So last weekend was the grueling Iron Painter. 24 hours. 1 HQ, 1 Troops, 1 other. You might already have seen the entries and results on Gamersaurus’ Page, but I figured that our weekly Tabletop Thursday would be a good time for me to pen down what I did as well as my thoughts about Iron Painter itself.
I prepped and primed all my models last week, so I was ready to dive in when the 2pm start time rolled round. The first order of business was to get all the airbrushing done. I wanted to keep airbrushing to a minimum. I don’t trust myself with an airbrush enough to perform with standard during a time crunch. There’s a lot that could screw up and it was kind of stressful. But I needed the time boost of an airbrush, because having to paint all the large swatches by hand would have been problematic too.
I settled for a compromise. A blue gradient for the separate armor plates and a basecoat of brown for some parts and bases. Everything else only had a quick dusting of white to help establish highlights. Thankfully nothing significant came to pass.
Even then, that was like the two hours or so down. Time to lay down the basecoats for the rest of the parts, especially the skin for my models. And that’s where the livestream came in.
I didn’t do the livestream during the airbrush because I didn’t want flecks to get onto my phone or anything, so I did some of the base metals before I started up filming myself. Nothing really exciting came up (yes, it really is like watching paint dry), but hopefully some of you enjoyed seeing my process. I’m not sure if a better setup would make the streaming more interesting, but now you know I use my painting time to catch up on all the TV I haven’t been watching, lol.
To be honest, the next 3 hours or so was really just me laying down the basecoats for all the skin and metal. All the slow stuff I had to do well in order to make sure the end product was acceptable. Which is one reason why after the livestream my photos were few and far between.
Oh and Cookie, my cat, had to get scritchies. Incidentally, Cookie is a very needy cat, so I usually set a chair for him just outside my painting area so he can keep my company.
Thankfully though, by about 2am grots were done, and a decent portion of my bikes were also completed (mostly the parts that could be seen and could be rushed through), which meant I could start the detail work on my boss and bikers.
It was way too late though, so I finished up, grabbed a quick supper of bowl noodles, then showered and collapsed on my bed at about 3am, to get up again at 7.30am.
A coffee (well two), and it was off to the races again.
By this time I was pretty sure I was going to complete Iron Painter (just not know how happy I would be with the result), which is how I ended up taking more photos.
Even then I was actually doing armor plate an hour away from the deadline.
Thankfully though, I managed to complete everything at 1.45pm with about 15 minutes to spare. Well, I could’ve touched up some more but at that point of time I was ready to collapse. I had breakfast but barely slept and hadn’t had lunch yet.
So I packed up everything, dropped off my entry at GR and then went to have a well deserved hot lunch.
Hot lunches are a godsend.
After I had lunch, I also had the time to admire all the other entrants’ work. Its really amazing what everyone did in 24 hours.
I especially like Renzus’ marines and Elijah’s orks. The marines were done in like 12 hours or something (he did his Mothers’ day duties on TOP of Iron Painter), and Elijah did a bike, 10 boys AND a battlewagon! With nice basing! On top of all of that, his ork skin is really very striking.
Of course though, at the end of it all, only one can be crowned Iron Painter, and the trophy went to Kolectiv‘s Kenneth, with a very impressive entry of the new Idoneth Deepkin.
While there were things that could be improved, I think everyone would say the same thing of their own entries, myself included. And painting 12 models, with so much detail, in 24 hours is not something I would wish on ANYONE. Even then, Kenneth pulled it off really well, with strategic use of the airbrush to lay down smooth transitions and really good contrast. I’m especially a big fan of the colour choices he did on the turtle and its shell; the browns provide a great counterpoint to the blues and greens of the rest of his models.
At the end of the day though, win or lose I’m still happy with what I did in 24 hours, and I hope all the other participants feel the same way. Iron painter is definitely something every painter should try at some time in their life, and the one Gamersaurus Rex runs is a pretty casual way to try it out.
Am I going to do it again next year though? Ahahahaha…. I don’t know. Let me recover from this one first and I’ll tell you next year.
See you for Iron Painter 2019!
