Commander Dante - Work in Progress #1

Mostly as an excursion in metallic gold painting, Command Dante is also the first of the Citadel Finecast models for me to paint. The Finecast parts are very detailed, but suffer from soft plastic and quite often some faults from the manufacturing process. Dante's jump pack suffered heavily from this, and I don't have any green stuff to repair it. It's hoped that it won't be too visible when finished, but it could always be disguised as battle damage.

I did some reading first on Sanguinary Guard to determine how to approach the gold colour. There are two ways to painting gold: with or without metallic paints. The metallics have a habit of picking up reflections very easily, and so aren't suitable for models expecting to be photographed. They do however look rather well for some in store models I've seen.

With regards to metallic paints, I found that the layer paints are a little thinner than others, and so highlight rather well. It was mainly because of this that I felt Commander Dante could be painted to a fairly high degree of quality.

The first step, as always, is the base coat. Normally this would be black, however I wanted the golden armour to have a lighter tone, so the base coat was done white instead.

 Ceramite White provided the base coat, being careful to apply it thinly so as not to obscure any detail. As I've mentioned before, that particular paint is a little thicker than others, so watering it down every so slightly did help. If it gets watered down too much it has a tendency to settle in the lower areas. Adding a touch of paint to thicken and then spread it around other areas helps reduce that problem.

 With the base coat done, Balthasar Gold was used as the base gold colour. It's a fairly dark colour, closer to copper, but building up highlighting layers will make the finished result much lighter. I did avoid areas that won't be painted gold, which is mostly because my rule of thumb is: use the fewest layers as required. This helps to avoid obscuring detail with too much paint, a leftover habit from the Tamiya paint days.

 After the base armour colour was done, I covered the armour quite liberally with the shade Seraphim Sepia. The observant viewer will note that I'm only doing the armour for now. There's no special reason for this other than it let me paint the most common colour with worrying too much about painting somewhere I shouln't; other areas will be painted later. I reasoned that painting over the armour by accident could be fairly easily fixed later (which is mostly true).
Seraphim Sepia matches the golden colour fairly well, although the muscle shapes in the armour required a little coaxing to get the wash to settle how I wanted. Don't worry if when applying the shade it looks to cover up any deail - when it dries out, the detail will be back.

 The first stage highlight was done with Gehenna's Gold. This was applied to pretty much all raised areas, with a little more attention paid to sharper edges. The face had the cheekbone areas, the chin, nose, and eyebrows given a little more care because I really wanted a contrast between dark and light to bring out the mask's expression.
Picking out the raised areas of the armour, where it's shaped as muscle, is fairly easy but does require a bit of patience and good tip to the brush. Other areas, such as the hair, required more of a drybrush type effect, otherwise paint would spread unevenly and destroy the good work of the shade.
Quite often one layer of the paint wasn't enough and a second would have to be applied. This is normal, and actually gives a better finish than if using one thick layer. It also lets the highlight blend a little better.

 The second stage highlighting was done with Auric Armour Gold. This worked particularly well for the face, and really makes it stand out and gives the whole model that extra bit of character. The photos above should hopefully show the effect well enough.
This highlight was most heavily used on the edges, but I did apply a thin layer across larger areas too, with a little in the middle and then spreading it out to the edges. This was done to increase the overall brightness. Auric Armour also reflects light rather well, so good lighting will pick up the edges painted with it.

The overall golden colour of the armour worked quite well, although as I've mentioned it's not very good for photography. I only have one real gripe with the result - it's perhaps a little darker than what I was going for. This could probably fixed in future models by mixing in perhaps a little Runefang Steel, but I try to avoid mixing paint colours. The only reason for this is that it means mixing the right proportions for an even look - and that means a spare paint bottle and testing out different proportions of different colours. Too much hassle for me at this point in time; sticking to gradual layering works just as well most of the time, and lets me reproduce the result more easily.
Also, the slightly darker tone actually accentuates the brighter points, and gives the model a grittier, battle ready look.

Next time I'll start on the non-gold areas.

  -- silly painter



-- Additional: I later added a glaze of Lamenters Yellow just to see how it would look. It works well to give that extra glow to some areas, and so used most heavily on the halo. It's a very subtle effect, but those subtle things can make all the difference.