Terminator Squad - Part II

 

Shiny in red.

This won't be a long post, and mostly some commentary about how went a white zenithal to help highlighting. The short version is: it didn't help much.

The idea wasn't so much to have the white undercoat show through, but instead to help guide where to place shadows and highlights without having to change my process too much. In that regard it kind of worked - before varnishing to lock down the paints it did have more visible shaded areas than I have been getting, but the difference wasn't significant. I'll wait to see how they end up, but I suspect that for the next squad I'll try Averland Sunset and Blood Angels Red like with the Dreadnought. 

It is worth noting that there has been no edge highlighting done on any of the squad yet. I'm going to leave that to just before (and maybe a little bit after) the next varnish step. This will definitely help make the model more readable, and might trick the eye into seeing more shading than there really is.

I definitely think something needs to change on how I use the airbrush for painting up squads: I could just leave it and be happy enough, but I do want that little more "pop" out of volumes and I'm out of ideas that don't change the paints being used. The trick will be to keep everything looking cohesive as an army. I guess future experimentation will tell.

The bases I'm not sure will turn out as I really wanted, but as an experiment that's acceptable. I just wanted Terminators to look more comparable to the new sculpts (whenever I get those) but the height on the bases really does stick out. I'm hoping that painting it all relatively flat will reduce that effect. On a note about the bases, I was uncomfortable with the pressure on them given by the painting handles. Instead I epoxy glued a washer to a 32mm base, and just use magnets on the 40mm to hold it in place. The model is still firmly held in place and I've no need to try any other painting handles. Plus I now have an abundance of washers that I'll need to find a use for.

-- silly painter.

Azrakh the Annihilator - Part V (Showcase)

 

Also known as "Chainfinger".

Finally calling this model done. I could do more. I could always do more. Some of the face can be cleaned up, some of the green glow behind the head could be brightened, the base is quite plain, etc. I've just reached the motivational limit on this model however, and I'm calling it done.

What a monster to paint up, but an impressive result in the end. And I learned a lot about NMM techniques. On that note, the photo above does not do it justice at all. Between the lighting, camera settings, jpeg compression, scaling, etc, it loses some of the brightness of the extreme highlight points which sell the NMM effect. Too bad, but the actual model does look better.

Ultimately the model is very readable. The shapes are clear, the volumes are clear, the details are easily discernible. The face I actually think is one of my better ones, even if half of that is the great sculpt it's still the look of a mentally unstable and very angry character. For the face I wanted a pale look, but with deep shadows to give that kind of drawn, aged look:

• Bugman's Glow in two or three thin layers to give a solid base to work with.
• Darkoath Flesh applied all over, but not too liberally. I also removed any pooling in the eyes and mouth.
• Bugman's Glow again to start building up the more raised areas.
• Cadian Fleshtone glazed along upper surfaces, leaving some of the previous step alone.
• Kislev Flesh glazed more to act as a pale filter and offer yet more highlighting.
• Flayed One Flesh for the most prominent highlights (nose, chin, forehead, cheeks). I also mixed in a very small amount of white ink for the most extreme highlights.

The eyes are white, and then Iyanden Yellow. Nothing special there. Lips are some of the flesh tones mixed with Khorne Red for a dark pink. The tattoo on the head is purposefully a little less "perfect" than in references - I figured it was done with the blood of opponents and without much care given over to artistry. The teeth are white, then black washed into the recesses and excess removed. I could definitely do more here, but just really can't be bothered.

The green glow emanating from behind the head is different to reference pictures. I didn't make the grooves in the cowling (for lack of a better term) be the source of any lights because it would be difficult to make them not look dark while still having a glow on the outer edges. This is something that to me doesn't fit nicely on the box art, even if it's very striking on the original Mark Gibbons artwork. So I just had the glow coming from deep behind the head somewhere.

