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.