Horus Ascended - Part I

 

Horus Asc...assembly required.

This model sucks.

Kind of a click-baity start to this post, but I do have strong (perhaps even valid) reasons for this opinion. I'll get to them in just a moment, but to start with I'll go over some of the niceties, some of the middle ground, and then finally some of the issues it has.

Assembly

The model itself is very detailed, as everyone has come to expect from the Forgeworld Heresy Character range. There is no doubting that the quality of production is very high, and has improved in leaps and bounds in recent years. I can point out the polygons on rounded surfaces in some cases, if I look _very_ closely. This is an important point for later: the actual manufacture of the model is superb, which means any flaws come from elsewhere in the process.

The dynamic pose of the model is nice to see, and for those who want to play with it then the detachable smaller base is great. The full base itself is so over the top that only a truly insane designer could have dreamed it up, and it is glorious. I keep finding new and interesting details every time that I look at it. It's truly a base of horror that befits Horus having gone evil.

For all of this, everything is pretty much intended for this model to be a showpiece and not for gaming. In particular, some of the details are very flimsy and will certainly break with any moderate usage. I've already broken the ammo belts feeding in the Talon of Horus, in four separate locations no less, and the model wasn't even assembled enough for painting, let alone playing with.

The numbering on each piece is missing, meaning that following the assembly instructions is a case of visual matching alone. Normally that's ok, but when some pieces look very similar (say, the fingers on the Talon) then it's basically a guessing game as to which piece fits where. I'm pretty sure I got that wrong on the fingers. I almost had it wrong on some of the wolf pelt.

Then there's the bad: the model does not fit together properly at all. I mentioned build quality earlier because this cannot be a manufacturing error - it's simply that nobody checked before it was shipped. The wolf pelt in particular is just plain terrible. Even after hacking away at the underneath to get it sitting properly aligned on the armour cowling, the leg hanging over the right pauldron simply doesn't line up with the appropriate connection point. There's a 3mm gap or so - which is unforgivably large for such an expensive kit, and is where the blu-tac is located in the photo above. I'm going to have to break out the putty to fill that gap, which quite frankly won't look as nice, and worse: for nice sub-assemblies it will have to be done after much of the painting has been completed. That leg is actually the last piece to glue on, and so now I get to look forward to finishing the model, only to then putty up and repaint an entire area or two. The base has some places that don't quite line up as well, but thankfully they're mostly hidden and really don't need to be touched.

The only model I've dealt with that has a similar problem is actually the Primaris Mephiston, where cables just didn't align. They could be bent and glued during assembly at least, and the massive mold line running down his cape was easily filled in and smoothed over. Horus Ascended is far more expensive, with a far greater gap, and can't be fixed until the model is just about completed. When the motivation is assembly and painting nice looking models rather than playing the game, then this just makes me question why I bothered with this model at all - and I haven't even primed it yet!

So with some clever planning, painting, and more than a dash of stubborn perseverance, I will continue with this model. Hopefully it won't take four and a half years to complete, but it will certainly take more than a couple of weeks, and I'm not convinced about putting in the effort to get to such a high standard as the previous Horus model.

Planning

Part of the assembly process is planning how to paint it all up. On the photo it can be seen that I've drilled some holes in the feet and pinned paperclips in, and then taped the whole thing to a painting handle. This is because painting handles are great and I won't need to touch the model itself, and because I wanted easier access underneath; gluing to the base would have caused complications in painting some areas. This took longer than it should have for me to come up with, but everything appears sturdy enough and will make painting easier.

The left arm is missing because it needs to be put on after the cape. The cape I intend to airbrush separately, and leaving it off allows me to reach the back of the legs much more easily. Owing to the placement of the mace over the cape, the cape must be put on and then the arm. If the wolf pelt were already glued on then it would get in the way of the mace, and so the wolf pelt must go on only after the mace. This in turn means that the leg draped over the right pauldron can only be attached after the pelt is properly in place, which leads to only being able to fix that gap after everything is just about painted up.

The colours will be heavily influenced by the work on the previous Horus model. I don't feel any particular need to modify them. I will not even think about trying NMM; I had considered it, but the assembly problems have convinced me that this model isn't worth that amount of effort.

To contrast against the burgundy of the cape, then earthen greens on the base will very likely be used. This will likely mean Salamanders armour, although if I keep symbols off they can be interpreted any way the viewer wishes. Most of the lore doesn't have Horus actually fighting on Terra itself (he just sat in his flagship), so who knows what location it's intended to be.

