Devastator Squad - Part VIII

 

Never enough helmet lenses.

No, the squad still isn't finished. The Marines are, but not the squad. Turns out I had been leaving out a small familiar that needs to be quickly painted up, but more on that soon.

One of the things I've been still steering away from is bright edge highlighting. I went for something intense here, but not bright, so it's not as apparent in the final photos. This is partially a matter of taste, but also partially a matter of colour: as I've been trying different approaches to painting red armour, the orange tones of Wild Rider Red (my normal edge highlight colour) aren't quite matching anymore and I end up glazing back over them with Evil Sunz Scarlet. I may have gone too far on these models however, and I think the edge highlights are too little now.

I have a floating skull pet. Your argument is invalid.

The volumetric highlights have turned out well enough and are compensating to a degree for the underwhelming edge highlights. The airbrush stage setup a good sketch, but I still went back in with a brush after the final matt varnish to touch it up, which lead to a surprising development. First of all, the matt varnish did make some of the airbrushing noise fade - it's still there, but barely visible now. Trust the process I suppose. Second, a matt varnish will actually help dissipate surface cohesion of fluids on top (due to the roughed surface I suppose), which helps to feather out glazing. A little flow improver instead of water, and I was building up very smooth gradients very quickly. Using this helping hand I was able to reinforce volumetric highlights where they were lack, or create them if they were missing, to help tie the entire assembled model together.

Eat this.

For the missile launcher I tried just yellow and red that was on the palette to first build up a missile exhaust and then afterwards built up greys and black over the top to simulate smoke. In reality this would light up the rest of the model too (even in broad daylight) but sometimes a bit of artistic license is required. I didn't spend that long on the effect and it works ok - nothing too special, but the basic approach is sound and could be improved on with a little practice.

Let your worries just melt(a) away.

Reinforcing metallic paints with the mid-tone and then edge highlights all after the matt varnish works as expected still. I much prefer this way for metallic surfaces as opposed to pure NMM, but I am starting to take to a kind of hybrid approach: I've been starting to try and paint TMM but using NMM highlighting theory. One of the problems I personally see with NMM is that most will matt varnish afterwards, which makes the end result slightly dull and creates this dissonance of perception (the colours say metallic, but the lack of shine says paper). Using TMM gives the colours, shine, and while encourages a particular viewing angle it still works from others. The barrels of the multi-melta worked particularly nice with this approach so I'll continue to refine it.

That's not a laser pointer, this is a laser pointer.

I had a good deal of fun painting these models, even if they're considered older. They just have so much more character about them compared to more recent releases. I did buy Infernus Marines (for their poses) to kitbash with spare heavy weapons but unless I speed up my painting then don't expect to see that for a while. It was a slog to get through the Devastators but that wasn't the fault of the models, that was just "stuff going on". As mentioned before there is still the familiar to go, which I'll be using as a palette cleanser before figuring what I should tackle next.

-- silly painter.