Blood Angels Contemptor - Part II

 

Un-armed but still dangerous.

Back again and returning to incredibly slow painting because reasons. It's picking up, and I really want these dreadnoughts finished, so maybe in the next week I'll get a lot more progress done. Much of the most difficult decisions have been made on them however, so it will hopefully feel like going downhill from here on - but I guess I'll see!

Strangely one of the more difficult choices that really delayed everything was trying to figure out just what would be painted in metallics. There's no easy separation in some areas, and even now I've just kind of decided to leave some parts dark and hopefully not draw the eye to them. Also need to do something about that left leg.

I ended up varnishing this model before painting on any metallics, just to see how well it would go. My Leadbelcher is definitely the main issue, it's become like a gel and won't cover properly. Iron Warriors works more effectively, so I'll use that for now - I still don't see that much difference compared to Leadbelcher anyway, and after a wash they'll probably be even closer. This bodes well for me, because I still like how I have that moment to correct mistakes with a gloss varnish.

Here I've added recess shading, Carroburg Crimson of course, and again the gloss varnish helps with that. I've also done some edge highlighting, although the reflective nature of the varnish kind of overwhelms that in the photo. I put a lot more effort into keeping highlights matching the general volume highlights: Mephiston Red on the darker areas, Evil Sunz Scarlet on the lighter areas, mixing in Wild Rider Red for brighter edges. I also like to paint Wild Rider Red, then glaze over with Evil Sunz Scarlet at this stage - it keeps the edge highlighting more red than orange, and leaves pure Wild Rider Red for later when the matt varnish has been applied and I can see which areas need to "pop" a little more.

From here the plan is to finish doing the above for the arms, then move onto the head and metallics again. Just enough that I can then properly glue the torso plate in place and paint enough of that to then be able to glue the arms into position. Somewhere along the way I'll also play with battle damage - that will be Rhinox Hide mixed with black for deeper scoring probably, and use the reds listed above to add chipping as necessary.

While painting this particular dreadnought, I've also been moving forwards with the Blood Angels MkIV Assault Squad. Nothing with too much focus, more of a "while I have these paints out" kind of thing.

The current count is now down to 12, as I've ordered another dreadnought while they're still in stock (Blood Angels Librarian), and will possibly get more Blood Angels Assault Terminators when they're back in stock too. I'll have to hold off on 10th Edition for a little while, but that might not be a bad thing - I'll get the more flexible kits later on instead.

-- silly painter.

Ancient Rylanor - Part II

 

Favourite band: Deep Purple

Painting has been very slow going of late, and will continue to be that way for another couple of weeks (because reasons), but that doesn't mean I've done nothing. I've done a fair amount of airbrushing and preparation, including some purples for my take on Ancient Rylanor. The major problem is that I forget exactly what I did with the airbrushing - so what follows is a rough guide, but might not be entirely accurate.

I had mixed a blue (Night Lords Blue) into Chemos Purple as a base coat, and then straight Chemos Purple as a mid-tone. Genestealer Purple was then used to highlight, with then a bit of white mixed into that as a final more extreme highlight. Most of this was covered long ago when doing a test model for the third Legion, so I knew roughly how it might turn out, but with larger models like a dreadnought there are some differences.

One of the changes I've attempted here is to actually highlight bottom areas of the more vertical planes, which sort of helps the eye read the shape. Although it's a mostly vertical plane, there's slightly more area facing up at the bottom usually, so highlighting that helps give volume; at least that's theory behind it all, but mostly it just looks cool. The idea stemmed from a youtube video (Eric's Hobby Workshop I think, one on tanks) and so this seemed like a good place to explore how I highlight. Strangely enough, this is still actually how I highlight Space Marines now anyway.

One thing I did forget to mention was a kind of white Zenithal highlight that was done after the black primer. The intent was not for highlights at all, and nothing of that stage shows through, but it does give a good reference of where areas might be more naturally highlighted, and definitely helps pick out detail on a model. I do this regularly with more complex models now: heavily thinned white over the primer simply to help make the details more readable while I paint.

All told I'm quite happy with how the airbrushing turned out on this model. Purple seems to lend itself rather well to airbrushing and highlighting in general, perhaps because it's easy to work up from a dark blue to a nearly white all while maintaining readability as purple. There's likely a very good colour theory reason why this is the case, but I'm not recovered enough to confirm some ideas on that.

One of the larger pauses in painting came next simply because I didn't feel like doing it. It was a real struggle to get through, not really sure why, but the base metallic silver is just Iron Warrior. I will be comparing it against Leadbelcher later on to see which is "darker", but Iron Warrior just seems to have a slight amount of purple in the mix so seemed more natural to go with. I wanted to get this done before any varnish just because metallics over varnish aren't always the most pleasant of experiences and I'm hoping this will work better in future. It's tricky however because I do like to varnish at the end of airbrushing to seal everything in and help prevent chipping or rubbing off, and I had to be extra careful in trying to avoid mistakes.

After enough areas were covered with Iron Warrior for me to be happy with I then of course added a gloss varnish. This will help shades later, which I'm hoping will allow acrylic shades to act similarly to the oil shading done on the recent Titanicus models. There is one new approach to this varnish stage however: the size of the airbrush nozzle. Previously I used a larger nozzle because faster coverage, but sometimes it also meant a far too thick layer was applied. This time I used a much smaller (0.2mm) nozzle and some more distance for a finer and thinner spray over the model. This seemed to work really well, and I'm wondering if a thinner gloss layer will help metallic paint coverage, so another dreadnought has that ready to be tested soon.

Going forward on this model there is already the start of some Druchii Violet recess shading, although I might also use Drakenhof Nightshade in the deeper shadowed areas. I still want to do edge highlighting with Dechala Lilac as well, probably before a later matt varnish stage as I think it will still show through and I can always add more again later if it doesn't. Not sure how long it will take me to do all that, and I strongly suspect the new Dante model will land before then, but hopefully in a couple of weeks I can make some real progress.

-- silly painter.