Cherokee Paint Submission 2024

 This year I went to Cherokee with my Khorne daemons. Like last year, I decided to strip my whole army 2 weeks before the super and paint them. The theme I decided was to go with Zodiark from FFXIV. These are with purple/black/burgendy/blue hues. Zodiark's theme was the hardest, but most fun I have ever done since I couldn't decide to go with warm or cool tones since I was contradicting myself quite a bit. However, I was able to finish the army before Cherokee. Belakor is only 90% done and the rest are between 50-75%. With this in mind, I still did my submission to see where do I fall with the display board that I also created. I didn't know that the scoring at Cherokee was the same one as the Golden Demon Awards. So with a not completed army I scored a 52/100 with the highest at the super being an 80. I hope to keep on improving and next year score in the low 70s with what ever army I decide to submit. I believe the smartest thing is to finish my demons, and next year re-submit again to see how much did I improve. 

    With the scoring I learned a lot of things. Belakor was the highlight of the army, but it was not an obvious centerpiece. Thus, I need to make this more of a spotlight. I may need to change his basing to be more pronounced. Next, the ice swords were not as good as I would have liked. Granted, I only have done 30 swords with this technique.... with only my blood letters. The basing was good, but didn't bring out the khorne skull theme that I was hoping, but that is an easy fix. Lastly, I learned a lot about purple and how much it can help with making a model more warm or cool depending upon what hues you can use. Overall, it was great to have the feedback from the scoring of where my weaknesses are and how to make my painting stronger.

Zodiark FFXIV

 Paint Score 2024

Daemon Army    

Crackle Effect on Armor

 Over this last Tau comission, I was working on a phyrexian themed from MTG to incorporate onto Tau models. While talking about ichor, the client and I decided to do crackle effects on the lower portion of the plate to create an image that the ichor is slowly corrupting the tau from the base upwards. Here I went through 3 different methods to try and get the best crackle effect with randomization without loosing details from the panels themselves. I will go through the 3 different ways I tried, the pros-cons, and which one lead with the best crackle effect. 

Trial 1: PVA glue. The first trial was with normal PVA glue ontop of the lower armor. This is the first option due to its accessability and affordable nature. Upon application there was a few problems. A. The glue was extremely thick and would cover detail after drying. B. Even with trying to dilute with thinner and not water, the glue did not thin to the desired consitency to place over the models. Even when drying for a hour to apply the crackle color of black, the effect just did not work as expected. I believe using PVA glue is a great crackle effect option for display boards since you can put it on thick and then use the acrylic color of your choice ontop. The majority of the cracks that did occur on the plates were not small enough and not as radomized as I would have liked. 

Trial 2: Maskol. This is an amazing tool that can be used for various options. It is liquid rubber that is purple that allows you to paint where you don't want certain colors at. Then once the Maskol is dry, you can lift that section up with little mess. However, there is a few issues to using this. A. Even with the smallest detail brush I had, I couldn't create the crackle effect I wanted. Since the rubber is thick and can be hard to natvigate around, it was a bit disappointing of the larger, more obvious "crackle", effect it had. B. It needs to cure for a while and it does smell a bit. This isn't the biggest issue since I can always hop on another model to paint while it dries for 30-45 minutes; however, the smell for me was a bit of a draw back. Otherwise, this liquid rubber has a lot of potential for later projects. 

Trial 3: Hobby crackle medium from FolkArt. This one was the winner of the 3 trials that I had. This is an acrylic medium that when applied and dried, can lead to randomized crackle effects and changes based upon the thickness you do. With this, it worked wonders with diluting it with thinner and did not effect the dry time nor the effectivness of the product. There are three main issues while using this product you will need to watch out for. A. The time to dry. It does take a full hour for this product to cure before you can paint ontop of it. Otherwise the crackle effect will not work as well or you will notice brush strokes very obviously no matter how careful you are painting the second layer on top of it. B. Even though you can thin it down 1:1, I would still apply a thin layer. However, you need to make sure you will add enough product for the effect to work but not enough that it will cover up details. C. This layer catches a lot of brush strokes and the last layer you will need to dab it. Yes, dab the paint not brush it on. Other than these 3 things with the crackle paint, it offered the best, smallest, and most randomized cracks on the armor.