The Sanguinor, Exemplar of the Host - Part II

 

Spread your wings and fly.

Another shorter, not much progress post. This is more of self-reflection on how a lot of time spent on something can give diminishing returns, and might not be required in the end at all.

The wings for the Sanguinor are actually ideal for Contrast paints. An appropriate base coat, a coverage of some Contrast, perhaps a directed shade or separate contrast, and then a highlight. The only part that would take any real amount of time in that approach would be the final highlight - quick, effective, additional highlights if really demands a little more.

Of course, that's not what I did. Mostly because I don't have suitable Contrast paints.

Instead, I used the traditional base, layer, wash, layer layer layer approach. It was incredibly tedious and took a week to get done. I'm still not finished - I might add some pure white highlights later on down the line, if the wings look darker than they should.

The most time consuming part was painting each individual "feather" one at a time. The smaller ones are ok, but getting the blending right on the larger ones takes multiple very thin layers of each paint. Recipe in the end:

• The Fang as a base layer over all feathers.
• Nuln Oil liberally covering the entire area next.
• The Fang to neaten up from the previous step.
• Russ Grey over most of each feather next. Only really the base of each feather, and the immediate "outline" of each was left from the base coat.
• Fenrisian Grey next, same approach but leaving a little of the Russ Grey showing. For the smaller feathers this was barely anything at all.
• Ulthuan Grey follows, and this step really took a long time. Being very bright, very desaturated, it needs applying in multiple thin coats - four or five for the larger feathers, only a couple for the smaller ones.

If the above ends up not being quite bright enough, then White Scar will be added later on. I don't intend to fully blend that into the larger feathers, instead applying it in thin lines to make them look more organic.

I'm happy with the colours. Nuln Oil over a white just never quite sits right - it ends up being too grey, and is far too unnatural for feathers. A hint of blue, or blue-grey is far more suitable, and the "Space Wolf" paints works nicely enough for this purpose. Just took far too long, and if I had to do this more often I would definitely look into more Contrast paints instead.

-- silly painter.