I have a rough idea that a subtle red glow about the feet could help give the impression of Horus giving off an evil aura. Easy enough to do with an airbrush - just glaze one of the clear reds over the areas surrounding his feet - but I'm undecided if I should do the same from within the armour itself. Obviously the glow surrounding his head needs to be done, but I'm wondering how to make the armour itself seem alive. Maybe it will just be some red on the metallics; I'll keep thinking on this topic.

I'll need to prime the model soon and then just begin. Priming with black and then covering with a very thin white through the airbrush will allow me to visually pick out details with ease, so I'll get to that in the next days. I do want to switch focus back to a certain dreadnought, but I've spent the last week airbrushing other models (certain arrangements mean that if I don't do the airbrushing now, it'll be a couple of months before I next have the chance) and then assembling Horus.

-- silly painter.

Ultramarine - Part II (Showcase)

 

When Smurfs go to war.

And another model done. I'll be honest, after the experimenting on the armour, something with this particular model just didn't do it for me. There are a lot of little pieces just not quite right, and I didn't enjoy the rest, so I kind of hurried to get it out. Parts don't fit quite right, the back of the heavy bolter is "empty", other areas a too much filled in, and the mould lines are frustrating in places. It's from the Space Marine Heroes series, but somehow the design and quality is lesser when compared to the Terminators. Still, it was a test piece for blue armour and so served its purpose well enough in the end.

The eye lens I tried to make glow a little bit, but that kind of failed and now the Marine just looks kind of evil. I adjusted the photo slightly, because the OSL surrounding the eye lens doesn't look quite so bad as it was coming out in the photo. I guess I should use different colours for red over blue OSL in future, but equally I'm going to stick to reflective effects for eye lenses - unless I want the slightly evil look.

Jokaero Orange mixed with Mephiston Red was a nice edge highlight on the heavy bolter. I'll have to remember that for when I want armour that is slightly different to the red I normally paint up Blood Angels in. Actually the entirety for the heavy bolter is:

• Khorne Red.
• Mephiston Red, glazed up for highlighting and built up further on edges.
  
• Jokaero Orange / Mephiston Red for edge highlights.

Nice and simple. I could add more depth, add scratches, add more directional lighting, etc, but it's not worth it here.

The metal is incredibly simple:

• Leadbelcher
• Nuln Oil
• Leadbelcher glazed over the top to smooth out some of the wash staining
• Ironbreaker along the edges, with some scratches stippled in.

I like this more basic look as it creates a darker metal that serves as the basis for a greater range of highlights and additional contrast effects. I wouldn't mind a basic colour that's slightly darker than Leadbelcher, and I might actually mix one up for myself.

The base I envisioned to be broken tarmac, so it's mostly just greys with a dark blue shade, and then some browns between broken areas to represent the soil underneath. I didn't really have inspiration for anything more, but it could definitely do with something extra on there.

Otherwise there's not much to speak of on the model. It's my normal army level quality I guess, and that alone is good practice if I'm to have more troops being painted up while I also do larger models (notably the dreadnoughts).

With this model done, and the recent purchase of something else, the count is now at 11.

-- silly painter.

Sons of Horus Contemptor Dreadnought - Part III

 

Eye of Sauron Horus

This next post might be slightly early, but I was having a lot of fun and decided to record a few notes for future reference (being the entire point of this blog).

I've been slowly blocking in base colours around the model, trying to decided which colours should go where. That's mostly sorted out now, however silver metallics are currently missing, and for good reason. I don't want much of it, and what is there I want to be quite dark rather than bright and, well, silver. Also, traditionally many of the skeletal components (for lack of a better term) might be done in metallics, but looking around at vehicles, photos, reference materials, military equipment, construction equipment, bridges, etc, many of those components are also painted in the primary colour of the equipment. Basically anything that doesn't move might get a layer of paint, and everything else gets grease and oil to aid movement and prevent rust. So I was thinking to keep metallics to a minimal, keep as much as possible the sea-green of Sons of Horus, and build up joints with chipping and washes of various kinds. Guess I'll see where that takes me.

I might have gone a little overboard with painting over decals, but that has been fun. Good tip on a brush (I'm using one of my best for it), magnifying lenses, and a lot of patience, but it's been fun. The main problem is that I actually didn't want to fork out a good deal of money for the Legion transfers, just to use a small handful. Perhaps if I were collecting an entire army it would make sense (and I may do that one day), but for now I wanted to print my own - and I could then customise several different transfers onto the one sheet. I fortunately have a laser printer for this purpose, but the printer is only monochrome. Also, the printed transfers can be seen as small "dots" when looked at closely enough - not always noticeable, but in this case it was. None of this really mattered too much because the entire intent was to use them as a guide, painting over them with the desired colours.

