Good old fashioned Blood Angel Terminators (with NMM)

I had a great day at Wayland Games/Tabletop Nation today, including a sweet game of 40k where my Eldar/Corsairs tabled a bunch of Grey Knights :) More on that tomorrow (I think). For today, here's some Blood Angel Terminators I painted a while back.

 Having painted nearly thirty Space Wolf Termies before this lot, it was kind of a relief to build and paint models with pretty much the same armour and equipment. Paint for the armour is the usual recipe of Mechrite Red, Blood Red layer, Blazing Orange and Vomit Brown highlights and Graveyard Earth shade.

 The Storm Shield has a very basic Codex Grey base. I forgot what I used for shades and highlights. I believe the cracked effects are just lines of Codex Grey/Chaos Black mix, with a very fine highlight of skull white (maybe a very light grey?) to give that 3D effect.

The 'nid skull is a spare from a genestealer sprue. Its a happy coincidence that the few 'nids I have painted have been that colour as it matches the colours on the termies really well. Almost as if I planned it...

 Side view - so you can see the Forge World shoulder pads. The sculpt quality is pretty good. You can keep the ribbons and parchment as far as I am concerned, but the winged blood drops are really sharply cast - very easy to paint up with a striking contrast between the recesses and raised points. I don't think the Blood Angels pack is nearly as good as the Space Wolves one - it would have been nice to see a proper conversion kit, rather than just an upgrade style pack. But they are still a nice way to mark out your BA terminators out as different than the plain boxed ones.

 So here I wanted to show the blend I did for the NMM effect on the Thunder Hammer. There's something about taking pictures with my phone when the light is really strong though, hence that bar effect you can see. I suspect its just that the light is too strong for my camera, but hopefully you get the idea. For a steel effect, I often start with a base of Hawk Turquoise/Bleached Bone. I then blend up to Space Wolves Grey, then through to White. I blend down to Regal Blue.

Getting this NMM effect is, in my opinion, easier on smaller pieces, like these blades or Dreadnought claws, than on big pieces of armour. Thats because you only have to worry about light coming from one direction. Often my NMM blends can actually look really crumby until the very last step - the edge highlight and notching. I often do this with my lightest blend of the base but you can do it with straight white paint too. Basically, you overbrush the edges (every one!) so you get a fine edge highlight and then add a few diagonal streaks. Depending on how you do it, you can get either the effect of the blade being pitted from striking hard objects of seeming to shine with reflected light.

You don't have to do a NMM blend to get this effect either. Even if you use the old Boltgun Metal/Badab Black wash, followed by a drybrush with Chainmail technique, you can add a degree of verisimilitude to your blade by adding these notches/streaks. The trick is getting the lines thing enough to look natural and then knowing when to stop :)

PLEASE do feel free to ask any questions. I know you are reading this :) If you have any questions about any of the stuff I have painted or written about, leave a comment. Unless you're going to be rude, of course. In which case, move on - this isn't the place for you :)

Back from Holiday - Here's Something I Made Earlier

Ok then, I'm back from a week overseas in the sun. I got to read the entire Sigmar Omnibus (Graham McNeil is the God-King of fantasy) as well as the Dragonlance Legends Trilogy. Dragonlance is an under-rated, perhaps even unheard of franchise these days, but the story of Raistlin's quest for Godhood and Caramon's quest for, well, his self, is a great one.

Anyway - I've managed to get in my second game of 40k since I got back, but no painting, so here's some stuff I painted a while back.

 This fella started life as a Black Reach dreadnought. He's had a few paint jobs, all poor, before I decided what I really needed for my Blood Angels was another, fourth, dread. He's painted with my usual BA recipe of Blood Red over Mechrite Red, with Blazing Orange line and Vomit Brown edge highlights, and a shade of Graveyard Earth in the recesses.

 In case you're not familiar with it, the Frag Cannon is awesomeness incarnate (at least, it was in 5th). You get two rending template hits worth of bang for your buck and this guy  has been something of a unit-assassin for me in the past. Flying around on a Stormraven, he likes to jump off, blast a 'safe' unit in a building, maybe assault them if they haven't all been minced by the cannon, then jump back on the 'raven and do it all over again.

 As I said, the body is the Black Reach dread. But I had enough spares in my bitz box to give him a BA fist.

 At this point, with a few thousand points of BA's in the box, I'm running out of synonyms for rage. This dread got good old 'Anger' on his scrolling. And, to be honest, I couldn't be bothered to think of something clever/paint that small for his glacis nameplate so he's just got some random squiggles there. Dont' tell anyone.

 Another nice view of the Frag Cannon. I'm also quite pleased with how the decals came out on this model too. The yellow is perhaps a tad overbright for the dark red plates, but this emblem, the skull on the shin guard, and the numeral on the other shoulder all look natural and painted.

 One of the things I love about the latest BA codex is the versatility of the army list. You can have a jump pack army, a flyer army, a dreadnought army, and a fast tank army. This one is unique to BA's too - the Baal Predator. Once again though, you can see my slight shortage of enthusiasm for names in the lack of a title for the nameplate. I've only used it once in a fight though, so I guess eventually I'll be inspired to name it.

