Mephiston Base

Back to basics.

I'm not expecting to have the Primaris Mephiston done anytime soon, but rather as a model I poke around with in the background. To that end, and because I thought it would look cool, I started on the model's base.

I figured a black marble with inlaid red would be suitably impressive for something from the Blood Angels. Quite why Mephiston would be standing on a broken piece bearing the chapter icon I'm not sure - he became Primaris after the Tyranid invasion - but I suppose it's just for show.

Colours used are as follows:

• Abaddon Black over the entire marbled area.
• Corvus Black to add some lighter areas, edges, etc.
• Eshin Grey to create thick striations.
• Dawnstone to create thinner striation lines.
• Dark Reaper for edge highlighting along cracked areas. The marble is already black, and so shading recesses doesn't work; edges must be highlighted instead of recesses shaded.
• Word Bearers Red thinned to a wash and pooled into icon outline.
• A mix of whatever I had on the palette (Mephiston Red, Evil Sunz Scarlet, even a little Screamer Pink) to add some marbling to the icon. This was then glazed over with very thin Word Bearers Red.
• Mephiston Red in the grooves for the word "BAAL", and glazed over with Word Bearers Red.

I purposefully wanted a more burgundy colour for the icon, and something slightly more towards a purer red for the wording. This keeps the two linked, but separate, and makes reading the letters a bit easier.

Overall I'm fairly happy with the start to this. There's some dusting to be done yet, and I'm still deciding how to surround the base. It will need to offset against Mephiston himself, which will be a relatively dark model, so probably the normal desert colours for other Blood Angels will suffice.

Sadly, most of the work going into the base will be covered up once the model is in place, but at least I get some more marbling practice without worrying about messing it up.

-- silly painter.