Terminator Squad - Part IV

 

The crux terminatus of the matter.

Free time to paint has been very rare recently, so I'm not getting a whole lot done. As a consequence, posts are becoming fewer and further between - and this one won't be very long at that.

I've managed to finish the bases on the Terminators. They do look much nicer all painted up, and while I haven't yet compared them next to anything else just yet, the paint slightly hides the "standing on a hill" effect from before and makes the older models seem just slightly larger than they are. Only slightly, but I'm hopeful it'll be enough to fit in with the rest of the army better.

I didn't put any effort into the skulls. Wraithbone, Skeleton Horde, highlight with Wraithbone again. I could do more, pick out edges, deepen shadows, and some variation, but really there's not much point. Defined enough, moving on!

Rocks I tried something new with:

• Mechanicus Standard Grey
• Agrax Earthshade, notably where rock meets sand.
• Stormvermin Fur (which ties it into the Zandri Dust of the sand more)
• Terminatus Stone (of course)

Actually the rocks came out rather well. I need to experiment with mixing other colours for variation - shifting the grey with greens, purples, browns, creams, reds, etc, instead of just monotonous grey.

Nothing else is yet new. I've been painting the blacks, eye lenses, Crux Terminatus icons, etc, all in a batched method. Relatively few paints are involved, and with the wet palette I can just do a little every so often throughout the day. I'm not going to be fancy with most of the smaller details, instead relying on metallics to give them some visual interest. I'm steadily headed into "just get them done" mode, and will get as far as I can with batched painting before switching to individual, unique details. I also want to buy a few new things, so need more models finished first.

Lastly, the armour still hasn't had final highlights applied. I'm holding out there until most other details are done, and I'm expecting it will make the armour "pop" that little bit more without the need to be so precise earlier on in the process.

All told, at least another couple of weeks before these are finished. If I had a couple of days with just a few hours of free painting time then a week easy, but I don't and so at least two weeks it is. That's also very probably going to be my next post, but we'll see.

-- silly painter.

Jain Zar - Part II (Showcase)

 

That's an impressive pony tail.

It's been a little while since I was last intending to post, but things keep getting in the way right now. I'm having to restructure routines a little bit, so I suspect for the rest of the year painting will be sporadic again, but it certainly won't stop. And despite not getting much else done, I have at least managed to complete Jain Zar.

(note: forgive many spelling and grammar mistakes that will no doubt exist - I need sleep!)

I'll admit that I lost some motivation part way through this model and it took a bit of a change of perspective to get that back and complete it. I basically decided not to care so much about painting precision (which is very much Golden Demon style) and care more about the "feel" of everything. That's not to say I'm unhappy with the model, quite the opposite, but it's not competition level.

Last time I had some trouble deciding on how to paint the various "red" material (cloth, streamers, grips, etc). One of the differences between materials that gives visual clues to how hard the surfaces is, comes from reflections: strong edge highlights, value contrast, bright points, all give an impression of a hardened surface reflecting light. Keeping midtones and shadows, but without much in the way of highlights, will give more of a cloth impression and is exactly what I did for the loincloth. Deepened the shadows with blue mixed with burgundy, increased some areas with Mephiston Red added instead, and that was about it. The hairband increases the light/shadow contrast and has a Druchii Violet wash to help give definition, but the extremes aren't like edge highlights on armour. The streamers are just glaze highlighted with Mephiston Red and not much else.

The handles I thought worked well enough that I might start to use something similar on future models:

• Barak-Nar Bugundy
• Druchii Violet
• Word Bearers Red, focusing more on surfaces facing any light source.
• Tuskgor Fur, and more prominent highlights.

The hair I like the least, mostly because black hair is difficult enough at the best of times and yet I wanted it distinct from some of the armour. I ended up with:

• Daemonette Hide lightly brushed over the upper areas.
• Night Lords Blue mixed in and the lightly brushed over lower areas that still received highlights.
• Mephiston Red / Dryad Bark (1:1) mixed in again and sparingly added to shaded areas.
• Nuln Oil to add some depth around where the hair meets other surfaces, e.g around the mask, hairband.

Black armour is semi-NMM heavily influenced from Juan Hidalgo's tutorials:

• Skavenblight Dinge to place some reflection points and highlights.
• Stormvermin Fur glazed to increase the value of those points.
• Administratum Grey for more extreme edges.
• White for dots of the brights points.
• Black glazed as appropriate to smooth transitions or darken areas.

