Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Devastator Squad - Part IX (Showcase of a Cherub)

 

Not what you imagined for drone delivery services.

Rounding out the squad is the little cherub familiar, delivering a canister of prometheum presumably. If I remember the lore correctly, these are vat grown flesh heavily augmented to fulfil whatever role - more akin to lab meat than anything else. While the appearance fits within the religious overtones of the setting, a "normal" servitor that could carry more and be outfitted with a greater array of sensors would be far more fitting on a battlefield - but hey, creepy flying baby.

In painting this up I based the entire scheme on a triad of Two Thin Coats colours picked up from recent model show: Barbarian Brawn, Dwarven Skin, and Elven Skin. These were used for all the skin areas by layering, glazing, and mixing on the palette. Obviously quite a matt finish and I probably should put varnish over it, but as quick free style piece I didn't really care that much for this model.

Robes are far too long.

The robes (or whatever) are built up as mixtures of Barbarian Brawn (to tie everything together), Mechanicus Standard Grey, Celestra Grey, (both of those Citadel of course) and Trooper White from Two Thin Coats. I have a bottle of White Star but haven't opened it yet - Trooper White is similar enough on small details and mixes ever so slightly better into other paints because it's an off-white.

The wings are Mechanicus Standard Grey, then mixed with Celestra Grey, and finally mixed again with Trooper White. Different mixture ratios and the extra skin tone in the robes make them and the wings look very distinct, even if mostly the same paints were used.

Silver metal is Doom Metal (from TTC), and then the usual culprits from Citadel. I have a preference for this approach rather than sticking to washes between metallics because I can just put everything on the palette and don't really need to wait for a wash to dry before I can continue on that area.

The canister is again Doom Metal, then Warplock Bronze (Citadel) mixed in to highlight up, then I think it was Sycorax Bronze afterwards to add highlights in a more NMM style, particularly along the rounded ends. It took a few successive layers to built up enough metallic contrast that wasn't completely overpowered by the gloss finish, but I think it worked rather well in the end - so long as you pay attention to the various angles the model can be viewed from and place highlights accordingly.

The gold details are nothing very different except I used Warplock Bronze to glaze into some shadowed areas or where I wanted more contrast. The rest of the smaller details are just whatever I felt like at the time - put one paint down and mix with what's already on the palette to build up highlights and shadows. This isn't entirely haphazard because I'm getting an idea of how various paints will mix and can use that experience to minimise the number of different paints I'm using, but also it's sometimes worth not writing it down because the key idea is experimentation. If something works very well then I'll make notes if I think it should be replicated on future models. In this case though, I really was just playing around.

Fun little model in the end, quickly painted up (by my standards anyway) and now I can look at what else is pending to be done.

-- silly painter.


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