A Fist Full of Bitz: Plus Some Photoshop!

The Sly Marbo turned into a squad now, so the initial paint scheme is going on.

Reasons for the different colors: carapace armour and helmets are easy enough to paint between campaigns while aboard ship, so the desert colors there. The under jumpsuit is a sand color, easy enough to get a jump suit. The holsters and pouches are cloth so you can't just paint them or it will look terrible, and the demo charge is in a cloth bag, so it stay green just like the backpack because you probably aren't going to get them re-issued between campaigns. Weapons are fickle things and most guys are just superstitious when it comes to those, so obviously these guy's are superstitious and won't repaint paint them. Goggles, one eye is for infrared and the other for zoom, hence the two colors.

Plan will be to do up a sizeable squad of these guys that can be switched about for all kinds of load outs, ill start with melta gunners, then some plasma gunners and finally some flamers, so I can make what ever kind of squad I want for all kinds of situations...

So additional Veterans have joined the squad, 2 melta gunners and a lasgun guy (another lasgun guy already at 80% complete, ill post him eventually). All in all the squad is going well and because I think I might do some kill team with them I have decided to add a few extras (like the dog on the base below the guy with lasgun) so that I can use them for multiple roles. The next lasgun guy is carrying an asupex for example, so that I can use them for sentries and whatever else not.

But first a small Photoshop tutorial, so - here we go (all credit in the world goes to Mike at Santa Cruz Warhammer for his October 2009 article that taught me how to do this):

Open up your image in photoshop. Once it is open add another blank layer to it:

Go to 'Layer'

Then to 'New' and select 'Layer...' then click 'ok'.

Make sure this new layer pops up above the layer with the pictures of your minis. Now make sure this layer is selected so that this next step is done in the new layer, and not on your minis!

Go to 'Filter'

Then go to 'Render'

Then select 'clouds'

You will now have a picture full of black and white clouds. Select your eraser and set your opacity to about 15% with a pixel size of about 20. Begin at the center and erase in circles and you can see your minis start to appear again. Take these circles all the way towards, but not over, the edges. Now increase your opacity to about 20-25% and do the same thing but now stay closer to the minis. Finally put the opacity to 40% or so and do the areas just around the minis.

Result:

Took about 5 minutes to do the smoke effect. I added in the flames and brick street to cheese it up a bit. This entire picture took me a whole 15 minutes to do!