The real difference is that the armour is more black than steel. The weapon uses the same colours as I use for Blood Angels black armour, while a little Dark Reaper and Thunderhawk Blue (glazed back where necessary) give the shaft minor visual interest.

The eyes are very simple: Ulthuan Grey, White Scar, and then Aethermatic Blue. It's not enough to really bring focus to the face too much (at least not from the angle the photo is taken), but I'm not entirely sure I want that - I want the miniature as a whole to be the focus, not one individual part of it; it's difficult to get an impression of fluid motion if all the attention is on the mask.

Spirit stones are Mephiston red and Yriel Yellow mixed in various proportions, with the usual black darkened area and a white spot highlight (and then gloss varnish at the very end).

The blades I tried some NMM with. Very similar to the black armour, but swap out Administratum Grey for Ulthuan Grey and shifting everything into the bright grey spectrum rather than black. I played with inks a fair bit as they're very useful for glazing: black for the black areas of course, but a little crimson to reflect the streamers, and green (with a blue tint) for the tri-blades. I also had some of the Night Lords Blue on the palette and so mixed that with Ulthuan Grey and very (very) lightly glazed that on top of the other weapon as a sky reflection. That glaze is really the keystone to it all. There are of course glazes and glazes and glazes to try get some blending going on, during which I realised that very shiny metal quite often doesn't have smooth blends because it's reflecting solid objects with defined borders.

Am I happy with the blade NMM? No, not really, but I can myself starting to understand it more and with practice I'll probably be semi-decent at it one day.

With Jain Zar done, the could should be at 13, however I bought some Assault Intercessors and old-school jump packs while the latter are still available. I just think that combination looks better than the newer design, personal preference. That effectively brings the count back down to just 3. This makes me want to finish the Terminators next while I look around for motivation to get back onto the Dreadnoughts.

-- silly painter.

Terminator Squad - Part III

 

Chainfist. For when you really want to cut something.

It's been a little while since the last post, what with travel, work, and a bunch of other hobby time intrusions, and sometimes it can be difficult to get moving again on projects. Which is actually something that "background projects" can sometimes help with (at least for me).

I've lost a little steam on the Dreadnoughts and Jain Zar, and the latter in particular is very difficult because I simply don't have the motivation and inspiration to figure out what or how to paint next. The one thing that does help me get over this is to finish a model - a catch 22 when it's the lack of motivation stopping me from progressing. Switching to a background project, such as these Terminators, is what helps get me back on track: there are no surprises in what or how to paint everything. I just need to get it done - and there's the second problem. Getting started again, even without blockers, is sometimes difficult by virtue of not knowing where to start; I want the models done, but don't feel like grinding through it all.

To get some level of progress there visually needs to be a relatively high level of change from minimal painting effort. Metallic details (here I'm trying Iron Hands Steel, though perhaps it's a little too bright - I'll know after the matt varnish stage) are a good way to start - just load some on the palette and work away at each model. I don't need to swap paints around, and each "session" can be just five or ten minutes. I don't need to sit for hours to paint models - quite frequently I only do a small bit over a handful of minutes, then come back later for a few minutes more. That one colour on the palette all setup and ready means I can just go at it the moment I feel motivated.

After the metallics are in place, black paint on any chest Imperial Aquila, chapter symbols, gun casings, just setting the base colour for next steps. I can later go back over again with only a small selection of paints to fill in the highlights and shading - and suddenly the models are starting to look a lot more completed (even if they're not really), and I'm starting to get motivated to do more.

I still need to apply black shading to some recesses on the Terminators, and the I'll likely get one of the most troublesome bits out of the way: black weapon casing highlights. They take a while for me to do properly, and I will really try next time to mask off some of the areas and hit it with the airbrush (or rather hit it with paint sprayed out of the airbrush) to see if that will be more efficient. Still, I'll work at it over the next day or two, and then get started on the Crux Terminatus of each, followed by the eye lenses. Somewhere in there I'll very likely start to pick out pieces on other models and get those projects moving forwards as well.

That's the plan anyway, so I'll see how it pans out in a week.

-- silly painter

Boarding Actions Terrain - Part I

 

Let's look behind door #1.

