Sanguinary Guard - Part III

 

The greater the bling, the greater the warrior.

Some recent progress on the Sanguinary Guard, and enough to fully assemble the initial test model. This was the first one that I'd airbrushed the armour, added edge highlights, shading, etc. It took me a while however to decide on how the next most important feature should be painted: the wings.

I'm still baffled by Games Workshop's decision to remove the iconic wings from the Sanguinary Guard. The helmets look derpy, but they're far more easily replaced; the wings are what make them such a special unit aesthetically amongst all the Space Marines. Whatever the reasoning behind the decision, the replacement parts work just as effectively as the original, but I didn't want to paint white wings fully white. A brighter white would simply overpower everything else, and leaves nowhere to go if I wanted something else highlighted more extreme. This really only leaves shades of grey, hints of blue, to work with, and I still intended to follow through painting the higher feathers brighter than the lower ones, encouraging the eye to be drawn upward.

The process involved a lot of paints to get the look I was after, and while I'm not sure all of them are required, having such a range to mix and move between was rather useful.

• Mechanicus Standard Grey
• Dawnstone
• Grey Seer
• Ulthuan Grey
• Corax White

I started with the darkest (Mechanicus) and worked by way up feather by feather, keeping the recesses darkened to provide an outline. The whole process took quite a good deal of time, and I while the results are fair, I wasn't a fan of repeating that again. Ultimately I probably would've saved time if I had just done that, but experimentation would inform future such attempts what might and might not work for me.

Biggus Swordus.

I tried to drybrush the next wings, which was actually before I had airbrushed them. I figured I could just mask off the feathers later. The drybrushing didn't catch the feathers as well as I'd hoped - mostly it was stuck to the edges and didn't fill in each as I wanted. Stippling may have worked, but that also would've filled in the recesses too much and I wouldn't have the control over edges.

Next I tried to airbrush the colour gradient in. Trying to do that in bands across feather rows did not work at all, however using the entire wing as a single shape and building up a gradient that way did give nicer results. Gloss varnish and an oil wash help bring back definition, but I still needed to touch up places later with a normal brush. It's for this reason that I think in future I should simply just paint it all by hand; it takes time, but with fewer steps it's quicker overall. A coat of Stormshield varnish later to pull everything back to the same finish rounds out the feathers, but the varnish should also help protect the paint when masking it off for airbrushing.

Masking off the feathers also took me some time to consider. I wasn't sure if PVA glue would peel off the paint, and trying in a small area showed that it didn't - but metal tool used to lift up the glue sure did leave scratches. Blu-tac was far too difficult to put into the right shape, and I don't have any silly-putty, so in the end I went with PVA glue and a plastic tool to help scrape it off later. That mostly worked, but I did have to use water and an older brush to wipe off some of the more stubborn bits. Note to self: PVA is water soluble, making it ideal of this kind of thing. A few spots didn't mask properly of course, but they were trivial to clean up later with remaining paint from the palette.

Whatever he's facing is about to regret its life choices.

Something else I'm experimenting with lately is an alternate glue to superglue. The frosting from superglue has been causing a bit of hassle and I'd like to avoid that if possible. From unrelated activities I have a bottle of Gorilla Glue (Clear), and it apparently bonds quite well but requires some pressure for a couple of hours first. That's not always possible for these models, so in future I should probably just avoid using an excess of superglue to begin with.

I'm planning next to paint up enough of the rest of the Sanguinary Guard to have them fully assembled as well. I have a rough idea of the colours I'd like, but there's enough doubt that this might continue to slow me down. I need to break up the large gold areas with something of visual interest, but less is more sometimes and it would be difficult to paint up that gold again with a brush.

-- silly painter