Wraithlord - Part II

 

Back in black.

Not exactly going to be a long post, but I wanted to record a small experiment with the Wraithlord. The basic summary is: highlighting black by undercoating with off-white.

I've been using Typhon Ash a lot recently, mostly because it's the closest I could get to wraithbone in an airbrush paint and I have two bottles of it and need to use it up now. After the airbrush mania a few weeks back, I had the inspiration to see what I could do about black.

Black is very difficult to to work with. It's an absence of colour, and so any colour added stands out in very stark contrast. Grey tones end up flat, but picking the wrong slightly-cool or slightly-warm tones can mess up the entire feel of it. I have trouble with volumetric highlights for some of these reasons: smooth gradients with black are extremely difficult, best done with glazes, and are very time consuming. My physical accurate black often has fewer such highlights in reality, or they're very subtle, but that doesn't help a miniature stand out and be readable by the viewer. Some liberties need to be taken, but they often just end up looking like stone.

The Wraithlord has shapes that lend itself naturally to an airbrush. It's larger, curved surfaces are ideal for building up gradients with an airbrush, and a less than perfect finish might be explained by the Aeldari material used for most of their construction (wraithbone). I'm improving with the airbrush a lot, particularly in getting smoother gradients out from multiple passes, and basically thought I'd give it a go. If I end up collecting any Eldar then it's likely I'd paint them up as Ulthwe.

Typhon Ash would give me a warmer tone to the finish, in theory. So I used that to build up where I wanted highlights and tried to keep the upper part of the model brighter. I had to correct myself while doing this step because it's easy to get lost in details and forget about the larger picture. Once happy with this step, I then used Black Templar (Contrast) to bring back a black finish, more heavily in the lower areas and surfaces facing downwards. The end result is that is looks kind of....grey, like darkened stone. This fits for a Wraithlord, but I chose Black Templar for a reason: Abaddon Black is darker still and I could use that to nudge the contrast where I wanted.

The left leg has some experimentation with colours from the palette where I wanted to get more of a feel about how this would turn out. Mechanicus Standard Grey, White Scar, Ulthuan Grey, and Abaddon Black in varying degrees to shade some areas more, and highlight others. Edges and tops of the "bumps" make them stand out more, defining the shapes without necessarily brightening things too much. Upper areas of the model I'd use brighter edge highlights. It's working well enough, but I'm not sure how motivated I am to continue. I can see how using very small and bright edge highlights can make it look reflective and smooth, where the dulled effect I'm going for definitely gives a rougher, matt finish impression. I would certainly like to explore the shiny side of things, but I'm not sure that fits theme of this model too well. Perhaps i can try that on the blade later.

Final note: I missed a lot of paint when stripping the original model, and again when priming it. Patches of red were showing up underneath, and actually it looked really cool, almost like there was some nightmare glow from below. I'll have to keep that in mind for future reference.

-- silly painter