Blood Angel Intercessor

Some assembly required.

After finishing the termagants, it's time to work on another Intercessor. They're great for airbrush practice, and it's still a case of doing one at a time to experiment with various airbrush approaches.

So today it's a focus on using the airbrush.

First of all, I've finally figured proper ways to clean the airbrush both between paints, and at a final step before storage, without needing to strip it down to individual parts. A proper squeeze bottle of water, a receptacle for cleaning it into, the trick of backflow by blocking the nozzle and pumping air through it, and a jar of 1:1 cleaner/water. The latter is used after mostly cleaning the airbrush, just to try rinse out any leftover particles inside - literally dip the whole front of the airbrush in and blast away. Obviously do this inside a proper extractor hood, and while wearing a proper filter mask.
Oh, and cotton buds. I've been using them inside the cup feed with the needle still inserted and it appears to work ok.

Basically, spend a bit of time figuring out how to clean the airbrush, and you'll save a lot of effort (and time) switching paints around.

This next Intercessor was prepared in the usual way: trim from the sprue, clean surfaces, assemble the minimum for ease of painting, and then prime with black. I did cover some areas with PVA glue first, to mask them from any spray (including the primer) so that the plastic glue used for final assembly will have clean surfaces to bond together. This is a really simple trick: just paint some PVA onto appropriate areas, and peel it off at some later stage. No scratching or filing back the surface, and it doesn't seem to remove paint from anywhere else.

Wanting a more vibrant red this time around, I ended up with the following next steps:

• Spray can of Mephiston Red over the whole model.
• 1:1 Mephiston Red / Dryad Bark airbrush in shadowed areas. Mostly just point from underneath and spray around.
• Mephiston Red airbrush from above, covering most raised surfaces and trying to leave some of the previous step as appropriate.
• Evil Sunz Scarlet airbrush for smaller highlight areas. This stage works best by not giving full air flow through the airbrush, which is possible with dual-trigger variants (otherwise just adjust air pressure), giving a smaller cone of spray.

While this worked, it's still not giving enough contrast between light and dark areas for my liking. Also, the last step can create a speckled effect between transitions - not noticeable at a distance, but annoying once it's seen.
To fix these issues, the next model may introduce some slight variation again: a second coat of the shaded areas just to give some extra depth, and a final pass at the very end with Mephiston Red, possibly thinned down a little. Almost a glazing pass to try filter out some of the speckle. It might only be needed across the transition areas too, rather than the whole model. Something to explore once this Marine is finished.

The picture above also has the traditional brush step of using Carroburg Crimson in recessed areas; still an absolutely necessary step to really give definition to the whole model.

-- silly painter.