Boarding Actions Terrain - Part I

 

Let's look behind door #1.

For something different I've been experimenting with assembly and coming up with a painting approach for the boarding actions terrain set. I know I have a whole heap of other models to finish as well, but the past week has been a little messed up and I haven't had much in the way of spare concentration or motivation. Playing around with a terrain test piece was just something to be done very casually. I'm also away with travel once more soon, so it'll be another couple of weeks before I can post again.

I also make no apologies for the extra number of spelling and grammar errors. My head isn't in the best shape right now.

The boarding actions terrain box contains a lot of plastic. From the outset I knew this wasn't going to be something I could spend a long time filling in details on, performing perfect blends, etc. I'm also going to need to limit the colours used for the majority of it - I won't be giving individual colours to each key on the keypads for example, cables are likely all to be the same colour, etc. Mostly I need things simple, or I'll never get it all done.

To begin with: assembly. I spent ages scraping and filing down mould lines, and that just was never going to happen for all of it. So I've invested in a couple different grits of sandpaper and tried that on all the doors. A lower grit to perform some fast removal of mould lines, higher grit to smooth the surface later. It worked surprisingly well, and should work even better on the larger wall sections

There are small pieces that glue onto wall sections, mostly to hold the doors in place while allows them to swing open and shut. I considered for a while if I should glue it all together first, or paint the doors and wall sections separately. I opted for the latter, but the "door hinges" can be easily attached with pva glue for priming and airbrushing, and then properly glued in place when the door is ready. The catch with that is that if too much paint is applied on the door then it can cause the door to get stuck and not open/close properly.

Looking around for colour inspiration, I ended up liking those used by Duncan Rhodes. I didn't end up copying direction, but I was definitely influenced by the look. Starting with a black primer, I then used thinned down (a lot) White Scar to give a basic lighting scale. Several layers were used to build it up slowly, making it much lighter near the top; the floor area would accumulate far more dirt, stains, etc, and is going to be further away from light sources and so should be darker. Thin airbrush paints from Citadel, they do need it. I'm learning a lot more about thinning paints through an airbrush and basically building up just like with palette paints. After this step, Space Wolves Grey straight through the airbrush, and that's the basic wall background colour.

The doors I wanted to stand out, but not conflict with the wall. I thought about it for a while, and then while looking at recent bases painted for the MkIV Assault Squad and Azrakh, it just seemed a perfect fit for the doors. I haven't finished it yet, but it's the same basic approach: metallic (Leadbelcher here but I've done the rest of the doors with Iron Hands Silver, which is much darker), Incubi Darkness, and building up from there. The photo still needs some Rhinox Hide dirt and rust, and then probably Leadbelcher (or something) on corners and edges.

The little sign panels are so far white with Reikland Fleshshade followed up with Seraphim Sepia to give that rust stained look. Not sure how I'll paint the framing and symbols/numbers just yet. Maybe a bronze outline, and red symbols.

I did try an ink thinned with a hefty amount of flow improver to use as a wash over the whole surface, and then used a damp brush to clean up some the more flat areas. I'm convinced this can work, particularly because the ink and flow improver takes a little while to dry, but here I think it was thinned too much and didn't really show up much once it dried. I'm going to try an oil wash next, but not until I've painted in more cabling and piping. I've bought cotton pads to wipe off most of the oil wash, and might end up using a paint brush to be more precise in areas. I'll decide if a drybrushing pass to pick out edges is needed after that or not - maybe it would add some more, but it's also a time consuming step that could easily be carried too far.

I will very likely paint some glow around the lights, but deciding which light is "on" is another decision that will take time. In the photo above it would look out of place if the door was closed but included with any lighting glow, and it would look equally out of place if there was a glow while the door was open.

Finally, select few details will probably be done to a higher standard to the bulk of the wall and doors, because it's the details which stick out and catch most of the attention. Putting more effort into smaller areas might come across as counter-intuitive, but I find myself looking at them more than other areas and so deserving of extra attention.

-- silly painter.

Blood Angels Furioso Dreadnought - Part I

 

Some serious upper body strength.

While the Librarian is moving painfully slow, I decided to get the next Dreadnought started - a Furioso variant. This will share many of the same painting steps and so I decided to get both to about the same starting level before continuing - as such, this post is mostly about airbrushing.

To begin with, I somehow managed to damage the tip of the "good" needle for my good airbrush. It's still functional and so I won't buy a replacement just yet (unless the next time I use it causes problems), but it really does show how careful one must be with them. I don't even know how I managed it.

Anyway, the first thing done on this model was to try and airbrush some of the metal components. That proved less than stellar. The Air range from Citadel is a bit hit & miss at time, but the metallics are very poor in my opinion. The coverage isn't great, the result is "noisy" (for lack of a better term), and they clog readily. I might have to try again at some stage with a larger nozzle size and little bit of flow improver and thinner. This will necessitate multiple coats, but might give a better result. I might even have something perfect to test that against soon.

With the red armour I intended to use a larger nozzle (0.4mm) to base coat and run through an initial highlight, but wasn't thinking and used the smaller (0.2mm) instead for everything. At least I had good control: even if I was being lazy and didn't mask edges off this time when highlighting, the result was mostly good enough. It was also a good test to see how the colours and control might go on larger batches of smaller models.

In any case, the usual 1:1 mix of Dryad Bark and Mephiston Red was applied all over, and then highlighted up with Mephiston Red. I've been learning to use thinner and flow improver a lot more, and other than not clogging up the airbrush as much, I'm very tempted to apply both on the Mephiston Red step and use more layers in future. I'll experiment and perhaps pre-mix a bottle if it works out. Next up was a 1:1:1 mix of thinner, flow improver, and Averland Sunset. Just like before, I then went over it with Blood Angels Red directly from the pot. The Averland Sunset I perhaps should have used a second layer with - it was quite as bright in some places as I would have liked - but I can hopefully fix that with some appropriate edge highlighting in places.

