Justaerin - Part I

 

Clad me in spiked studs!

The recent Siege Assault Battle Group was good value for money when bought from a third party store, so I ended grabbing myself a copy. I didn't really fancy buying more models just yet, but I did want those new Cataphractii, and I could always sell the rest (probably won't, but I could). Naturally having the box sitting there I needed to assemble something and get a true feel for the new sculpts.

The end result is pretty great. The torsos aren't as bad as photos initially suggested, and if really necessary they could be padded out with green-stuff. The poses I was a little unsure about, but they do make everything seem more ponderous, which is absolutely spot-on for these suits of armour. Assembly, though, could use a few improvements.

The initial problem I was faced with (pun intended) was how to position the head correctly. I wanted it to face the same direction as the gun, and a wild guess likely would have it in the wrong position. So I needed to assemble the legs, some of the torso, and glue the arm into position, but not attaching the front and rear of the torso. Then I lined up the head, took some reference positions, and glued the head into what I thought was the right position. I did have a little time to make minor adjustments with tweezers afterwards and it ended up alright. I generally prefer to paint and glue heads into position much later, but the assembly here wouldn't permit that. Maybe I could trim some of the bottom of the head, but then that won't sit proper, and so in the end I've just fully assembled the model. Maybe in future I could PVA glue the chest in place, but that's just a lot of effort to paint areas that I doubt will be seen anyway.

The shoulder pads were a pain. They're in multiple pieces, I took the wrong parts from a different sprue (because the numbering is the same), and on the left shoulder pad the top tilted down where it wasn't supposed to. This gave everything the wrong angle and actually forced apart the under "plate" (I needed some severe gap filling with green-stuff to correct that). To compensate for the wrong angle I forced the arm up slightly and used pieces of plastic to add a kind of wedge (melted with copious plastic glue) to keep it in place. I fell like a few adjustments with little plastic nubs could've made all of that a lot easier to handle.

The hip plates do fit alright, but need care and should be done before putting the arms in place. Too bad I needed to put the arms in place first on account of the torso, but maybe that can be avoided: the attachment for the hip plates on this model are actually not on the torso piece and might not interfere if trying to add it later.

When attaching to the base, the angle wasn't quite right either. That's on me of course, and I only needed to tilt the model by one or two degrees, but it did mean mixing up the base and putting some extra debris underfoot to stabilise everything. Luckily the foot happened to be over an area that I thought would look cool if it was kind of crushed as the heavy armour stepped on it, so it all worked out in the end.

I'm making this model a Justaerin for practice. The triangular spiked studs let me try my hand and smaller sculpting, working the putty, and getting to be more familiar with how fast it cures, how the tools work, etc. I've actually made a small stamp for the spikes in future and can scuplt them sparately to later glue into place, but the experience with clay shapers was worth it for now. The little stamp was made by drilling a hole into a spare piece of sprue, adding putty inside, and then pushing the end of a thunder hammer from the kit through. Water or Vaseline makes sure that nothing sticks to the stamp when using it - but it works best with a "spiky" tip to stamp into. Pretty sure I'm getting the hang of bases too, but I have a few other ideas to make that easier (I don't have unlimited Sector Imperialis bases, and I'd like all the Horus Heresy models I do to have similar bases). Much sculpting ahead!

I'm not yet done with this model, and I have no real intention to start painting it quite yet. I just wanted to play around with it. There will be more painted model progress coming very soon.

-- silly painter.

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.

Sanguinary Guard (Heresy Era) - Part II

 

Looking down at you

Moving fairly quickly along with these models, I wanted to try out some of the new "True Metallic Metal" paints from Vallejo. The main reason was some of the colour variation available; I have enough metallic paints from Citadel, but sometimes I want a subtle difference in tone than available from that range. I'm actually more interested Aged Metal, but here I used Imperial Gold to separate the 30k Sanguinary Guard from their 40k counterparts.

First off I undercoated the entire model with Dryad Bark. This is my standard for any golds now, and I typically try to introduce some of that with following paints when using the Citadel range, building up colours layer by layer (very easy to do with an airbrush). It didn't really work here. At all. The airbrush paint doesn't need any diluting, but it doesn't mix well with Citadel and trying to be thin with it just ended up with extremely poor coverage. It was so poor in fact that I needed to go back over the models with either a third coat, or with a brush and the base paint.

This is where I hit another snag with Imperial Gold. Two or three passes with the airbrush would be fine to build up complete coverage, but the base paint is ... different. It behaves almost like a gel crossed with a Contrast paint. Very poor coverage, and it needs to be applied in multiple thick layers. It does kind of auto-level to a degree, but it was extremely bad to work with. It might just be that particular paint however, as the light colour behaves much better.