For something different I've been experimenting with assembly and coming up with a painting approach for the boarding actions terrain set. I know I have a whole heap of other models to finish as well, but the past week has been a little messed up and I haven't had much in the way of spare concentration or motivation. Playing around with a terrain test piece was just something to be done very casually. I'm also away with travel once more soon, so it'll be another couple of weeks before I can post again.

I also make no apologies for the extra number of spelling and grammar errors. My head isn't in the best shape right now.

The boarding actions terrain box contains a lot of plastic. From the outset I knew this wasn't going to be something I could spend a long time filling in details on, performing perfect blends, etc. I'm also going to need to limit the colours used for the majority of it - I won't be giving individual colours to each key on the keypads for example, cables are likely all to be the same colour, etc. Mostly I need things simple, or I'll never get it all done.

To begin with: assembly. I spent ages scraping and filing down mould lines, and that just was never going to happen for all of it. So I've invested in a couple different grits of sandpaper and tried that on all the doors. A lower grit to perform some fast removal of mould lines, higher grit to smooth the surface later. It worked surprisingly well, and should work even better on the larger wall sections

There are small pieces that glue onto wall sections, mostly to hold the doors in place while allows them to swing open and shut. I considered for a while if I should glue it all together first, or paint the doors and wall sections separately. I opted for the latter, but the "door hinges" can be easily attached with pva glue for priming and airbrushing, and then properly glued in place when the door is ready. The catch with that is that if too much paint is applied on the door then it can cause the door to get stuck and not open/close properly.

Looking around for colour inspiration, I ended up liking those used by Duncan Rhodes. I didn't end up copying direction, but I was definitely influenced by the look. Starting with a black primer, I then used thinned down (a lot) White Scar to give a basic lighting scale. Several layers were used to build it up slowly, making it much lighter near the top; the floor area would accumulate far more dirt, stains, etc, and is going to be further away from light sources and so should be darker. Thin airbrush paints from Citadel, they do need it. I'm learning a lot more about thinning paints through an airbrush and basically building up just like with palette paints. After this step, Space Wolves Grey straight through the airbrush, and that's the basic wall background colour.

The doors I wanted to stand out, but not conflict with the wall. I thought about it for a while, and then while looking at recent bases painted for the MkIV Assault Squad and Azrakh, it just seemed a perfect fit for the doors. I haven't finished it yet, but it's the same basic approach: metallic (Leadbelcher here but I've done the rest of the doors with Iron Hands Silver, which is much darker), Incubi Darkness, and building up from there. The photo still needs some Rhinox Hide dirt and rust, and then probably Leadbelcher (or something) on corners and edges.

The little sign panels are so far white with Reikland Fleshshade followed up with Seraphim Sepia to give that rust stained look. Not sure how I'll paint the framing and symbols/numbers just yet. Maybe a bronze outline, and red symbols.

I did try an ink thinned with a hefty amount of flow improver to use as a wash over the whole surface, and then used a damp brush to clean up some the more flat areas. I'm convinced this can work, particularly because the ink and flow improver takes a little while to dry, but here I think it was thinned too much and didn't really show up much once it dried. I'm going to try an oil wash next, but not until I've painted in more cabling and piping. I've bought cotton pads to wipe off most of the oil wash, and might end up using a paint brush to be more precise in areas. I'll decide if a drybrushing pass to pick out edges is needed after that or not - maybe it would add some more, but it's also a time consuming step that could easily be carried too far.

I will very likely paint some glow around the lights, but deciding which light is "on" is another decision that will take time. In the photo above it would look out of place if the door was closed but included with any lighting glow, and it would look equally out of place if there was a glow while the door was open.

Finally, select few details will probably be done to a higher standard to the bulk of the wall and doors, because it's the details which stick out and catch most of the attention. Putting more effort into smaller areas might come across as counter-intuitive, but I find myself looking at them more than other areas and so deserving of extra attention.

-- silly painter.

Blood Angels Furioso Dreadnought - Part I

 

Some serious upper body strength.

While the Librarian is moving painfully slow, I decided to get the next Dreadnought started - a Furioso variant. This will share many of the same painting steps and so I decided to get both to about the same starting level before continuing - as such, this post is mostly about airbrushing.

To begin with, I somehow managed to damage the tip of the "good" needle for my good airbrush. It's still functional and so I won't buy a replacement just yet (unless the next time I use it causes problems), but it really does show how careful one must be with them. I don't even know how I managed it.

