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.