The lessons to take away: thin the paints before going into the airbrush, mask off edges on larger models to keep proper shading and that flat panel look, and go brighter than you might think with the Averland Sunset step. With the thin paints I think this is where an airbrush can really shine: use something thicker for a base colour to setup with, and then use thin layers to build up glazes and filters of colours. Less speckling, more control, and easier to clean.

-- silly painter.

Jain Zar - Part I

 

"Storm of Silence", or maybe "Silent, but deadly."

Another model that has been sitting in the pile for a while is the relatively recent Phoenix Lord of the Howling Banshees: Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence. I really like the sculpt, a refresh of which was sorely needed compared to the old one. This new version is an even more dynamic pose and really sells this idea of a dancing whirlwind of blades, graceful but with terrible purpose. To do that, the sculptor obviously wasn't going for inredible realism, not with that amount of hair - and I think that's best. This is a model, meant to capture the feeling a particular character and their traits rather than be an accurate depiction of their physical form. That's always been the case for Games Workshop, but I think this model captures the idea particularly well and I've been thinking how to paint it for quite some time. I will state that I did not, and do not, intend to paint this model to the same technical level as Azrakh. That model was for learning more than anything else, and this one I want to play more with the overall composition of light and colour.

Originally I had intended to paint the armour in a similar bone pattern to the Avatar of Khaine, but when I came to it, it just didn't seem to fit. The armour has hardened surfaces, but don't really look like additional pieces compared to the rest of the bodysuit - more like they're part of it, not overlaid. Something rigid like bone wouldn't do.

Looking back at the original model there are blues and violets, which is when I was struck by an odd piece of inspiration from the background story. Jain Zar existed before the Fall of the Aeldari, and was apparently part of a precursor to Drukhari - which traditionally are painted with a hefty amount of purple. The particular power in the warp that spawned from the downfall of the Aeldari is also often painted with purples, violets, and burgundy. It occurred to me that this probably came from colours of the Eldar civilisation - and so the armour of Jain Zar might have a nod to that.

To start with the colours, the blade isn't final. That was simply messing about with blues on the palette, and I intend to paint over it later - although I do like the idea of a blue hint to the blade. The hair I had also airbrushed first, using some purples and whites in very thin layers to build up the volumes...and then promptly ruined the lot by using Black Templar over the whole thing. I thought it was thinned enough, but everything just went black again afterwards. Oops.

The main armour is a combination of six paints, however only three of them are really needed. I used six because I wanted to get a feel of the paints, not for any transition reasons, and I did blend between all of them on the palette quite a lot. The closer a paint comes to white, the more difficult I find it to glaze and blend with other colours, and it took quite a while to get this far. I also tried to avoid very strong value contrasts between "panels" and "garment" - I wanted to give an impression of a hardened surface that is also part of the more flexible material, and softening the edge transitions can help do that. The colours used are:

• Barak-Nar Burgundy, mostly in shadowed areas.
• Daemonette Hide.
• Warpfiend Grey.
• Slaanesh Grey.
• Ionrach Skin.
• Deepkin Flesh.

If I were to choose only three, I'd go for Barak-Nar Burgundy, Daemonette Hide, and Ionrach Skin. Those were the colours used the most, and mixing to various degrees between them can give close approximations to the others.

The lighter areas are the right breast, right side of the face, and right arm. I imagined the light coming from the weapon, or close by it, fading towards darker colours on the opposite side and towards her feet. This would naturally draw the eye to upper chest, and I'm hoping a spot of colour on the mask will draw attention more directly to the facial area. I've yet to decide on which colour for the eyes - red, blue, or teal. The vambrace and and other more obvious armoured parts I'm intending to borrow from something done on Azrakh by making them "shiny black" rather than silver, with a little Dark Reaper just to add interest (I'll probably using Thunderhawk Blue to highlight that just a little more later on). I'd considered using metallic paints, but that somehow doesn't gel with the concept of the Aeldari using Wraithbone for their manufacturing, and the shiny surface would almost certainly detract away from everything else. So in this case, using NMM techniques again seems appropriate.

I've used Barak-Nar Burgundy as the base colour for cloth, weapon grips, etc, merely as a colour sketch at this stage. I'll probably go for reds on the spirit stones, maybe a blue here or there, and the burgundy seemed appropriate as a starting point. I don't want a bright red, so I'll see where this takes me.

The base came about almost by accident. While I didn't want bone coloured armour on Jain Zar, it did seem suitable for the ruins of some ancient shrine perhaps. Morghast Bone, Seraphim Sepia, Skeleton Horde, and Screaming Skull. Actually Seraphim Sepia looks very much similar to Skeleton Horde, with the paint consistency more the different than anything else. While doing that I realised that it was a good value contrast to Jain Zar; she is using darker tones overall, and so a brighter and more colourful base might serve as a good contrast to that. I also reasoned that perhaps the ruins are from a time long past, maybe on a world that is now quiet from the echoes of past wars - or in other words, plants have started to grow on it. This would add a splash of colour and visual interest, and as a bonus needs no sculpting from me. I also conveniently recently was gifted some "flowers" that I wanted to try out. Between those, some grass tufts, and a small amount of flock glued in place, the base turned out alright. It needs a bit of tidying up still, and a few overhanging parts could be trimmed back, but I think overall it serves the purpose I intended.

I'm not sure where to go with the hair next. I want it to read as black hair, but some volume highlighting needs to be done. Perhaps a light "dampbrush" with a mostly desaturated violet, followed up with Nuln Oil to bring it back and better define some areas. I'll consider further as I get more of the armour completed.

-- silly painter.