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.