of where each would go. This has been particularly hard for the Mi-Go as they were going to be pinks and blues – which can get a bit garish if not balanced well. Step 2: Dry Brush Electric Blue The first layer was doing the carapace. I chose to do dry brush from this model for two reasons: it would be quick, and it has lots of textures that work well with dry brushing. So grabbing my small dry brush, I applied a layer of Electric Blue over all the …