This is the same Deathripper as before after an hour or so of base-coating work. Still needs cleanup, some more coats, and then all of the shading and highlighting work, but I'm happy with it so far.

The lighting makes it a bit difficult to see the Gnarls Green base for the necrotite furnace against the main Cryx Bane Base layer, but it'll presumably start to pop a bit with some highlighting and washing.

I'm definitely enjoying playing with the new color palette, especially the Blighted Gold; it's a fun change of pace from the clean brass and gold metals of Cygnar and Khador.

Also, even after just an hour or so, I'm amazed at how much more pleasant the sable brushes are to use. Sharp clean lines, minimal slop, fantastic detail precision, and they hold a ton of paint. Totally worth the ludicrous price, and I think I'll slowly be replacing all of my detail and base brushes with sable.

Hopefully tomorrow or Wednesday I'll be able to get a little shading and washing done on this creepy little bugger — I'll be off at Cigarfest this weekend, so there'll be no painting time there.

I'm already looking forward to getting paint on this guy's big brother the Slayer. This is a bit of a surprise to me, since I'd sort of written Cryx off as the faction I had around just to make quick multiplayer games possible. Now I'm starting to understand what people see in these particular models…

I don't want to think about how much I spent on them, but initial experimentation suggests it was totally worth it. They work very well, and I love how they feel in my hand. I will admit that I'm a complete sucker for fancy tools and gadgets, but I'm definitely happy with them so far.

I've been using them for a bit of a faction break from Khador red and Cygnar blue:

Cryx Deathripper!

It's a completely different color palette than either of the factions I've painted before, plus a very different shape and flow. Since I've been feeling sort of stuck with my units, it's turning out to be a pleasing change of pace. More updates as I, you know, get more than a single color on it.

My favorite of them is probably this guy:

Jump jets! How can you not love that? It's an awesome model, and on the table it has some cool mobility rules that should be fun to play with.

I also added a set of Kayazy Eliminators and a unit of Windowmaker snipers, but I don't have good pictures of them currently. Also, they'll need to wait until I'm over my unit painting fatigue before I even want to prime them.

Oh, and next-best for last:

Beast 09! His axe alone is taller than the Minuteman. It's nuts. I'm also really looking forward to seeing what I can do paint-wise with his runes and other nifty details.

Next up on catch-up time, tonight's activity…

I got into a bit of a painting rut, for which I blame my "I know, I'll paint two units at the same time!" bright idea. Turns out that painting a set of five near-identical figures and a set of six near-identical figures at the same time is a bit of a soul-sucking assembly line.

After a bit of a pause for "but I don't WANNA paint those guys again!", I have both to kind-of-close-to-finished state now, with the Stormblades a bit more done than the Man-O-War Shocktroopers. I still need to do a round of highlighting and deep shading on the blue armor, but I'm pretty happy with how the weapons and metal turned out:

The glow isn't perfect, but in person it has a decent pop to it. As my first special effect, I'll definitely call it a success.

Similarly, I think my first face came out okay. Lips aren't great, but the eyes look pretty okay and I managed to shade/wash those tiny little areas without making the poor dude look like he has some horrible skin disease.

Anyway, that's most of what I actually painted while I wasn't blogging. Next up, some non-painted stuff and my current distractions…

It's also the heaviest model I've put together. There's a good bit of hollow space in the torso, but even so it's a big chunk of pewter. I hauled out the kitchen scale and the damn thing's over six ounces. You could put someone's eye out by flinging it at them.

Building it was fun. Lots of pieces, decent range of pose options, a little thinking about the best way to go forward. It did end up taking a lot longer than I expected, though, which was kind of a bummer. I'd hoped to have time to paint after building it, but getting it all set chewed up the time I had.

There was a lot of pinning here, since all the pieces are so big and have such small joins between them. The head, pelvis, and arms are all pinned and therefore nice and sturdy. Those were time consuming but overall pretty straightforward.

I also spent a while trying to find a good spot to pin the shoulder pieces to the torso before giving up and solving the problem with extra glue. I'm still a bit worried that they'll shear off if I drop the thing, so possibly I should try and epoxy the gaps a bit to give a bit of structure.

The main weak point is the hoses between the lightning coils and the arms:

They look awesome, but the fit isn't great and there isn't much surface area to secure them with. I'm a bit worried they'll break off, especially since the right-hand one got weakened a bit while I was trying to fit it.

I'm also going to be experimenting with priming and painting bits that haven't been glued yet. The shock coils on the forearms are so close together that they'd be pretty much impossible to paint in place, so for now they're just stuck in with sticky tack. I'll try and mount them somewhere to prime and paint on their own and then glue in afterwards. Hopefully that'll go smoothly.