 As well as being fast and having Scout, the Baal can be equipped with lost of flamers. A Flamestorm on the turret and heavy flamers in the sponsons. Great for clearing buildings - a possibly increasingly likely target in the new edition of 40k.

 I used Forge World's Black Soot weathering powder around the vents and exhausts for a nice little effect. The barrels were washed with increasingly dark washes of browns.

 The yellow decal on the turret didn't bed down quite as well as I would have liked - you can still see the edging on the drops in the right light. Unusually, repeated treatments with Micro-sol didn't help any either :(

 The decals on the front came out a little better though. The extra weathering the received might have helped, being a mix of weathering powder and sponged on Mechrite Red.

So thats a couple of my BA vehicles. Tomorrow (probably) - Terminators!

Final Gallery - Sun Blitz Brotherhood Eldar Corsairs

Alright, these boys are about as done as I want them to be. I could add a few more little details here and there - glyphs on the helmets, that sort of thing - but I really don't want to paint them any more. Time to move on to something else. So here they are:

 Its a ten man squad, complete with a missile launcher and a shuriken cannon. I envisage them holding an objective in my deployment zone and taking shots at anything that comes too close.

The heavy weapons are both scratch-built from several spare parts from tank kits. This guy did have a really cool looking forehand grip - that got lost somewhere during transportation ><

 I started building the missile launcher before I realised the hand holding the handle was the left one. That meant I had to find a right hand that didn't have a weapon, leaving this Corsair looking as if he is suggesting a new direction the squad should attack.

The squad leader is carrying a shuriken pistol and power sword. Just a little bite in case of being assaulted. Not that Str 3 is likely to worry too many enemies...

The bases were all painted with GW's Stirland Mud textured paint with a few pieces of slate and small pebbles mixed in for variety. These additional parts were painted Bestial Brown before I dry-brushed the whole thing with Kommando Khaki and Bleached Bone. The addition of a few tufts of reedy grass and some orange rubber foliage helps break up the bases and tie them in to my flyer bases.

Right, I'm off on holiday now - see you in a week or so.

Finishing Touches - Eldar Sun Blitz Phoenix

Its been a busy few days, what with having two kids to wrangle and all, but I've nearly finished the paint job on my Phoenix.

Basic colours

Having finished the main body, hihlighted the edges with Bubonic Brown and a tiny edge of Sunburst Yellow, I did a pretty basic job on the pilots and glued on the canopy. Most of the gems are blue as a contrast to the flaming yellow of the fuselage, with just a couple of orange ones for variety.

With added highlights

Something was missing though. My Nightwing fighter has a nice Sun Blitz crescent (not a spiral, as I had previously erroneously described it) but it was not so easy to get this painted onto the bomber.

I tried the liquid mask method I used on the fighter, but it just didn't look as cool as I wanted it to when I pulled off the frisk. Actually it looked awful. So bad I had to respray the whole thing :(

The problem is the shape of the plane. It doesn't have a lot of large flat areas for painting such details on. It has a tiny strip of wing on each side, connected to the jet sections by a very thin strip, then the dorsal surface is, well cluttered and there are the two fins to get in the way too. I just couldn't see a way to paint on the crescent, or even crescents, without it just looking like a weird red stripe.

So, a couple of nights to think it over were necessary.

I had my eureka moment this morning. I had thought I was going to go with a sort of sunrayish motif, using the two panel/instrument pods as the centres. Their location was still a little problematic though and I couldn't figure out how to do it, using a freehand brush, and get the lines to look straight over a curved surface. I was dreading putting the brush down to find I had just painted, again, some weird stripes.


But then it hit me - the Phoenix! It is, of course, a legendary bird of flame, not just a pretty word the Eldar (the Imperium?) used to denote this flying beast. So, perhaps I could freehand a flame motif on the wing.

A quick bit of research (google) gave me this image:

I also found some other, less savoury pictures

I then practiced drawing those organic, naturally curving and authentic flames/feathers in a notebook (another good tip for freehand painting - practice it with a pencil first) before committing paint to model.

Too much?

 I used thinned Mechrite Red, followed up by a thin layer of Blood Red. Then I went too far, trying to add realistic flame effects, with lines of Gold Yellow, Blazing Orange, and Sunburst Yellow. In the flesh, as it were, the flames looked ok. Only ok. Part of the problem was I'm not very good, that is, haven't practised, at drawing flames. The other part was the yellows and orange were too close to the plane's base colour, giving a sort of diluted effect to what is supposed to be a strong contrast colour.

Not a complete disaster though as I was able to paint back over the flames with Mechrite and Blood Reds. I then added a thin highlight or Blazing Orange and thin shade line of Dark Flesh to each flame. It looks pretty good, albeit not as smooth a finish as it should be. 

I will probably add some more layers of Purity Seal on top and may even polish this, so I don't think the unevenness of the paint will be too apparent in the end. I will also do some better quality shots too as the paint job is, in places, better than these pictures show.

