Nightwing Reworked

Yesterday I put up a piece about my Eldar Nightwing conversion, focusing largely on the painting. I did some more work on it after publishing and then a little bit more this morning. Sadly, in the cold light of day, I could see there were more mistakes and problems with the paint job than good bits. So, with more than a little pain in my heart and some trepidation, I resprayed the whole thing.

The problems with the first attempt at the paint job were mostly centred on the spiral motifs. Basically I couldn't see how to make them look properly painted on. I couldn't figure out how to shade or highlight them realistically. I tried using a Baal Red wash and just made it all worse. Eventually I figured I would go back to my original plan or spraying the whole thing red, masking off the spirals, then spraying again with the Golden Yellow.

To be honest, this didn't really solve the problem. The liquid mask gives really really crisp lines, and I think that sometimes the contrast between the two colours I was using were just too stark. I still needed to solve that. BUT, my second attempt at the Golden Yellow layer was so much better than the first.

Part of this has to do with the practice factor. I'm fairly new to airbrushing and only have a basic brush. Its not really precise enough for infantry models or any real detail work so I have mostly used it only to coat a few entire models. It feels like I'm getting the hang of it now though. It feels much easier to wash and clean the thing between colours now and I have a better idea of what consistency to mix different paints too (Citadel Foundation paints needing much more thinner than layers, for example). Doing the same colours almost straight after the first attempt then was pretty straightforward and I was able to apply them much more precisely.

The other positive for redoing the same paint was I effectively had a pre-shade and pre-highlight layer on the model. That is to say, I had done a fairly poor job of shading the first time round and a reasonable enough job of edge highlighting the panels, and these paints, due to the thin nature of spray paints, are somewhat visible through the top layers. Seeing how easy this actually is to do has given me a lot of confidence to pre-shade and -highlight the next big model I paint.

I have also Forrest Gumped my way to making the spirals look just about presentable too. I need to figure out what other details I need to paint on now, before adding some decals and getting to work on the weapons and engines. Here's where we're at now though:

Bright enough for you?

Weapons will be a light brown, engines a brassy colour