Overall it's a great model, and I'm hugely looking forward to painting it. I haven't tried to do the glowing-blue Cygnar electrical effect yet, and this 'jack has a ton of it in all the coils.

There's still a little mess along the lines between the cream base and the burgundy highlight, but it's a lot better. Also, the black menofix detail is way cleaner — it looks a little messy in the photo cleanup, but in person it looks awesome. There's a subtle highlight on both the cream and the burgundy that I think works well; later I'll do a narrow secondary highlight to try and make it pop.

I also gave washing the metals a shot and got decent but also sort of mixed results:

As this picture shows, the armor wash gave a little shadow definition to the pig iron bits and some in the really textured gold, but overall it isn't as strong as I was hoping. I think the deal is that I thinned the wash too much — I'm still probably too worried about ruining the paint job by sloshing ink all over it. I'll want to go over that with a stronger concentration of wash and see what happens.

The Vigilant also needs a round of shading on the non-metal bits, but overall I think it's the best thing I've painted so far.

It clearly still needs another coat on the orange plus some touchup work, but I'm pretty happy with how it's coming out.

The paint scheme is the standard Protectorate cream-and-burgundy-and-gold, with the addition of orange at Ray's request. I wanted something that'd stand out nicely between the Sanguine Base of the edging and the Coal Black of the menofix symbol, so I ended up mixing a touch of Skorne Red into some Heartfire to deepen it a bit. If I had it to do over I might have thrown in a little Morrow White to lighten it up a tad, but I'm still pretty happy with how it came out.

The contrast looks especially good on the larger symbols on the shields:

Dealing with this color palette has been a nice change from the bright colors and heavy metallics of the Cygnar and Khador 'jacks I'm usually painting, so that's been fun. I kept being surprised by just how dark the Sanguine Base went on, especially over white primer. Felt like it took a kajillion coats before it was even close to smooth and consistent. The Menoth White Base was great, though, and coated very quickly and looked solid after three coats tops.

I definitely should have cleaned up the edges of the menofix background with some Morrow White before putting down the orange mix — the Heartfire / Skorne Red mix didn't cover as well as I would have wanted, which contributed a bit to some of the messiness there. I knew while painting that I should have taken the time to re-prime white and get everything clean, but I was in a hurry to get the last color on. Once again, haste makes me screw up.

It's only paint, though. Everything's fixable.

Anyway, I hope the tiny man likes his 'wobot' when it's done. Laura tells me that he'll love it no matter what because he's two and it's a robot I made for him, but I still want it to be as nice as I can make it.

The details on the Stormblade weapons are going to be a pain. The center gap is tiiiiiiiiiiny, and all of those coils need to have a nifty arcane blue glow applied to them. Fortunately, the rest of the unit is just Cygnar blue and gold, with a dab of flesh tone for the leader's exposed face. I'm considering doing the Army Painter varnish thing here so I don't have to deal with carefully washing all the armor. I'll need to avoid varnishing the swords and glaive, since that'd probably hurt the blue glow effect.

The Man-O-War unit is starting to look awesome, though it's going to need a lot of touchup for all the fine detail spots. The shields and helmets in particular are a hot mess right now. I'm doing a better job of thinning out the Khador Red before applying it, which is definitely giving me a smoother coat. That combined with the brighter tone from the white primer base really helped them start to pop even after the first coat. Both of the troopers pictured here have only 2-3 coats on them — at  4-5 they'll probably be done and ready for touchup and highlighting.

Unlike with the Stormblades, these are big and impressive enough that I'll probably highlight and wash them by hand. Basically, they look like warjacks, so I might as well paint them like warjacks. They're on 40mm bases and everything. They tower over the Stormblades and make the Gun Mages look like children.

Last up is Ray's Vigilant, which has a pretty clean Rhulic Gold and Pig Iron base on it and is ready for the nonmetallics:

I showed it to him this morning, and he remains super-excited. Laura and I talked to him about the color scheme, and he seems to want the standard Menoth white-and-purple-and-blue scheme but also with orange. Laura's idea is to switch the white background of the Menofix symbol out with orange, which I think will work pretty well. I'll have to see if I can find a decent darker blue for the Menofix itself to keep the contrast up. I'm glad he likes his robot so much.

The Gun Mages look great, and I think I managed to keep the nice details on them:

They'll be a nice challenge to finish, both because of their size and because of all the detail and fabric on them — I'm good at painting metal, but there just isn't all that much of it on these guys.

Next up were the Firefly and Sentinel:

Two fairly standard plastic Cygnar 'jacks that don't seem like they'll be too tricky to paint. I'll try and be more careful with drybrushing with these. They're pretty much my "okay, try to screw up fewer things than last time.

I also primed the Man-O-War Shock Troopers and the Menoth Vigilant for Ray, but I'll post about those separately, since I forgot to take primer-only shots of them.