I tried to mix the base and light colour to do some volumetric highlights and it kind of worked, but with limited success. I have a better experience here with the Citadel range, by orders of magnitude. I suspect again that it's the base paint which doesn't like being thinned, because the light version was perfectly fine for edge highlights on its own (but is too much of a jump in value to try glaze with).

The shade is almost like a mix between a normal shade, and a Contrast paint. It's quite dark, applies evenly, but also goes kind of tacky very quickly. Once that happens, any disturbance will tear it immediately and cause it to bunch up in a kind of messy film over the surface. If you're very quick you can drag the paint off before that happens, but you need to be fast to do that. It's a nice enough colour though and dries with the same finish as the metallics. I suspect I could do a lot better with some practice, but it doesn't lend itself too well to my preferred painting style.

My overall impression with Imperial Gold (and by extension the whole TMM range, knowing that it could differ for other colours) is that they're really nice if you paint in the "BSL" system. This is quite similar to how Games Workshop tutorials work, but more structured with the paint range. The problem is that I don't quite paint that way - I prefer to mix up gradients with tone and value variation, with thin layers and glazing as I go. I really rely on translucency of paints, thinning with different mediums (water mostly, but acrylic flow improver quite a lot too), and constant adjustment as I go. If the TMM colours fit with what I'm after, they'll be fine. If not, I'll struggle. If I were painting large numbers of troops in a metal finish (say, Thousand Suns) then I suspect the TMM range would be very useful.

I persevered and in the end came up with using Balthasar Gold mixed with Imperial Gold to get better coverage and then used that as a shadow colour in certain areas. That's not shown on the model in the photo - the shadow areas there are just the Dryad Bark showing through more than I intended. To highlight I loaded managed to work the Imperial Gold base as a kind of glaze filter to blend the overpowering Balthasar Gold into the mid-tones, and then added some of the light to keep going for highlights. It...works. I just prefer the Citadel range for doing that sort of thing.

Doom Metal (Two Thin Coats) shows where I want more steel / silver colours to go, which at this stage is just for blocking in parts to get a feel of how the model will go. Then we come to the pouches and pistol holster. That's a tricky bit, but I didn't want it too high in value, nor just a dark brown. I base coated with Wraithbone, then hit it with a coat of Gore-Grunta Fur. There's just a hint of orange there which I like, but it was too bright. I tried another with Wyldwood, but that was simply too dark and wooden. I tried mixing the two, which just kind of desaturated everything and was messy. In the end I'll likely stick to Gore-Grunta Fur, use Wyldwood for some straps just to break up the monotony, then go in with maybe Agrax Earthshade to darken things in a few places. Maybe Squig Orange can be used later to add scratches and brighter highlights, though perhaps it will need a hint of the Wraithbone in it to do that.

Gehenna's Gold is probably a fair approximation for the Imperial Gold base, while Liberator Gold is very similar to the light variant. The shade is possibly a close match to Ratling Grime.

-- silly painter.

Year in Reflection - 2025

2025

Looking back over the past year of painting, one thing sticks out the most to me: I got so very few models painted. It's not like I wasn't motivated, there was just a lot of more higher priority tasks or situations that prevented me from getting anything hobby related done. This was something I knew might happen and while frustrating, it wasn't surprising.

Throughout the year I tried some other approaches to painting red, learned more about airbrushing (and bent another needle, still not sure how), reorganised paint storage with custom racks, and...didn't do much sculpting. I still want to do more sculpting, but it takes a bit of time, space, and concentration. Perhaps once everything calms down then I can get back to it. Weirdly the best of all was the custom paint racks: cheap, tailored to my needs, and makes paints within easy reach. When I do have time for painting then it's becoming more efficient because I can quickly get the paints I need. This leads into something else I've been improving with the past year: put the paints I need on the palette and get something done. A pouch, a sword, whatever it happens to be - just paint one little part to completion. That more than anything else kept me going throughout the year.

I wanted to get more models painted. That didn't work. I also bought more things, mostly because they looked cool and I wanted to pad out for free shipping. It seems that I'm slowly being drawn towards Horus Heresy. Something about the designs reminds me of older editions of 40k, and the setting is certainly darker in tone than modern day 40k. There's nothing bad in there, on the contrary there's now a wider range than ever to appeal to a lot more people. Some of the older Horus Heresy models are spectacularly detailed (see the Crimson Paladins), but the newer plastics appear to be what I can best describe as higher detail, but plainer design. The manufacturing processes are definitely improving, while the sculpts can be painted effectively from a more limited colour range, and so they feel easier to assemble and paint compared to what I'm used to. Let's see if that translates to getting 30k models done more quickly than their 40k counterparts.