Anyway, the first thing done on this model was to try and airbrush some of the metal components. That proved less than stellar. The Air range from Citadel is a bit hit & miss at time, but the metallics are very poor in my opinion. The coverage isn't great, the result is "noisy" (for lack of a better term), and they clog readily. I might have to try again at some stage with a larger nozzle size and little bit of flow improver and thinner. This will necessitate multiple coats, but might give a better result. I might even have something perfect to test that against soon.

With the red armour I intended to use a larger nozzle (0.4mm) to base coat and run through an initial highlight, but wasn't thinking and used the smaller (0.2mm) instead for everything. At least I had good control: even if I was being lazy and didn't mask edges off this time when highlighting, the result was mostly good enough. It was also a good test to see how the colours and control might go on larger batches of smaller models.

In any case, the usual 1:1 mix of Dryad Bark and Mephiston Red was applied all over, and then highlighted up with Mephiston Red. I've been learning to use thinner and flow improver a lot more, and other than not clogging up the airbrush as much, I'm very tempted to apply both on the Mephiston Red step and use more layers in future. I'll experiment and perhaps pre-mix a bottle if it works out. Next up was a 1:1:1 mix of thinner, flow improver, and Averland Sunset. Just like before, I then went over it with Blood Angels Red directly from the pot. The Averland Sunset I perhaps should have used a second layer with - it was quite as bright in some places as I would have liked - but I can hopefully fix that with some appropriate edge highlighting in places.

The lessons to take away: thin the paints before going into the airbrush, mask off edges on larger models to keep proper shading and that flat panel look, and go brighter than you might think with the Averland Sunset step. With the thin paints I think this is where an airbrush can really shine: use something thicker for a base colour to setup with, and then use thin layers to build up glazes and filters of colours. Less speckling, more control, and easier to clean.

-- silly painter.

Jain Zar - Part I

 

"Storm of Silence", or maybe "Silent, but deadly."

Another model that has been sitting in the pile for a while is the relatively recent Phoenix Lord of the Howling Banshees: Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence. I really like the sculpt, a refresh of which was sorely needed compared to the old one. This new version is an even more dynamic pose and really sells this idea of a dancing whirlwind of blades, graceful but with terrible purpose. To do that, the sculptor obviously wasn't going for inredible realism, not with that amount of hair - and I think that's best. This is a model, meant to capture the feeling a particular character and their traits rather than be an accurate depiction of their physical form. That's always been the case for Games Workshop, but I think this model captures the idea particularly well and I've been thinking how to paint it for quite some time. I will state that I did not, and do not, intend to paint this model to the same technical level as Azrakh. That model was for learning more than anything else, and this one I want to play more with the overall composition of light and colour.

Originally I had intended to paint the armour in a similar bone pattern to the Avatar of Khaine, but when I came to it, it just didn't seem to fit. The armour has hardened surfaces, but don't really look like additional pieces compared to the rest of the bodysuit - more like they're part of it, not overlaid. Something rigid like bone wouldn't do.

Looking back at the original model there are blues and violets, which is when I was struck by an odd piece of inspiration from the background story. Jain Zar existed before the Fall of the Aeldari, and was apparently part of a precursor to Drukhari - which traditionally are painted with a hefty amount of purple. The particular power in the warp that spawned from the downfall of the Aeldari is also often painted with purples, violets, and burgundy. It occurred to me that this probably came from colours of the Eldar civilisation - and so the armour of Jain Zar might have a nod to that.

To start with the colours, the blade isn't final. That was simply messing about with blues on the palette, and I intend to paint over it later - although I do like the idea of a blue hint to the blade. The hair I had also airbrushed first, using some purples and whites in very thin layers to build up the volumes...and then promptly ruined the lot by using Black Templar over the whole thing. I thought it was thinned enough, but everything just went black again afterwards. Oops.

The main armour is a combination of six paints, however only three of them are really needed. I used six because I wanted to get a feel of the paints, not for any transition reasons, and I did blend between all of them on the palette quite a lot. The closer a paint comes to white, the more difficult I find it to glaze and blend with other colours, and it took quite a while to get this far. I also tried to avoid very strong value contrasts between "panels" and "garment" - I wanted to give an impression of a hardened surface that is also part of the more flexible material, and softening the edge transitions can help do that. The colours used are:

• Barak-Nar Burgundy, mostly in shadowed areas.
• Daemonette Hide.
• Warpfiend Grey.
• Slaanesh Grey.
• Ionrach Skin.
• Deepkin Flesh.

