Ultramarine Lieutenant - Part I

 

Blue Man Group auditions.

With new contrast paints having recently been released, I decided it was time to try out one colour in particular to see if I could get a much more vibrant result: blue. There are still various models I will paint blue (Librarians, a certain Primarch, for example) but always felt the existing Citadel paints lacked that really striking result of old-school Ultramarines. Now I think there's something close enough.

Although I'll detail the above scheme, I'll also write down what I'll do next time: this model is about learning, not about a final method.

To start with, a black primer as usual. I didn't want the white for a particular reason:I still wanted a dark blue in the shadows, and it's easier to build up brighter zenithal highlights than it is to darken shaded areas. Following that with some airbrush:

• Night Lords Blue over the whole model.
• Macragge Blue as a mid-tone, leaving the previous colour in underneath areas, recesses, etc.
• Calgar Blue as a highlight colour.
• White Scar (thinned of course!) added as a second highlight. This mostly covered the previous step, rendering it pointless really.
• Asurmen Blue, fed directly into the airbrush. No thinning needed, although a little water in the cup probably did that anyway. This was sprayed over the highlights, perhaps too heavily in some areas, but overall saturating the brightness quite well and giving a very deep, but not dark, blue.
• Gloss varnish to make sure everything was locked in place.
• Naggaroth Nightshade in all the recesses to add some contrast.
• Caledor Sky to highlight the edges. I tested some Hoeth Blue for this as well, but it was too desaturated, whereas Caledor Sky seemed to fit much more nicely.

I also added a decal on the left pauldron, and promptly ruined it. Good thing it's just a test model.

In future I'll scrap the Calgar Blue highlight stage and go straight to White Scar, possibly slightly more opaque, to give the Asurmen Blue extra "punch". I'll probably also do edge highlights with pure White Scar before the Asurmen Blue is applied, just to get that edge highlight more for free without having to colour match. And I'll use a better decal with a little less softener.

The above picture already has a matt varnish applied; I wanted to know if it would dull the vibrancy at all - and yes, slightly, but not enough to ruin it. Overall I'm pretty pleased with the result, and think that the new Contrast paints will work very well over white to bring out some good results.

-- silly painter.