Nightwing Scenic Base 2: Forest Pond

Just time for a quick shot of my scenic base for the Eldar Nightwing fighter.

Although my inspiration pic features green water, I figured I would make mine blue. This is to tie it in with the blue gems on the fighter. Just like the picture though, I am going to try to use lots of oranges and reds on the rest of the scenery, again to tie in with the paint scheme on the fighter. There, I must be getting better as a painter. I'm talking about 'tying in colours' and stuff.

Just pretend that glue isn't there...

So, I painted the slates with Bestial Brown, and dry-brushed them, quite heavily, with Kommando Khaki and Bleached Bone. They look earthy, with enough of the brown showing through to get that red hit.

I have then glued on some of that rubbery foliage you can get from any model shop. Its a little stinky and, if you use too much, doesn't look great at this scale. But if you just use a little, and put some thought into where it goes (i.e. coming out of the crevasses between rocks, not just slapped down randomly on top) it looks reasonably like natural foliage.

I also used some Woodland Scenics artificial grass to make reed-like clumps of greenery around the edges of the pool. Not too much - Just enough to show there is life around the edges of the water. I also kept it away from the 'beach' - if this is a living world we're looking at, its likely animals would be coming down to the waters edge to drink. This also helps the base feel more like a portrait - the open edge draws the eye into the water, while the rocks at the far end frame it all.
I ddid add a couple of fallen logs at the near end and some rocks though. I see them as an opportunity to add more red and orange accents, probably in the form of lichen or leaves, to again help tie the base in to the model flying above.

The water itself is really simple. Its just three layers of blue, starting with a dark layer under the rocks and finishing up lighter where the water ends. I will be adding Water Effects later, but this simple paint job will help give an impression of depth and reality to the whole thing.

Overall I'm very pleased with how this thing is turning out. Just have to wait a few hours for all that PVA to dry now...

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

Eldar Nightwing Conversion/Liquid Mask/Sun Blitz Botherhood

Every time I try to get out - they pull me back in...

One of the combinations of armies I want to try in 6th Edition 40k is Codex Eldar and Eldar Corsairs. The Corsairs army list is given in Imperial Armour Volume 11: Doom of Mymeara. It is a fast attack list. Apart from some compulsory cannon-fodder infantry, the list features lots of fast movers, from jetpack walkers and jetbikes, to fighter and bomber aircraft. Since reading the book I've had a yearning to field an army with flyers in it and, as 6th Edition features these vehicles, now's the time.

The downside of this list though is the cash cost. Both the Nightwing fighter and Phoenix bomber are Forgeworld models and quite pricey. When trying to decide if I really wanted to commit more than £100 on two models it suddenly hit me that the Edar Razorwing is very similar to the Nightwing, in shape at least. A minimal amount of kitbashing later, and we have this:

Its not a perfect match, but its good enough. The Nightwing doesn't have the central dorsal fin and does have moving wings. But my model cost half as much as Forge World's, so I'll keep the £30 and use mine, thanks very much.

It is simple enough to switch the Dark Eldar Lance's out for some surplus Eldar ones from the bits box. They require a bit more effort to secure, not having the nice little square peg the supplied parts do. The forward Shuriken Cannons are also quite simple to make from chopped down tank weapons and a couple of other spare parts.

For the paint scheme I have decided to go with the Sun Blitz Brotherhood, also found in the IA11 book.

I based the model with a black primer. On top of this I sprayed a Mechrite Red base coat, then a layer of Blood Red, and then a couple of coats of Vallejo's Game Colour Gold Yellow. I have blended up some of the more raised areas with a mix of Gold Yellow and Iyanden Darksun and edge highlighted the panels with Sunburst Yellow. Sadly, most of these paints are no longer available, but Vallejo probably do passable equivalents of the GW colours or you could just use Air colours.

The next step is to add the red spirals that marks this vehicle out as a Sun Blitz flyer.

When planning this I saw two ways to do it. Either, having sprayed the thing with the reds, mask off the spiral shapes before spraying on the yellows, or spray all the colours, mark out the spirals and then respray the reds. I went with the latter for two reasons: my airbrush is not that great (nor is my technique) and it was late at night when I started painting so there was no way to get hold of some liquid mask.

Here is how the model looks with the Liquid Mask (also by Vallejo) painted on:

I have never used the mask before so here's a couple of things I have learnt:

• It looks like a fairly watery paint on the palette
• It can be painted on to a model pretty much like a paint, having a consistency similar to thinned PVA glue.
• It dries more quickly than a paint. Beware of using your good brushes for application - it will form a gum between the bristles really quickly, so use an older brush you don't mind writing off if you can't get all the mask off.
• It takes longer to dry on the model than an acrylic paint. I'm not sure how long you're supposed to leave it until painting over, but its been on my model for about twenty minutes now and still feels a little tacky in places. That said, I've seen videos where people sprayed over it almost immediately so I'm going to go ahead and spray it now.

Thats all there is for now. When I have sprayed on the spirals I'll take some more pictures and write about removing the mask.