Earlier in the year I practised with painting reds by using a yellow undercoat and then covering with a Contrast paint. This absolutely works to see where highlights are going, and gives a vibrant result, but suffers from one major drawback: the need to be precise. It was only towards the end of the year that I made the realisation that I shouldn't be using the airbrush to do all of the armour. Use it as the foundation to later perform fine-tuning on; go back to the original airbrushing paints I was using now that I can thin the paints properly, use those for a rough sketch only, and refine the armour with glazing as necessary later. I'm eager to paint more squads with this idea in mind, as it might just be the final piece to my army painting puzzle.

2026

Going into 2026 I have the same goal as last year: get more models painted. I by far enjoy painting single miniatures more than squads, but I need to clear some of the backlog. There's just too much piling up and it's getting depressing. I'll need to get squads of troops done, but the simpler the better.

There is another tactic I might try as well. I paint a lot of Blood Angels. I always will. Yet looking at some of the models in my storage, I wonder if what makes them difficult is the repetitive nature of always painting red armour. I should just try painting different Chapters. The Guilliman model will need a retinue, so Ultramarines seems the logical choice to try out, and there's plenty of box art to use as a reference. I also probably won't care quite so much that way, and maybe, just maybe, I can try not to be such a perfectionist if the models aren't Blood Angels.

Other than that, I would also like to paint more larger scale models. I strongly suspect the airbrush will be the key to unlocking that for me - paint the basics, then go back in with a brush later to refine everything.

Captain Karlaen Kitbash - Part VI (Showcase)

 

Back, bigger than ever.

I'm calling it done on the conversion / kitbash of Captain Karlaen. I absolutely could go all-out on highlighting the armour more, making it really pop, but that would take at least another two days and then I'd have to start fixing other little mistakes too. This model is not a competition piece, but I've learned enough that it could be.

Before anything else, a nice sable hair brush with paint at the right glaze consistency (preferably using flow improver) over the matt varnish really, truly does wonders for highlighting red armour. Synthetics don't quite have the same softness or "spring" to them, and the matt varnish evens out the brush strokes in a way that's difficult to describe. I may have to use this to really step it up a notch on another model before too long.

For learning NMM, this model has been both a success, and a failure. I learned a lot about light placement, shadow placement, and using contrast to bring out the shape of something. The hammer haft and the storm bolter worked particularly well. The tilting shield trim did not. The rest of the gold was hit and miss - I could probably make it work, but I don't think the formula for gold was quite right for this model. I also need to use more mid-tones with less yellow because it goes too bright too fast.

What really helped with NMM for me was not starting from the darkest colour. Start from the mid-tone. That's the "unlit" colour of the metall, everything else is just adding light and dark for reflections to sell the effect.

If I'm going to continue learning NMM then I may need to add some texturing to the mix to help differentiate NMM from something simply lighter in colour. The Crux Terminatus is too close to the NMM areas and might come across as an earlier experiment - but actually I want it to look more like stone. Weirdly I could probably make it work with NMM quite well, but I think that a stone look gives them more weight, makes the armour look heavier, more powerful, and more menacing. In the meantime though, I want to switch back to metallics - I like the end look of them more in most cases, but I can still apply some of the lessons learned here.

The inner cape is darker than I originally intended. There's no colour reason for this - it was just difficult to reach that area and it was getting annoying. It was a risk I took, but next time I'll paint the cape before gluing the model into position.

The hammer grip was a good choice to be something other than red. It makes the hammer more distinct, whereas something more red or brown might have looked like an extension of the arm.

I could spend ages pointing out defects, mistakes, and generally describing everything in minute detail, but there's not really a whole lot of point to that. Also I'm tired and just want to finish up. The model was, overall, a successful kitbash. I know what I could improve in future for kitbashing, I know more than before about the placement of light and shadow, and I have a nice looking miniature all painted up before the end of the year.

-- silly painter.

Sanguinary Guard (Heresy Era) - Part I

 

Stab. Stab stab stab!

I normally wouldn't be posting on these models at this stage, but the assembly was noteworthy enough to warrant it. I'll start with the picture above: I messed up the pose and from that camera angle he looks a little hunched over while putting a pizza in an oven. From a lower angle it looks like he's stabbing upwards into something. I don't like it, but it's well glued together now and there's no getting around it. This bring me to point one: posing.

Arms with multiple connection points are really, really hard to pose properly. Using blu-tac (or whichever equivalent) always puts a slight spacer between the connection points and it does matter at this scale. I much prefer when there are guides to get the arms in the proper position, which can always be trimmed if not wanted. Without this then in future I'll need to look at creating my own out of paperclips. This takes time and effort, and really degrades motivation. The extra problem on this model is the fact that the arms and hands were also separate and used ball joints. Anchoring just one arm once everything is dry-fit would be great - and if all the pieces were plastic that might be an option (just drop some extra-thin cement in there), but between plastic and resin? That needs superglue. In future I'll just take the time and pin it.

