Tag Archives: Citadel Craters

From the Painting Desk #5.1 – Completed Citadel Craters!

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So between not needing to work today, a small sleep-in until 7:30am, and the morning being a beautiful blue sky morning, I decided that instead of going back to bed, I’d go out to the shed and try and see what I could get done on those craters that I started yesterday. Luck was with me, and I managed to get them finished. Good thing, too. The weather is turning back to it’s normal foulness tonight, and will stay that way all week…

Completed GW Craters.

Turned out alright, I reckon. Just enough contrast between the light and dark, and a bit of weathering powder to represent the dirt underneath being thrown up. I kept the palette to grey and brown, so that they can work reasonably well on a variety of table surfaces.

Works for them!

I really enjoy finishing up pieces like these – they work well across a variety of genres, as our Dark Angels, Heer, WarZone Imperial and other friends here demonstrate. I also very much enjoy being able to quickly turnaround pieces. Being able to go from basically unpainted (ok, it was sprayed and had some texture on the edges) to finished in 24 hours or so (under in this case) is always incredibly rewarding and appealing.

From the Painting Desk #5 – Citadel Craters

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No, not the new ones made from dead Cadians and Skullz, but the older ones, made from cheap, vac-formed plastic with the softest of soft details. I got these around 8-10 years ago when a friend of my wife’s got me a GW voucher for Christmas. By this time I was buying most of my stuff from overseas, due to Australian prices being a rather steep gouging. So when I went in, I found something that seemed reasonably priced, so I picked these up. They then sat in various boxes, uncared for until 2014, when I was going through my stuff as part of getting the War Room into shape. I put them in a box I marked “Fast Scenery” while sorting through stuff. Fast scenery being scenery that I felt like I could paint… you guessed it – fast!

A couple of months ago I was moving stuff and spied the box. I pulled the craters out, and sprayed them with grey. They then sat around until tonight, when on impulse I brought them inside and gave them three layers of drybrushing to get to the stage in the photos. Now I’m putting them on my blog, in what must be the most underwhelming update I’ve posted so far. So why do this? Because I want to make myself finish the damned things, so maybe this will help me guilt myself into doing it. Also, because I’ve barely been updating for the past month or so, despite still doing a bit of painting. I’m just worn out, and a large amount of what I’ve been painting have been plastic Minas Tirith troops, which are about as uninspiring as it gets in terms of WIP (right up there with drybrushed craters, in fact – but a hell of a lot more of them!) The Gondor guys look great all ranked up on the table, but until then, they’re just meh.

To be fair, I’ve been finishing off some stuff that’s marginally more interesting. A little bit of undead, an Ogre got renovated, as did some old Familiars. I guess I’m just tired and a little burnt out. Hopefully the end of winter and the depressing gloomy weather we’ve had for so long now and a bit of time off work to sleep and recharge in a few weeks will renew my interest in blogging, and I’ll show off some newer stuff. Until then, let’s just hope I can wash, airbrush, powder and varnish these craters instead of put them aside for another 2 months (or 8 years!)