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.