Sanguinary Guard (Heresy Era) - Part III

 

You know he wants to play the axe like a guitar.

In the background there is slow progress on the stand-in Sanguinary Guard, but the main colours are at least blocked in and there's at least an idea of what they'll look like.

Ignore the dust on the model. I do have a soft makeup brush to clean that off.

The first thing to note is that if I do these sort of model again, I will leave the shoulder pads unglued until the very end. It would be much easier to paint the red with an airbrush, but I was concerned that this would demotivate me and thus left them on. Too late now I suppose. Glazing the highlights takes a very long time, so as can be seen here I am instead blocking in the main highlight points and I'll glaze the transition areas later. Doing this on five models will probably take me a full week. The airbrush would take half an hour (including cleanup). Next time!

I pondered on the weapon handles whether I should use a greener tone such as with Incubi Darkness, but in the end the Blood Angels are all about: "There is the blood, and there is nothing else." Red, and tones of red, are everything.

The eye lenses are being given a white undercoat and I'll go back in with Hexwraith Flame later to make them stand out. The slits in the helmet are too narrow, and the eye lenses too sunken, for the normal reflection effect to be tried, so I'm going for something which should make them stand out enough to draw attention to the head.

The blades of each weapon use the same effect as on the Champion: black metal, then build up a blue tint to act as the power field glow. Given that any gemstone on the weapons would be lit up from the surrounding energy glimmer, I painted Spiritstone Red over a bright silver and called it a day. This red is very saturated and glossy, so it stands out impressively even amongst the rest of the metallic shine on the model.

I'll keep plugging away at these guys, but the focus for now is on another model. That will be finished very soon, and I might then switch to get these finished next. There's a lot left to do, but none of it is particularly difficult. I just need the time to sit down and get them done.

-- silly painter.

Crimson Paladin - Part III

 

If it gets past that gun, not sure a sword will stop it.

I've finally managed to fully assemble the first of the Crimson Paladins. Still a ways to go to paint him, but at least assembly is done. There isn't a whole lot to say about the painting, so this post will instead focus on putting together the model.

The first thing to note is actually the last piece to be glued in place: the helmet. I really like the style of those helmets, and it really suits the aesthetic, but there's one small problem. The helmet sits too low compared to the arms, and the helmet-less head is larger than the helmets themselves. This gives them some weird proportions and so I made the decision to add some padding and lift the helmet just a little. This probably makes the head look oversized now, but it also makes the model look taller, and so I think on balance it was good enough choice. This wasn't difficult to do; extend under the helmet with green-stuff, pad the round connection point some more, and then file it back if it's too much. 

The arms were positioned almost exactly correctly because of pin holes I had originally drilled. Everything lined up and gluing was simple. I think the right arm was ever so slightly too high, only by about 1/3 of a millimetre, but at this scale that's enough to be noticeable. Not too much I can do about that now.

The pauldrons. They were never going to glue nicely into position with that design. It took a long time for me to think of something to try that might actually work, and the answer was: green-stuff. I tried to sculpt more surface for the pauldrons to sit on, and even in the end added a small blob to hold it in place while the glue dried. I'm still unhappy with the result. I think next time I need to extend the surface out with yet more green-stuff, sculpting it into the proper shape even before the model is primed.

The leather flaps under the pauldrons are painted with the same recipe as for the White Dwarf's gloves. Rhinox Hide and Squig Orange for the most part, some Nuln Oil in recesses. It could be a lighter tone. Maybe I can try that with the next one.

I still need to fill in a few details, and the pauldrons are only base coated (no highlights yet). The base itself is obviously in need of some work. Quite a bit to go. I started off the year strong, but unfortunately the (rather predictable) events of work, house, health, and all of that, is forcing me to slow down these last few weeks. I might need to focus on just one model now and get it done, then move to the next, and the next, and so on. Or just keep painting what I feel like, when I feel like. Let's see.

-- silly painter.

Justaerin - Part II

 

Mr T. Knot

Just a quick post because I wanted to wrap up the sculpting practice for the first of the Justaerin. There's ultimately not a whole lot done, but the small details are enough to shift the outline and bring some more depth to the character of the model.