The base gave me pause for a little. I wasn't sure how I wanted to base the Heresy models - something industrial or hab block related seems more appropriate: it could be on any world, it could be on Terra, it could be within a ship. That's when I remembered what I'd done on previous models: I used Sector Imperialis bases. No need for much else, just glue on the models and done. Of course there's a lot of repetition if I just use those, so later I may need to add rubble, piping, concrete debris, that sort of thing, just to differentiate them. Adding a layer of randomness makes the visuals less uniform.

As I was assembling a squad I noticed that the backpacks have enough room behind that I could just glue them onto the torso, and so I did. Then when I tested the shoulder pads I saw there was just enough room to paint those whilst attached. The arms aren't really hiding much either, so they and the weapons are all glued in position. Then looked at the helmets, looked again, and looked for a third time. There would be some difficulty, but the majority of the helmets are accessible for painting. Everything is glue together - even accessories for each. The latter will probably be the worst for accessibility to various areas, but it's worth it for motivation; I'll paint a fully assembled model much quicker compared to sub-assemblies.

The helmet and head options are from older Forgeworld kits, and while Games Workshop has done a brilliant job at compatibility, they simply aren't designed for these newer models. They just didn't sit right - too much height on the neck, or not enough. In the end there was really only the one option: trim it down a lot and use a (very) small ball of putty to make up the difference. A bit of glue and squishing the putty into place makes sure it flattens out to take up the space while giving a large contact area for adhesion and even time to make minor adjustments to sit everything in the proper place. This is all hidden by the helmet itself and won't be visible in the end.

During assembly I've gone the extra mile with scraping off mould lines and sanding things back as smooth as I could with 1200 grit sand paper. Some plastic cement in a few areas helped to seal seams shut before sanding it all back, though doubtless some areas will still be visible later. The left pauldrons in particular seem to be troublesome for that, but that's the price for the better looking armour studs. I decided to go with them because they look cool, and signifies that though they are well equipped, they're still one with the others of their legion who may not be so fortunate in their offerings from the quartermaster.

Finally, I've been preparing these models specifically to test out some new paints, but also to see how well I go with models that don't have quite so much ornate detailing. I'm hoping this will help limit the palette and make me get through the models more quickly than usual. More on the reasoning for that later.

-- silly painter.

Crimson Paladin - Part II

 

Cleaning that sash must take some effort.

Originally I thought I could paint the Crimson Paladins relatively quickly, but this first model has proven me most incorrect in that matter. It's the sub-assemblies that annoy me, but even more it's that the shoulder armour doesn't have a proper mounting location and I can't glue them in place until the arms are done, and they need to be done separately from the torso to reach certain areas without hassle. One of those spots is the sash and rings on which it hangs.

The sash itself is fairly simplistic with building up from a dirty beige to an off-white:

• Steel Legion Drab
• Zandri Dust
• Skeleton Horde (TTC)
• Screaming Skull
• Pallid Wych Flesh

The issue I still have with cloth though is making it look like material. Trying to find references is difficult because photos are always with cheap costumes using nylon: thin, slightly shiny, overly smooth. I want something heavier looking, more durable. Ancient Roman togas is the closest I can find. Even then, the scale means it shouldn't be painted realistic, but instead painted more impressionistic: take the properties and exaggerate them. Durable, thick material will have large woven fibres that can be portrayed by painting always in the same direction to build up a kind of lined grain in appearance. It doesn't always work.

Another problem here is that I'm used to glazing and smoothing between layers, which is _very_ difficult with whiter and lighter coloured paints. It leaves everything looking blotchy and messy far too frequently. Using flow improver instead of water to thin the paint does help, but actually it's simply better to use slightly thicker layers and wet blend instead. Even then it was the Pallid Wych Flesh that brought everything together in the end - it was a total mess before that.

So I still need to find my rhythm for painting cloth.

The hanging straps could be leather, or just more heavy cloth. I painted them with Steel Legion Drab,  Barak-Nar Burgundy, mixed in Warpfiend Grey in some places and The Fang in others, then gave the whole thing a coat of Black Templar (Contrast) mixed with Contrast Medium (about 1:1). I played it fast and loose with the whole thing and may still go back and add scratches and edge highlights, but I'm starting to like using purple-greys with black leather.

As for the armour trim, that's still just Castellax Bronze with a thinned Canoptek Armourshade (1:1 with flow improver) right now. I may highlight after the matt varnish stage of the model, not sure yet.

-- silly painter.