• Waywatcher Green (the old glaze paint) glazed over the head. This was actually a mistake - the paint must have gone slightly bad, or I'm using it in an unintended fashion: some areas it dries nearly white. I've had this problem with shades before as well. Mostly it ended up ok, but I'm not sure about using that paint in future.
• Waaagh Flesh to give the initial light volumes. This is actually used up to the most outer edges of the glow, where the light naturally falls off the most.
• Kabalite Green for some edges and general inner surfaces more affected by the light source.
• Warpstone Glow for edges and sharply defined points.
• Warpstone Glow / White, which was mixed and used for extreme highlight points. This is far too desaturated for the most part, so I ended up adding more white into the mix to really define the extreme highlights, and then afterwards glazing back over them with Warpstone Glow to give more of a vibrant, saturated green.

For just about every steps written above there's often not a clear application of one paint and then another. I mixed colours on the palette quite frequently to help smooth out transitions, and went back and forth between steps to fix mistakes or adjust if I felt it wasn't looking quite right.

The base I glued some brass detailing onto, and then painted it all just like with the recent MkIV Assault Squad. I toyed with the idea of adding a pile of skulls, but that would have added too much noise and taken focus away from the facial area - not something I wanted to do after putting in all that effort. I then thought about putting some cabling across the floor, but paperclip I was going to use was too heavily influenced by the magnet underneath the base. I could use putty to roll out something, but this is another item that I think is just too much effort to continue with. I did use Black Templar, thinned and feathered out, to darken the base around the feet - some of that isn't a trick of the lighting, it's actually how I painted it.

And with this model done, the tally is now at 12.5 and I can start thinking of what to focus on next.

-- silly painter.

Blood Angels Librarian Dreadnought - Part II

 

The highlight of the party.

After travels and some minor health complaints, I'm finally back to painting. There isn't actually all that much to show since the last post as I've only just had a chance to get back into it, however I wanted to record some airbrushing from today.

I pulled out a few spare shoulder pads and did some small experiments in layering to see if I could get some more vibrancy out of the initial airbrushing stages. In particular I wanted to use this Dreadnought as a test piece - being a Librarian there's an excuse for the colours to slightly differ from the rest of the army. I tried white, yellows, and building up reds before a final coat of Evil Sunz Scarlet on some, and Blood Angels Red on others.

The idea struck me that perhaps I could learn from what I'm doing with Ultramarines and use a Contrast paint through the airbrush as a final filter step. The major benefit for me in this approach is being able to more easily see where the highlights will be and making sure they don't blend too much into shadowed areas - whites or yellows against a red base make it instantly visible where the highlight is. I'm hoping this will build up more tonal variation in the final result than what I'm otherwise getting with the airbrush.

Unsurprisingly white with a filter just ended up looking like pink. Not what I was going for. Using a bright yellow such as Flash Gitz Yellow was closer, but still further into the orange spectrum than I wanted. Averland Sunset is a far more muted yellow/yellow-orange and looked about right. So that's all that's really been done since the last photo.

Yellows and whites have a habit of speckling quite a lot for me. I could play with the air pressure, nozzle sizes, distance, etc, but I'm not as proficient with the airbrush as all that. I do find that changing the flow properties of the paint helps me more, i.e thinners and flow improvers mixed with the paint. I find this reduces speckling and also results in a much thinner coverage - perfect for highlighting where I can use two or three passes to build up the transition and mistakes aren't too troublesome. I used 6 parts thinner, 3 parts flow improver, and 6 parts paint, mixed well.

With the Averland Sunset stage done, it was then a simple case of cleaning out the airbrush and the some Blood Angels Red directly from the pot. This sprayed directly over the top gives the picture above.

I might have gone for too much tonal contrast, but I'm sure that will get knocked back by the time edge highlights, shading, details, and varnish is all applied. A good first try in other words. I would like to try this further, however think I might instead use the normal method on the next Dreadnought just to see how it matches up. I strongly suspect I'll be doing more of this Contrast approach on future models though, notably the resin Contemptors that are still to come.

-- silly painter.