If I were to choose only three, I'd go for Barak-Nar Burgundy, Daemonette Hide, and Ionrach Skin. Those were the colours used the most, and mixing to various degrees between them can give close approximations to the others.

The lighter areas are the right breast, right side of the face, and right arm. I imagined the light coming from the weapon, or close by it, fading towards darker colours on the opposite side and towards her feet. This would naturally draw the eye to upper chest, and I'm hoping a spot of colour on the mask will draw attention more directly to the facial area. I've yet to decide on which colour for the eyes - red, blue, or teal. The vambrace and and other more obvious armoured parts I'm intending to borrow from something done on Azrakh by making them "shiny black" rather than silver, with a little Dark Reaper just to add interest (I'll probably using Thunderhawk Blue to highlight that just a little more later on). I'd considered using metallic paints, but that somehow doesn't gel with the concept of the Aeldari using Wraithbone for their manufacturing, and the shiny surface would almost certainly detract away from everything else. So in this case, using NMM techniques again seems appropriate.

I've used Barak-Nar Burgundy as the base colour for cloth, weapon grips, etc, merely as a colour sketch at this stage. I'll probably go for reds on the spirit stones, maybe a blue here or there, and the burgundy seemed appropriate as a starting point. I don't want a bright red, so I'll see where this takes me.

The base came about almost by accident. While I didn't want bone coloured armour on Jain Zar, it did seem suitable for the ruins of some ancient shrine perhaps. Morghast Bone, Seraphim Sepia, Skeleton Horde, and Screaming Skull. Actually Seraphim Sepia looks very much similar to Skeleton Horde, with the paint consistency more the different than anything else. While doing that I realised that it was a good value contrast to Jain Zar; she is using darker tones overall, and so a brighter and more colourful base might serve as a good contrast to that. I also reasoned that perhaps the ruins are from a time long past, maybe on a world that is now quiet from the echoes of past wars - or in other words, plants have started to grow on it. This would add a splash of colour and visual interest, and as a bonus needs no sculpting from me. I also conveniently recently was gifted some "flowers" that I wanted to try out. Between those, some grass tufts, and a small amount of flock glued in place, the base turned out alright. It needs a bit of tidying up still, and a few overhanging parts could be trimmed back, but I think overall it serves the purpose I intended.

I'm not sure where to go with the hair next. I want it to read as black hair, but some volume highlighting needs to be done. Perhaps a light "dampbrush" with a mostly desaturated violet, followed up with Nuln Oil to bring it back and better define some areas. I'll consider further as I get more of the armour completed.

-- silly painter.

Terminator Squad - Part II

 

Shiny in red.

This won't be a long post, and mostly some commentary about how went a white zenithal to help highlighting. The short version is: it didn't help much.

The idea wasn't so much to have the white undercoat show through, but instead to help guide where to place shadows and highlights without having to change my process too much. In that regard it kind of worked - before varnishing to lock down the paints it did have more visible shaded areas than I have been getting, but the difference wasn't significant. I'll wait to see how they end up, but I suspect that for the next squad I'll try Averland Sunset and Blood Angels Red like with the Dreadnought. 

It is worth noting that there has been no edge highlighting done on any of the squad yet. I'm going to leave that to just before (and maybe a little bit after) the next varnish step. This will definitely help make the model more readable, and might trick the eye into seeing more shading than there really is.

I definitely think something needs to change on how I use the airbrush for painting up squads: I could just leave it and be happy enough, but I do want that little more "pop" out of volumes and I'm out of ideas that don't change the paints being used. The trick will be to keep everything looking cohesive as an army. I guess future experimentation will tell.

The bases I'm not sure will turn out as I really wanted, but as an experiment that's acceptable. I just wanted Terminators to look more comparable to the new sculpts (whenever I get those) but the height on the bases really does stick out. I'm hoping that painting it all relatively flat will reduce that effect. On a note about the bases, I was uncomfortable with the pressure on them given by the painting handles. Instead I epoxy glued a washer to a 32mm base, and just use magnets on the 40mm to hold it in place. The model is still firmly held in place and I've no need to try any other painting handles. Plus I now have an abundance of washers that I'll need to find a use for.

-- silly painter.