Starting with the Sons of Horus symbol, that is essentially an embossed decal. I applied a decal first, adding some softener to make sure it was strongly adhered to the plastic, and used that as a guide to sculpt over the top of. This would never be quite so precise as the decal itself, but the intent here is to gain experience with sculpting, not try to be a human 3d-printer. With that in mind I tried to think of what to sculpt first: what is the basic shape to build the rest upon? The central oval shape of the eye, with a small cutout for the "pupil". That was the easy part, and I used straight green-stuff for it. Next I mixed green-stuff and Milliput together for more fine detail work and built up everything else. I've learned that this particular mix can be troublesome when freshly mixed, but given 20 minutes to cure it's more workable to my liking (at least for this scenario) and I managed something passable in the end. It's not quite as clean as I wanted, but with careful painting then it should be more than sufficient.

Next is the top-knot. I spent some time thinking that one over, looking at tutorials on hair, trying to figure out where exactly it should go, and how to anchor it to the model. I couldn't place it on the helmet directly: there's just not enough space. The top of the armour seemed too far back, leaving the arch above the head as the only real solution. I needed to carve a little away to flatten an area, before drilling a small hole with a 0.4mm drill bit and gradually increasing size to 0.8mm to fit the paperclips I use. The reason for multiple drill bit sizes is just to make it easier to centre the hole. A touch of superglue to place a piece of paperclip, with green-stuff to blend it into the model, and the shaft to attach hair to was done.

The hair itself I might have tried to put a blob in place and then carve into, but I took a far more painstaking route to rolling out multiple, thin lengths of green-stuff and wrapping them together. I did try to taper one end more to give natural bulk when it would attach to the shaft, then simply stuck it on and shifted it around to a pose I liked. In hindsight I should've used a dot of superglue when initially sticking it to the shaft, but here I needed dab the glue into place after the fact in order to hold it down. Wrapping a small amount of green-stuff around the join and blending it together works to hide all of that.

Not a very colourful fellow.

Priming the model brings it all together and gives a clearer view of what the end result will be. I was worried the hair might just look like tentacles, but it seems alright here.

I have made a mould of the Sons of Horus symbol and might see how well I can cast it onto a fresh shoulder pad, but equally repeating the same again would be good practice. Perhaps I can do both: there are, after all, five more in the squad to go.

-- silly painter.

Blood Angels Champion - Part IV

 

Champion and Dedork.

Progress. Very slow, but progress.

The base has been done and now has an Ork skull with grass growing next to it. A special character model such as this probably deserves a more blinged-out base, but fitting him in with the rest of the models means I'm going for something a bit simpler. The skull rather than freshly hewn head means it wasn't this champion's work, but it seemed appropriate given the swords.

I'm trying something new with the swords here, and have actually already changed it up a bit, but the basic idea is: dark metal sword to make a blue metal "glow" appear brighter by contrast. I still don't like the look of generic everything-blue power swords, and so I keep experimenting. The tips being blue help define shape, but that's the part already adjusted in other models: using silvers instead. Steel swords in good condition should be very well polished and reflective, which works nicely with NMM techniques, but I figure power swords need different materials to help them work and so the darker metal colour of Doom Metal (TTC) shouldn't be too out of place but really makes the Omega Blue (TTC) seem that much more vibrant.

In this case the blue tips of the swords unbalanced everything too much and I need to draw attention back towards the torso and helmet. The small accents of green in the eye lenses isn't large enough to do that on its own, so I needed something close enough to blue to balance out the swords and lead the viewer on a path there. It's subtle, but the purple gems on the pauldrons is what I ended up going with. Just that little bit of colour variety that doesn't make the swords stand out quite so much, and draws a line towards the helmet. This also means the details on the shins shouldn't stand out too much, which is what lead me to using Grey Knight's Steel on the central blood drop symbol. It's not quite blue (actually more purple I think), but happened to be on my palette at the time. The symbol to the sides I'll paint up as red - it will add visual interest, but shouldn't draw attention away from the rest of the model.

I might try mixing Castellax Bronze with Sycorax Bronze to highlight the chest detailing. I haven't tried it yet but I'm hoping it'll be enough to highlight without going too bright - and I might need to leave it until after the matt varnish anyway.

I'll definitely try to get the smaller details filled in soon so that I might get to the final stages of this model. It's about time I finished it really. I have plenty of other models that have been painted in the background too, however keeping momentum up is difficult and actually finishing a project always helps.

-- silly painter.

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.