Ideally I should have done an colour invert on some of the decals applied to black areas. I could have painted the base colour (gold, in this case) and then placed the decal on top, leaving the base colour to show through where the design is. I didn't think that far ahead at the time and so had to very carefully outline everything in black after tracing over it in gold. I'm also not following the exact original design colours - they have a reflection in them that just doesn't seem to work for me, so I drew on inspiration from how I painted up Horus and did a more light-source-neutral scheme. I'm not finished yet, but I'm pretty happy with the results.

I also ended up buying Gauss Blaster Green, and have used that on a few edges. It works, but most importantly gives me more edge highlighting options when painting up Sons of Horus.

Some good progress all round, but I'd like there to be much more over the next week. I have a lot of other dreadnoughts to get to.

-- silly painter.

Ultramarine - Part I

 

Red guns shoot faster.

With a model bought on holiday as a kind of memento, I had the inspiration to use it for testing some more of my approach to Ultramarines. There is a reason for this: I have a certain Primarch in a box that I would like to start within a year or so, and these attempts at blue are directly for planning how to paint him.

Last time I painted an Ultramarine I had some ideas on what could be changed, and so this time I put those ideas into action. The main thought was to remove a Calgar Blue highlight step, and to pre-edge highlight with white before the filter of Asurmen Blue. This would make the entire armour:

• Night Lords Blue (Air) over the whole model.
• Macragge Blue (Air) as a top-down zenithal of sorts.
• White Scar (Air) to give additional highlights in selected areas.
• White Scar, with a brush, for edge highlights. This just strengthens the white along those parts.
• Asurmen Blue to act as a filter across the white.
• Naggaroth Nightshade in recesses.

After having done all of that, I've decided that the original approach is better. The Calgar Blue needed to be used later where the edge highlights weren't strong enough anyway, and the airbrush step served another purpose of smoothing out the gradients. White is always slightly speckled for me. I can minimise the noise with multiple thin layers, and Asurmen Blue again helps to fade everything together, but it's still noticeable. Using Calgar Blue beforehand, even if it's mostly covered up, helps to blend everything together that little bit more.

Now that the armour has been done, I needed to decide how best to finish the model. I basically only cared about the armour, but looking around I remembered old school Ultramarines and how they had bright red weapons. Naturally, the heavy bolter is now a very eye-catching red. I will try to finish the rest quickly and move back to all the other models on the go. If nothing else, it's more good practice for doing standard troopers, and even if I'm not that invested in the model itself, I can't just leave it half-done.

-- silly painter.

Space Marine Heroes 2 - Part VIII (Showcase)

 

Skully

The Space Marine Heroes, Series 2, is now complete. Or at least all of the ones that I have - strictly speaking I'm missing the heavy flamer and standard bearer models, but I'm not that much of a collector that I have to go out and find them. And though this post is a "showcase", I'm just using that to indicate the last of this series rather than showcasing all of them together (mostly because laziness is victorious at the moment).

Most of the models were just going through the motions, so I decided to try a couple of things to see how they come out. Firstly was edge highlighting - I've actually done that after the matt varnish on the last couple of terminators just to see how much extra I can define the shapes of the model. They were already edge highlighted prior to the gloss varnish, so this is really re-application of edge highlights in specific areas. And it works well enough that I'm going t continue trying this out.

The "silver" adornments I've also started to base in Grey Knights Steel, which differentiates them from weapon casings or anything more "functional", and I think I'll keep that going forward as well.

Really, what purpose does the cape serve?

Something that really didn't work very well was attempting to cover gloss varnished areas with metallic paints. The coverage was just extremely poor. This is something I have an idea of how to fix: leave the gloss varnish until after important base coats. The metallic areas will get a wash anyway, which will leave behind enough medium that later layers will have something to stick to. This makes the new basic approach:

• Airbrush the armour to build up basic highlights and volumes.
• Fill in some base coats.
• Gloss varnish over the model - only a single thin coat is needed.
• Edge highlight the armour, and proceed as normal elsewhere.
• Matt varnish over the model.
• Reapply edge highlights if necessary.

That's quite a process to be going through if I'm honest, and I'm sure it will receive further refinement, but I'm hopeful that thinking less and just getting on with it for standard troops will let me speed up my painting game this year.

