Sons of Horus MkVI Assault Squad - Part I

 

Be careful with that handshake.

I apparently don't have enough works in progress, so in addition to the Sanguinary Guard for 30k, I'm painting up the other five models from the box as Sons of Horus. I was already painting up Legions Imperialis in that livery, and with the idea this year to try something other than red (or gold) armour all the time, it seemed suitable to give them a go.

Before anything else I should state that the metallic paint seen above is the base version of Aged Metal (from the Vallejo TMM range). This applies much more smoothly than Imperial Gold. Looks like the latter is just one of the annoying colours of that range, which is fine because the Citadel metallics already give me nice gold colours and Aged Metal was the one I was actually more interested in.

I tried to experiment a little with the turquoise paint scheme for Sons of Horus by starting with a very dark purple as a shadow colour, building up through to a sea green for highlights. I'm not entirely happy with the result, but more on that in a moment. The approach is summarised by:

• Chemos Purple / Night Lords Blue (2:1 ratio) with equal parts thinner and flow improver through the airbrush and covering the whole model.
• The above mix with then equal parts Lupercal Green (overall equal parts thinner and flow improver again) to cover the top and sides, some underneath, but leaving a few shadow areas as purple. This needs several thin layers through the airbrush, so a layer or two over shadow areas doesn't hurt if they're otherwise too dark.
• Straight Lupercal Green (thinned & flow improver'd) to start on highlights, covering the top and most of the sides, but leaving some shadow areas.
• Sons of Horus Green, which isn't an airbrush paint and thus needs definite thinning to make it flow nicely enough. I noticed this still had some clogging problems, which isn't a surprise considering it's not a paint designed for the airbrush.
• Gloss Varnish.
• Shyish Purple / Terradon Turquoise (1:4) with equal parts flow improver and brushed liberally over the model. More on this below.
• Glazed with a brush and the non-airbrush Lupercal Green to fix some areas.
• Glazed with a brush and Sons of Horus Green to restore highlights.

The last step needs a lot more work to go on each model, particularly where I went too heavy with the shading wash. That cocktail heavily tints the surface, leaving a few options:

• Wipe away excess from flat surfaces as soon as possible using a damp brush, and well before it starts to get tacky.
• Manually rub off excess, which needs some aggressive brushing and will leave texture and markings. Try not to do this.
• Glaze back over everything to restore colour vibrancy once everything is dry.

The first step is by far the best to do. It will still need the last step to be done as part of a general clean up, but it makes everything that much easier to take care of later. Try not to do the second step. Feathering out from darker areas works, or just covering an entire surface, but don't touch it afterwards until it's fully dry. I made a few mistakes on the model above with that and it took a while to correct. I also far too heavily shaded the shins and spent half an hour correcting them - with a lot more work to go yet. The lower half is actually much lighter in reality, but it still needs lightening in places.

I would almost certainly skip the first dark purple step in future models. It's just a little too dark and the wash takes care of it in places if needed anyway. I keep my models darker than the box art in general, but it was too much in this case. The other models of the squad aren't quite so bad fortunately.

For the few areas where I didn't clean up the model properly, or where I've messed up the painting too much, I'll add decals to hide those mistakes.

When I get low on some of the airbrush paint, which Games Workshop no longer make, it seems that Two Thin Coats has acceptable replacements. That assumes those paints work well enough through an airbrush, and while they might not be quite as nice as dedicated airbrush formulated paints, I suspect they'll work better than trying to use the base and layer variants from Citadel. The difference in finish shouldn't matter given that I matt varnish everything anyway.

-- silly painter.