I'm still getting the hang of trying to paint textiles. They look too inflexible still, even if that's partially the photo. I've been practicing with stippling and using older brushes that no longer hold their tip to create texture on the surface, but I also need to reduce the highlight brightness in places.

The model count I'm allowed to buy is now 11.5, and hopefully before too long will climb higher.

-- silly painter.

Sons of Horus Contemptor Dreadnought - Part II

 

Using an assault cannon as a club, probably not a good idea.

The Year of the Dreadnought has started, so I thought I might post about the first work in progress. I'm quite happy with how it's coming along, however painfully slow on account of the multitude of other projects still being worked on (such as those jetbikes). The intended painting level is also being ratcheted up a notch because as a Sons of Horus war machine it's unlikely to be kept in pristine condition during the Horus Heresy, and so that will mean battle damage, weathering, perhaps a bit of rust here and there.

As a bit of a disclaimer, the above photo isn't yet finished with edge highlights or chipping. There's a lot more to get done.

To start with however: the airbrushing stage to get a base colour and simple highlights down. I'll note that Sons of Horus Green doesn't come with the Air range, so that was done by adding thinner, flow improver, and the layer paint into an airbrush cup. This works just as well in the end, but the initial test had too little thinner and the paint is surprisingly thick for a layer paint (or at least my pot was).

• Sons of Horus Green / Abaddon Black. This is around a 1:1 mix to desaturate and darken the green to act as a shadow colour.
• Sons of Horus Green over most of the model as a mid-tone. Some of the shaded areas were left well alone.
• Lupercal Green as a highlight. This is an odd choice (normally it would be used as the mid-tone), but it's a more saturated colour than Sons of Horus Green and I wanted to use that saturation for highlights rather than relying on brightness. I thinned it slightly so that it performed more like a filter than providing coverage.
• Deathshroud Clear to make the darker areas that little bit darker. This wasn't really noticeable, but I suspect the new Nuln Oil wash would be useful for this step.  Alternatively, a dark blue could also be used sparingly.

And that's about all for the airbrush. I should probably mention that I did prime the model through the airbrush, but honestly that particular primer is terrible and does not stick to the model very well at all. I much prefer Citadel's offerings, but I will continue to use the airbrush primer on occasional models in future just to avoid waste.

One of the benefits of using a Sons of Horus as a mid-tone is that being a lighter colour I could actually go back and use it for edge highlights. This sounds crazy, but it works. It's not a strong highlight, and contrasts best with the darker areas, so this isn't the only highlight colour.

Mixing Sybarite Green with Sons of Horus Green gives a brighter colour to use for edge highlighting those areas facing more towards a light source. Sybarite Green on its own can then be used to go even further if desired. I would use Gauss Blaster Green, but I don't actually have that paint. I definitely will invest in some should I start to paint up a Sons of Horus army (no plans on that anytime soon - I need to finish a lot more Blood Angels first!).

Coelia Greenshade works wonders in recesses for the lighter areas, and Drakenhof Nightshade is equally effective for those parts in shadow. Ordinarily I would apply a gloss varnish to help this step, but as this whole project is part experimentation I wanted to see how it would look straight away rather than trying to picture the result after a matt varnish.

The lack of varnish has exposed one particular weakness with this model: the poor primer, and not stripping all the paint to begin with leads to paint chipping and scratching off with startling ease. I've kind of leaned into it by using that as a natural guide to weathering, but I am slightly concerned with the longevity of the paint on the finished model, so I hope varnish steps later will help. For now I made sure to use a painting handle as much as possible (just a little blue-tac underneath the base and it's good to go). Painting the chips and scratches is a relatively simple matter of working with the existing paints - black, highlight around some edges, that's it really.

The other new item of note is the use of decals early on. Not all are visible in the photo, but I've been experimenting with printing out my own. Quite honestly, putting down a lot of money for a small handful on a single model didn't seem worthwhile, so I printed my own out. The downside is that my own are monochrome and if you look closely enough then the printing is obvious. So I'm mostly using the decals as a guide for painting over later, which can be seen on the left shoulder where I've already started doing that. It will make painting the black shoulders a bit of a nightmare, but the end result should be worth it. Again, if I was working up an entire army then the official transfer sheets would be much more worthwhile.

I'm going to try keep the palette slightly limited to reduce painting time. The more I have to think about what colour goes where, the longer this will take. It's not actually an incredibly complicated model to paint, about on par with the Titanicus Knights, but I have many more models to get done this year and it will motivate me more if I don't spend too many weeks on a single one.

-- silly painter.